Funding the future: A look back on federal tech investment
In 1992, Klee Dienes was an MIT undergraduate working as a manager of the university’s web server and paying for cheeseburgers with student loans. Around him, a government research network called ARPANET was becoming the internet.
One day, he demonstrated MIT’s internet research to a visiting senator from Tennessee named Al Gore, who was pushing legislation to fund the network’s expansion. At the time, the internet “really wasn’t a sure thing,” Dienes said.
It wasn’t the last time he had a front-row seat to innovation. Over the next decades, he moved from Apple, where he helped build Mac OS X, to the Army, where he flew medevac helicopters in Iraq, to a defense technology company he founded. He has seen government technology investment from the funded lab, the private giant and the cockpit.
The public and private sectors have different functions, Dienes said. Industry “innovates by iterating very quickly on...
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