It's an odd thing to hear. If you have even a passing interest in the history of computing, you've likely run across some portion of the tale told in "Silicon Valley." How the "Traitorous Eight," a group of brilliant scientists frustrated by the erratic behavior of their boss, Nobel prize–winning physicist William Shockley, defected to start their own company and launch the silicon chip revolution is the foundation stone of Valley myth-making. Every book -- and there have been many -- that strives to recount the story of how the computer chip changed the world, or how Silicon Valley's venture capital-funded start-up culture, with all its love of risk and innovation, broke the old way of doing business in America returns, over and over again, to the brave young physicists and chemists who abandoned their corporate cocoon in 1957 and kicked off the future.

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Why has it been in the world of information technology and, secondarily, biomedicine that venture capitalists have been successful? In brief: Only in these sectors did the state invest at sufficient scale in scientific research and in its translation to working technology. In over 40 years as a working venture capitalist, I learned that my colleagues and I and the entrepreneurs whom we backed were all dancing on a platform constructed by the federal government.

Let's focus on information and communications technology. National funding of the basic research that enabled the IT revolution was overwhelmingly provided by the Defense Department. The Soviet threat, crystallized in the years after 1945 and amplified by the Korean War in 1950 and the launch of Sputnik in 1957, was the context for the U.S. military's massive commitment to renewing its wartime role as the principal financier of technical research and the principal customer for the products that generated.

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