Earlier this year an intriguing coincidence took place in the world of innovation: at almost the same time, Bob Metcalfe and Walter Gilbert decided to become venture capitalists in the Boston area. Both Metcalfe and Gilbert are distinguished innovators who have played many different roles in the process of bringing research to market. Metcalfe invented the Ethernet and founded 3Com to commercialize it. After leaving 3Com, he went on to a career in publishing and punditry. Gilbert has had a brilliant research career in molecular biology, sharing the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering a fundamental method for sequencing DNA. He cofounded one of the very first biotech companies, Biogen, in 1978 and has also had a hand in starting several other biology-based companies, including Myriad Genetics.

Now both men are approaching the world of entrepreneurship and innovation from a new angle. Metcalfe has stopped writing his column in InfoWorld and joined Polaris Venture Partners of Waltham, MA. Gilbert has taken a leave of absence from Harvard University to join BioVentures Investors, in Cambridge, MA. In spite of the parallels between their careers, Metcalfe and Gilbert come from different worlds-information technology and biotechnology-and had never met. Technology Review thought it would be interesting to bring them together to talk about the current climate for investment, the most important emerging technologies and why they became venture capitalists now. Editor in chief John Benditt mediated a conversation over dinner in downtown Boston.

TR: How is venture capital activity different from when you started out forming new technology-based companies?
Gilbert: Back in the 1970s, venture capital groups were trying to find a few engineers or a few scientists to put them together with business people and form a company. There's very little of that now. To do that takes great effort, constant nurturing, and there's only a small amount of money involved at that stage. So if one runs a very large fund, one can't afford to put capital into small "seed" efforts like that because that would spread the money into too many companies. Nowadays, when a venture capital group supports the growth of a small company it is generally in the second, third or fourth round, with large investments, as opposed to the very beginning.

TR: How has the broader picture changed since you founded Biogen?
Gilbert: We have shifted from a period in which people doing biology had an ivory-tower view of the world, in which there were no practical applications for what they did, to a view in which everything appears against the background of immediate practical application. Back then, it was like breaking your oath, breaking the code of purity, to think about founding a company. There are thousands of biotechnology companies now; there were none then.