FreakTakes' Eric Gilliam launches 'The BBN Fund' to replicate ARPAnet-style contractor orgs
CatAstro_Piyush · x · 2026-10-28
Eric Gilliam (FreakTakes) publishes 'The BBN Fund,' detailing his year spent building a 'Convergent Research for BBNs.' His core lesson from early ARPA history: exceptional projects like ARPAnet and early autonomous vehicles came from exceptional contractors — R&D orgs structured, incentivized and staffed differently from academic labs or VC startups, which he calls BBN-model orgs. Unlike FROs, BBNs fund ambitious engineering-heavy goals via contracts and applied grants rather than $10-100M upfront fundraises. As a 'field strategist' for the ecosystem, he verified both demand and supply: per ARIA's latest fiscal-year data, a small set of scrappy BBNs won more ARIA funding during the year than every larger comparable (excerpt truncated). The thread opens with a tribute photo of Licklider hoarding BBN's PDP-1.
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