That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today's market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate Student Fellowship that paid for Brin to be at Stanford in the first place) than everything that NSF has spent over it's entire history.
This is why funding research is incredibly important, and incredibly unpredictable. No one would have looked at the DLI in 1994 and said "Ah yes, this one is the big payoff!" But it was.
Basic research is like VC funding, it's a portfolio with a huge amount of misses (in the sense that the research doesn't change the world), but the winners pay off for all Americans and everyone in the world far more than the losers cost. And, unlike VC's and start-ups, basic research has less investment than is socially optimal, because most of the payoffs are far more diffuse and are much harder to capture inside a company that returns profit to investors (the Google example is unusual in how direct the link was between the research and the company). Which is why the NSF (and other agencies like DARPA, NIH, etc.) were created, to fill a hole that exists in a pure market.
My previous startup, Wombat Security Technologies, was based on NSF funded research of just $1.2M. It led to over 200 jobs, and we helped protect millions of people around the world through our cybersecurity training.
I'm sure there are dozens of other startups that I don't know of also based on US Federal funding from NSF and NIH.
Strong science leads to a strong economy, and a strong economy is essential to national security.
We're also in an AI arms race with other countries around the world. Cutting science funding right now is a massive self-inflicted wound.
For everyone who is a US citizen, please write your Senators and House representatives pushing back against the chaos and the proposed science cuts. It only takes a few minutes, and the future of science in the US needs every bit of help it can get right now.
Trying to tie Google to one single grant doesn’t make sense, nor does associating the market cap of that company to that one grant make sense.
Google owes far more to TCP/IP research from DARPA than that particular library grant. But even then, the meta point is that you need lots of research pushing forward all edges of knowledge.
It is very rare that any single grant can result in a massive successful business at this point. Pushing computing forward needs constant research in all directions to push forward hardware, networks, security, power conservation/generation, algorithms, storage, etc, etc.
The grandparent article claims that Page and Brin were paid by NSF, working on DLI projects while researching PageRank and that the equipment for their prototype crawler was partly paid for by DLI.
If that's true, I'd say they're very fortunate that the Digital Library Initiative existed and that they could put their research into the public domain to reuse it for free at Google. In another context, I'd call the DLI an angel investor and they'd have wanted a slice of that Google pie.
That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today's market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate Student Fellowship that paid for Brin to be at Stanford in the first place) than everything that NSF has spent over it's entire history.
This is why funding research is incredibly important, and incredibly unpredictable. No one would have looked at the DLI in 1994 and said "Ah yes, this one is the big payoff!" But it was.
Basic research is like VC funding, it's a portfolio with a huge amount of misses (in the sense that the research doesn't change the world), but the winners pay off for all Americans and everyone in the world far more than the losers cost. And, unlike VC's and start-ups, basic research has less investment than is socially optimal, because most of the payoffs are far more diffuse and are much harder to capture inside a company that returns profit to investors (the Google example is unusual in how direct the link was between the research and the company). Which is why the NSF (and other agencies like DARPA, NIH, etc.) were created, to fill a hole that exists in a pure market.
This really feels more and more every day like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping