Against Usefulness: A VC's Case for Funding Research Before It's Useful

A venture investor argues that every useful company rests on research that was, at the time, deliberately useless. The essay frames this through a visit to Folk Computer, an open-source physical computing system in Brooklyn built by ex-Dynamicland researchers Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo. Ceiling cameras and projectors turn a room into the computer: sheets of paper become running programs, coordinates are measured in meters rather than pixels, and people program collaboratively while standing, drawing, and moving cards around. The author presents it as a live challenge to the fifty-year-old desktop-and-screen paradigm rather than an optimization of it.

Folk Computer is the latest link in a lineage that runs from Alan Kay’s Xerox PARC through Bret Victor’s Communications Design Group (quietly funded by SAP’s Vishal Sikka), to YC Research’s HARC and then Dynamicland. Those labs built prototypes explicitly ‘against usefulness,’ on the theory that the moment a prototype becomes useful its makers start serving present users instead of pointing at the future. Their decisive break with the past is going open source: the code lives on GitHub and outsiders can now build and extend systems that were previously locked inside a single building.

The throughline is a critique of monoculture and a question about who pays for exploratory work. Reviewing what ACM’s 100,000-plus members are studying, the author finds an entire discipline converged on one topic—agents—with no one left to ask the strange questions from which the next paradigm usually emerges. Historically this research has depended on a patron acting against short-term incentives: Xerox bankrolled PARC and then failed to capture most of the value it created, and CDG survived only because one executive believed in it. The piece is a pitch for backing that pre-useful stage so the next generation of useful companies has something to stand on.