# What Happened to the Future *What Happened to the Future?* is [[Founders Fund]]'s statement of investment ideology, written by partner [[Bruce Gibney]] and published in 2011 (later re-hosted on the firm's site in 2017). Its subtitle is [[Peter Thiel]]'s motto, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" — see the quote page [[Peter Thiel - we wanted flying cars]]. ## The thesis The manifesto's central complaint is that venture capital lost its nerve. Having once funded the semiconductor, the personal computer, and biotech, the industry retreated into low-risk, fast-return bets — photo-sharing apps, social games, ad-tech — while the genuinely hard problems went unfunded. In Gibney's framing, Silicon Valley stopped trying to invent the future ("atoms": aerospace, energy, biotech, transportation) and settled for optimizing the present ("bits": incremental consumer internet). The flying-car line compresses that entire indictment into a single quip, with "140 characters" — the original [[Twitter]] post limit — standing in for the triviality the manifesto laments. Crucially, the document does not dismiss the internet. It explicitly notes that mature does not mean dead, citing Facebook, Spotify, and [[YouTube]] as evidence of remaining value. The argument is about *allocation* — that capital and talent are disproportionately pooled in safe software bets rather than spread toward civilizational breakthroughs. ## The investment categories The manifesto lays out the areas Founders Fund argued deserved more aggressive backing: - Aerospace and transportation - Biotechnology - Energy - Advanced machines and software (robotics, machine learning, ultimately general AI) - The internet (acknowledged as not exhausted) ## What makes a fundable company It also offers four characteristics shared by the kind of ambitious startup it wants to see funded: they are *not popular*; they are *difficult to assess*; they carry *technology risk, but not insurmountable* technology risk; and *if they succeed, the technology is extraordinarily valuable*. This is essentially an early, manifesto-form sketch of the contrarian "secret" framework Thiel would later formalize in [[Zero to One]] (2014). ## Reception and the obvious objection The manifesto became one of the most-cited texts of the [[Great Stagnation]] debate and a foundational document of the Thiel worldview. The standard criticism writes itself: Founders Fund and Thiel were themselves among the largest beneficiaries of the very "140 characters" economy they mocked — Thiel was Facebook's first outside investor, and the firm's returns leaned heavily on consumer software. Critics argued the firm was part of the problem it diagnosed, not the solution. ## Why this matters This is the **diagnostic charter of the tech-right's "we used to build things" narrative**. Its lineage runs forward in two directions: into [[Zero to One]] (the contrarian-secret, escape-competition playbook) and into [[The Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] (Marc Andreessen's 2023 prescriptive answer to the same stagnation premise). It also prefigures the [[American Dynamism]] thesis, which reframes the manifesto's "atoms" — aerospace, defense, energy — as a national-security investment category. The flying-cars lament of 2011 and the defense-tech buildout of the 2020s are, structurally, the same argument a decade apart.