Go BIG!

I was fortunate to enter computing in the era of site funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA). "DARPA sites" from 1960s through the mid-1990s had sustained investment of $10M/year (inflation adjusted). The talent and vision combined with sustained funding at scale enabled the undertaking of bold transformative ideas, such as timesharing, entire new operating systems, novel computing system architectures, new models of networking, and a raft of exciting artificial intelligence technologies--in robotics, self-driving cars, computer vision, and more. For example, I joined Arvind's Tagged-token Dataflow Computing project as an MIT graduate student. This single project, which involved a dozen graduate and undergraduates plus staff and faculty, garnered $13.5M support with a run rate exceeding $4M/year.