I&#x27;ll answer your question: no, the venture model does not make sense in capital-intensive industries. The entire premise of venture investing is to beat established competitors by leveraging technology to be more capital-efficient. It wouldn&#x27;t work otherwise; because using the Internet as a delivery pipeline is exactly what gives most startups their cost &#x2F; strategic advantages. Infrastructure investment is expensive, and very few investors are willing to float you a billion dollars without expectation of return for 10+ years. VCs want to make lots of small bets on low-capital businesses and hope one strikes gold.<p>And it just so happens we have a funding model for capital-intensive industries: government grants and tax incentives. But the nature of the beast is such that we can&#x27;t have a huge number of companies all trying to do the same thing. That does mean that success is ultimately a result of your ability to get what you want out of the government system, and hope there aren&#x27;t too many powerful groups angling for the same thing. That&#x27;s exactly the model that VC &#x2F; startup is trying to get away from.<p>That&#x27;s the thing about capital-intensive industries: generally the problems and solutions are not difficult or especially unique. The only reason there&#x27;s not a hotbed of competition in those areas is because funding is the chokepoint. And you&#x27;re right; it&#x27;s more about quality of execution than &quot;getting lucky&quot;. Some things you have to get right the first time, so the trial-and-error approach of VC-funded companies is probably not the right approach.<p>EDIT: Also, to answer your point about being attached to a &quot;BigCo&quot;, you&#x27;re absolutely right. This indeed does happen -- you just never hear about it because large companies like to keep their R&amp;D projects secret. They don&#x27;t need to publicize their achievements to establish a customer pipeline because they already have one. In fact, most advances in infrastructure technology are funded by large, established companies in a way that makes them seem evolutionary.