thought: 

venture capital is giving millions of dollars to relative strangers, for products that haven't really been built, in markets that barely yet exist

it is the worst system of funding innovation, except all the others that have been tried

At least some VCs managed to make this model works in terms of financial return. Most other types of fundings (grants, R&D, etc) haven't managed to captured the financial returns and hence, generally not sustainable without government/foundation backing.

if a startup is doing highly nascent and deep technical research (and then open sources that research) how/why are they raising from vc’s? 

-there usually isn’t a product
-unlikely that they can reach high revenue metrics

is the goal to be acquired by a company? to release a token?

or is there simply a lack of a third avenue for research groups to be highly experimental… there should probably be more long term accelerator programs that isn’t attached to an academic institution

yup

https://warpcast.com/feven/0x6a0d3e6e