I was also fortunate to have dinner with Steve and William (the first post).  One tidbit he brought up that I thought was interesting was his agressive long term investment strategy.  For the long term, he suggested that the smarter investments and opportunities would be along the lines of aging.  He dismissed AIDS as a short term disease that will have a vaccine soon enough, he commented that cancer will probably be curable, maybe even preventable in the relatively near future (our lifetimes) and that the most important things, by the time we children of the '80s are all old will be Alzheimer's, memory, and mobility.  We are all going to live so long that we will have to focus our efforts on diseases of the old.
So I was not totally shocked by this comment however, as I have read about Gardasil, Merck's new "vaccine for cancer", patients with AIDS have higher and higher survival rates, and that just recently that rate of Alzheimer's disease is getting higher and higher.  He's probably right, should we focus on the long term goals as entrepreneurs?  My guess is that we should if we want to start companies that are "built to last" but there is also a bit of "here and now" pain that needs to be addressed for the VCs to bankroll the startup I suspect.

I think that the people who make the research decisions don't have to choose between something good and profit.  Both can be attained through specialization of products.  A company can have a near range product which caters to the immediate need and makes money off of that, but having another additional area of research topics would definitely help boost profits in the longer range view choices.  Every company needs to have both of the choices combined into a coherent strategy which can deal with the long range and the short term goals of the market corporation to get the desired results.  Most people who are trying to run a company realize this and that is the purpose of the long range Research and Development.