Two years ago, I was sitting with a friend on fire escape stairs watching an airshow. Jets cutting across the sky, trails of smoke, the whole spectacle. Somewhere between the acrobatics we started talking about time, about building things, about patience. I asked him something that had been stuck in my head: why did humanity stop building cathedrals that took generations to finish?

He didn't have an answer. Neither did I, really. But the question kept following me.

Think about what it meant to start construction on Cologne Cathedral in 1248. The people who laid those first stones knew, with absolute certainty, that they would die before the walls reached half their height. Their children would die before the roof was finished. The cathedral was finally completed in 1880. Over 600 years later.

What kind of faith does that require? Not religious faith, necessarily. Faith in continuity. Faith that the future exists and that it matters. Faith that your grandchildren's grandchildren will care about the same things you care about.

We don't have that faith anymore.

I think about this when I look at how we fund technology now.

Venture capital, in its modern form, really took over in the 1980s and became the dominant model for innovation by the 2000s. The math is simple: a VC fund has about 10 years to return money to its investors. That means any company it funds needs to show serious traction within 5-7 years. Ideally faster.

This is not a criticism, exactly. It is just a clock. And clocks shape what you can build.

Here is what bothers me: almost every technology that genuinely transformed human civilization took longer than a VC cycle to develop.

The internet gestated in research labs for 30 years before it became commercial. Semiconductors required decades of patient work at Bell Labs and government-funded university programs. Antibiotics, nuclear energy, commercial aviation. None of these fit a 7-year timeline. None of them would have been fundable under modern rules.

So what happens when the 7-year clock becomes the only clock?

You get a lot of software. You get apps. You get platforms and marketplaces and things that can demonstrate hockey-stick growth to a partner meeting. You get very good at building things that can be built fast.

And you get very bad at building things that cannot.

I was talking to an investor last year, someone who runs a climate fund, and she said something that stuck with me. She said the hardest part of her job is not finding good technology. It is finding technology that is good AND can show returns within her fund's timeline.

There is this fusion company, she said. Genuinely promising. Best team she has seen. But they need 15 years of runway before they will have anything commercial. She cannot touch it. Her LPs would kill her.

So the fusion company either finds some other form of capital, government grants, patient family offices, the rare billionaire with a long horizon, or it dies. Not because the technology is bad. Because the clock is wrong.

Before VC became the default, other institutions filled the gap.

Bell Labs employed thousands of researchers to work on problems with no immediate commercial application. They invented the transistor, the laser, information theory. The scientists who worked there won nine Nobel Prizes. AT&T funded this for decades because they were a regulated monopoly and could afford to think long-term.

Government labs like DARPA and the national research institutions funded work on 20-year, 30-year horizons. This is where the internet came from. This is where GPS came from.

Corporate R&D departments at places like Xerox PARC and IBM Research pursued fundamental questions. Some of this work took decades to pay off. Some never did. That was considered acceptable.

These institutions have not disappeared completely. But they have been culturally subordinated. The prestige now flows to the startup founder who exits in four years, not to the researcher who spends a career on a single problem.

My friend on the fire escape, he works in biotech now. He told me about a drug his company is developing. If this works, he said, it could add healthy years to millions of lives. But we need 12 years of clinical trials before we will know. And I have no idea if we will survive that long as a company.

Twelve years. That is not even particularly long, as these things go. Some drugs take 20 years from discovery to approval. Some never make it because the company funding them runs out of patience or money or both.

We have built a system that is structurally hostile to anything that takes time.

The things we cannot build now are not made of stone.

They are fusion reactors that need 40 years of sustained development. They are space infrastructure that requires half-century investment horizons. They are fundamental biology research that will not yield applications for generations. They are climate solutions that have to operate on timescales longer than any fund cycle, any political term, any CEO tenure.

We have the technical capacity to attempt these projects. We have lost the institutional capacity to sustain them.

I keep coming back to those cathedral builders.

They were not smarter than us. They were not more virtuous. They just lived inside a different story about time. They believed the future was real. They believed their contributions to it mattered even if they would never see the results.

We believe in the quarter. We believe in the fund cycle. We believe in the exit.

Maybe this is too pessimistic. There are people trying to rebuild patient capital. Foundations with hundred-year horizons. Sovereign wealth funds that can afford to wait. A handful of billionaires funding long-term research out of personal conviction.

But these feel like exceptions. The default remains short.

I do not know how to fix this. I am not sure anyone does.

But I think about that fire escape conversation a lot. About what it would take to build something you knew you would never see finished. About whether we are even capable of that anymore, as a civilization.

About whether we have lost something important, and whether we can get it back.

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