Rethinking Funding: Why Traditional Models Are Failing and How We Move Beyond Them

Original Strengths of Traditional Systems

Academia, venture capital, and philanthropy were all extraordinary innovations in their time.

• Academia created protected spaces for extended exploration. It enabled researchers to pursue “unprofitable truth,” to chase answers across decades without needing to show immediate market value. Peer review, credentialing systems, and the knowledge commons (journals, libraries, conferences) provided a shared infrastructure for advancing human understanding.
• Venture Capital engineered risk-tolerant funding for transformative technology. It bridged the “valley of death” between invention and commercialization, with structures like carried interest aligning long-term incentives. It understood that uncertainty was the price of progress and built portfolio approaches that embraced it.
• Philanthropy at its best served the commons: it funded what markets ignored and governments moved too slowly to support. Foundations protected fragile, emergent work—from scientific research to cultural institutions—and made possible a continuity of knowledge and care across generations.

These systems helped unlock much of the progress that defines the modern world. Their architectures were not accidents; they were brilliant solutions to the problems of their eras.

How and Why They Broke Down

Brilliance is fragile. Systems ossify. Structures built to manage uncertainty became structures that managed out uncertainty entirely.

In Academia:

• Demographic shifts and grant structures created a world where researchers spend their most creative decades working on safe projects, struggling to receive grants for novel research.
• Risk-aversion, political pressure, and citation games have turned many fields into insular loops, rewarding incrementalism over exploration.
• Innovation timelines grew rigid. Metrics became goals rather than signals.

In Venture Capital:

• Capital concentration hardened into an oligopoly, favoring credentialed founders over independent innovators.
• “Unicorn economics” distorted selection pressures toward $1B+ valuation dreams, systematically filtering out merely excellent ideas.
• Feedback cycles stretched beyond useful limits; fund math, not curiosity, became the dominant logic.

In Philanthropy:

• Many foundations became bureaucratic, prioritizing programmatic clarity over exploratory risk.
• Political scrutiny incentivized funding “safe” causes with obvious narratives.
• Even in “innovation” funding, grantmaking cycles often prioritize legibility over genuine novelty, favoring initiatives that are easy to explain but unlikely to disrupt.

In all three systems, the ability to nurture the genuinely new atrophied.

Not because anyone intended it—but because the architectures themselves became haunted by their own past successes. They became, in Mark Fisher's language, victims of institutional hauntology: trapped reproducing the past instead of enabling the future.

The Fundamental Mismatch: Technology, Timing, and Talent

Meanwhile, the substrate shifted under their feet.

• Technology cycles accelerated. Building and testing new ideas became dramatically cheaper and faster.
• Knowledge democratized. Expertise once locked inside elite institutions spread through open networks.
• Talent decentralized. Brilliant minds now emerge everywhere—not just in prestigious institutions, but in garages, remote towns, across every demographic boundary.

Yet funding structures remained anchored to the rhythms of the old world.

They demand polish when they should reward curiosity. They demand five-year roadmaps when the increasingly unpredictable frontier moves in five months. They demand credentials when the deepest insights often come from people without access to traditional pathways.

The result is a systematic loss of possibility: a slow cancellation of innovation across domains that need it most.

Multi-Dimensional Returns: Redefining Success

Analogue doesn't just fix the plumbing of the old models. It rebuilds the very idea of what “returns” mean.

We seek multi-dimensional returns:

• Knowledge Equity:
  • New scientific insights, frameworks, and open knowledge assets that enrich the commons.
• Network Equity:
  • Relationships, trust networks, information flows—the social substrates that allow ideas to propagate.
• Capability Equity:
  • Building the operational and strategic capacities of individuals and teams, so they can keep generating value across decades.
• Financial Equity:
  • Where appropriate, capturing upside from ideas that mature into companies, products, or licensing opportunities.
• Public Equity:
  • Outcomes that benefit society broadly—health, environment, education, cultural vitality—even when no direct financial upside exists.

We don't believe these dimensions are mutually exclusive. We believe they compound. The more faithfully you steward knowledge, network, and capability, the more resilient and outsized any financial returns become.

This is not philanthropy as charity. This is an investment in the deep infrastructure of human flourishing.

Importantly - we are not the first to recognize that the old architectures have stalled. The rise of FROs (Focused Research Organizations) and other experimental structures reflects a shared hunger to rethink how knowledge is funded and built.

We admire these efforts—and draw lessons from them. Yet most early models remain anchored to heavy institutional frameworks: topically specialized, siloed, and still optimized for financial outputs.

Analogue evolves the experiment further. We are building for fluidity across domains, timelines, and opportunity surfaces—designed to meet ideas where they emerge, not force them into existing molds.

The Case for Analogue: Building the Missing Evolution

We do not position ourselves as rebels for rebellion's sake. We position ourselves as the natural evolution.

• Where Academia and VC calcified, we build fluidity.
• Where Philanthropy retreated to programmatic safety, we reintroduce exploratory risk.
• Where old structures filter for conformity, we scout for the hidden, the emergent, the still-illegible.

Analogue is designed for the realities of today's frontier:

• Fast feedback loops.
• Low-cost exploration.
• High-consequence talent scattered across every corner of the world.
• The need for fluid capital structures that grow and evolve alongside ideas themselves.

Our task isn't just to fund ideas. It's to regrow the ecosystem conditions where brilliant possibilities can take root again.

This is why we built Analogue. This is why the old models aren't enough anymore. This is why the future still needs better ancestors.