1517 Garage Science: Flux Capacitor Applications to Open April 23

Bureaucratic science excels at refining what’s known, but it’s ill-suited for the frontier, where the rules aren’t yet written. Time to lift the garage door.

Last year we launched our $100k investment program, which we called Flux Capacitor after the time travel technology in the 80s classic, Back to the Future. The idea was to give scientists quick, no-fuss investment, peers, and mentorship so they could take risks, make discoveries on the frontier, and turn science fiction into fact.

We received hundreds of applications and ended up investing in ten teams. They’re still at work developing cures for cancer, replacements for copper, and super band-aids for the battlefield.

On April 23rd, we will open applications for the next Flux cohort. So keep an eye out, and please share with your siblings and friends who might be interested.

Who Should Apply to Flux?

Anyone–PhD or dropout–who is working on the cutting edge of science, who wants to commit full time to their most revolutionary ideas, and who has a plan to turn proof of concept experiments into a startup over three to four months.

Conditions for participating in Flux:

• You are a renegade scientist with a low need for institutional approval and are possessed by a desire to make history.

• Full-time: you will have to break away from your lab, your university, or your job and fully commit to this.

• You understand that this funding is not a grant but an investment in a commercial entity.

• You can and are prepared to incorporate in the United States as a C corp

• You can move to the United States. (We will help with visas.)

What Flux has to offer:

• Funding for ideas held back by academic bureaucracy and risk aversion.

• A group of peers to share knowledge with.

• Moral support for the unconventional.

• Practical wisdom on how to build a company.

• Immersive in-person gatherings with the 1517 teams and founders.

• One-on-one support from a 1517 team member regularly.

• Potential follow-on capital ($1M - $2M) if great progress is made.

Bureaucratic science in the university is holding scientific discovery back. The main bottlenecks to progress are legion: time-destroying grant proposals, a glacial process of approvals, grants only for old scientists, biases toward prestige, favoritism, incrementalism, committee-driven conformism, bitter peer-review commentary, forced consensus–we could go on. With Flux, you can leave them all behind. Our experience is that revolutionary science is now better explored in a garage through private funding. The university has turned scientists into paper pushers and politicians, not hands-on explorers. It’s time to go back to the future.

Scientific progress is the art of dwelling in the unknown. The rigid, explicit structures of institutional science choke unpopular hunches and intuitive leaps. A craftsman’s funny feeling about a discrepancy in the data can’t wait 18 months for funding approval. Garage-style science is better suited to nurturing the raw, exploratory spirit required for breakthroughs. There are no bureaucracies in a garage.

The garage was designed and built for the car. But since that day, it has resisted its original purpose. The garage, more than any other room in the house, rebels against its intended function, and America was the first nation to invite rebellion into the home.

(This is Amir Mashal, founder of Arcturus, a new materials company working to replace copper. Thanks to Flux, Amir could start the company in his garage, pictured here. To make room for his equipment, he had to ask his girlfriend to park her car outside!)

Frank Lloyd Wright is credited with building the first car garage attached to a house in Hyde Park, Chicago. Prior to Wright’s Robie House–completed in 1910–cars were either sheltered in detached stables or barns. One more thing we love about Frank Lloyd Wright, as if his iconic style were not enough, is that he dropped out of college and never went to architecture school.

If the automobile represents freedom and escape, consumption and status, the garage symbolizes hardcore craft. It is the forge of identity and invention.

Over the last century or so, the garage has taken on different purposes, wild aims, pipe dreams, macho fantasies, and self-improvement schemes, some say in spite of, but we say because of its rebellion against the intentions of its creator. The Walt Disney Company, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Google–all started in garages. To kick a car out to the curb requires a justification, a reason, a compromise with a partner paid in commitment to a craft. It requires, in short, a renegade project in conflict against prudence and practical uses. That, or a neurosis for hoarding.

Bureaucratic science excels at refining what’s known, but it’s ill-suited for the frontier, where the rules aren’t yet written.

Apply to Flux, for a $100K investment check, starting on April 23rd.