There are a few YC technical founders who were fired by their non-tech co-founders for rather flimsy culture reasons. So far YC was pretty hands-off. What makes YC think it can be effective at managing researchers? Wouldn't that be much more a function of the YC director(s) of research than the program?
YC Research
61–70 of 389 posts
Re: YC Research
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any helpful teasers on what that domain might be ?
Sam has expressed his desired to get really good AI to become a thing. Since YC does a ton of tech I'd bet $10 it's AI. But of course this is just my useless speculation :)
25 years is a reasonable number for how long it took deep learning research to begin getting traction. I would think AI would be a strange choice since it seems like there are a lot of research opportunities in academia and industry for this topic, but for the same reason I would say AI research is ripe for disruption.
Re: YC Research
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Above market salaries and also equity. We want to get the best people in the world, and I think YC equity is a pretty compelling thing to get. We're competing against e.g. Google, and Google stock is also a pretty compelling thing to get!
How liquid YC equity is? I assume that by getting google stock, someone can sell them easily in the public market. But how does it work with YC equity?
Probably somewhat less liquid with far greater alpha.
Re: YC Research
#64> We’ll especially welcome outsiders working on slightly heretical ideas (just like we do for the startups we fund) and we’ll try to keep things small—we believe small groups can do far more than most people think. What's the process for an outsider to get involved? This sounds like a really cool and much needed movement. Will more information be coming soon on how to apply/join/contribute?
We'll have more info on this in a month or so!
Re: YC Research
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any helpful teasers on what that domain might be ?
Sam has expressed his desired to get really good AI to become a thing. Since YC does a ton of tech I'd bet $10 it's AI. But of course this is just my useless speculation :)
Now if that "AI" were to be changed to "machine learning" that would indeed make me perk up.
Re: YC Research
#66Can't view the ycr.org site. Flagged as malware by OpenDNS. https://malware.opendns.com/controller.php?url=ycr.org&serve...
Re: YC Research
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we'll do in the future.
@sama - Interesting, I definitely think the toss up between meaningful research and high paying engineering work is very broken. You mentioned how compensation will not be determined based on conferences and papers, do you have any specifics on how you would measure "quality of output"? Will researchers be compensated differently based on said quality? (As often times the quality of research output is hard to gauge i…
Definitely still a work in a progress on how we'll measure it.
Re: YC Research
#68Very interesting! But exactly how fundamental is this research meant to be? Will there be any mathematicians working on projects not at all related to cryptography or physicists working on projects entirely unrelated to fusion?
As an astrophysicist in the thick of applications for jobs in both industry and academia, I strongly identify with the points raised in the article. While I consider my research slightly heretical with the potential to solve many big problems in astrophysics, I don't have any illusions that it will really lead to any practical developments. So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we're working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?
Re: YC Research
#69This article seems to have relevance. The Recurse Center is a YC company that recently began pursuing programming language research. https://www.recurse.com/blog/83-michael-nielsen-joins-the-re...
Re: YC Research
#70@sama - are the members of these groups going to be selected by YC or will there be an application process similar to YC? This is awesome to see, maybe YCR could be the next Bell Labs or something (although Google probably has a hold on that now).
"YCR could be the next Bell Labs"
Eh. That a pretty huge jump. Look, most new "tech" companies research is mostly PR, internal and external. If you're doing something you have little experience in and therefor can't evaluate, which success you aren't dependent on or necessarily benefit from and everyone will say how cool it is regardless then it's extremely hard to not cut corners and achieve real success.
Still exciting, but I wouldn't underestimate the challenge.