Pick few good bets and invest enough on them by 
Ciro Santilli 34 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 34 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01Poor countries don't have a lot of money.
Therefore, you have to pick a few key the next big thing deep tech bets, and invest on those enough.
These have to be few, because your country is poor, and so you can't invest on everything.
Therefore, the bets have to be well selected, because it is useless to make several insufficient investments: you have to pick a few ones, and put enough time and money into each one of them for them to stand any chance. These bets should be made and reevaluated on 5/10 year horizons.
The key things that you have to select are:
- which poor students you will bet on educating. Since you can't give amazing education to everyone, you have to select the most promising poor students somehow, and give those free amazing learning conditions: free gifted education
- which ares to focus on. Ciro believes that molecular biology technologies and quantum computing would be good bets. Focusing on the previous next big things, e.g. classic computers, is always a losing bet on average
And then you only tax those companies heavily when the start to bring in real money. These are startups remember! You only need 5 unicorns a year to call it a success. And countries should not be greedy and invest through equity, but rather recoup their investment through taxation alone.
Ciro's second removed uncle, who was a physicist at the University of Campinas, one of the best universities in the country, told him an anecdote. He had moved from fusion energy research to solar cell research. At some point, there was a research lab that needed 10 million to buy a machinery critical for their experiment. They asked and asked, and finally the government gave them only 2 million. So in the end they spent those 2 million in random ways, but of course did not achieve their research goal and no money came out of it.
He also explained how as a result of the insufficient investments, he felt clearly that some of the semiconductor production facilities related to solar power he saw simply were not able to control the production process adequately to produce consistent silicon. As a result, everything failed sooner or later as people found more and more bugs that they did not have the time to solve.
Another key investment is enticing back experienced exchange-students who have learnt new techniques to be heads of laboratory/founders to back in your country.
A fantastic initiative from Brazil for example is BRASA, which aims to put together Brazilian exchange students to make a difference back in Brazil.
Do not try to forbid external companies from selling in your country. Instead, fund your own companies to be able to fight the external market off. And if they can't, let them die and pick a different bet. Video "How Taiwan Created TSMC by Asianometry (2020)" has a good mention. Protectionism is something that Brazil notably tried to do, and look at what it led, not a single international success.