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YC Research

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC Research

#221

Post by Amorymeltzer »

aroch wrote: post #163
dewitt wrote: post #38

> "To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million..." Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

I don't want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year. $10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam i…

>$10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research

Sure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median/average grant size at $300k/$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.

$10 million is a lot of money. Science can be expensive but that $10 million can last a long time.

Re: YC Research

#224

Post by muyfine »

Imscaredofsama wrote: post #205
pw wrote: post #127

> I’m going to personally donate $10 million Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.

The whole sama thing doesn't compute for me and has negatively impacted my otherwise stellar view of YC. He dropped out of Stanford, founded Loopt (which raised $30 million and then acqui-sold for $43 -- and I'm sure Sequoia got the bulk of it), was then made a YC partner and finally appointed president. His Wikipedia page says he's made some angel investments in successful companies like AirBNB, but my question is:…

Completely agree. Would love to understand the money here - think it would provide a lot of perspective on how the technology financing community works.

Re: YC Research

#226

Post by vickychijwani »

Surely I'm missing something here. Won't giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held? Can someone explain why not? Honest question.

Re: YC Research

#227

Post by vickychijwani »

Surely I'm missing something here. Won't giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held? Could someone explain why not? Honest question.

Re: YC Research

#228

Post by jrochkind1 »

Amorymeltzer wrote: post #221
aroch wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year. $10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam i…

>$10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research Sure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median/average grant size at $300k/$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k…

I agree it's real money, enough to do some real stuff.

But:

> An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.

Well, that 'overhead' is paying for things like lab space, electricity, health insurance (at least for the faculty, good luck grad students), liability insurance, etc. Not to mention the actual salary of the PI and/or other researchers -- which universities in STEM schools increasingly expect to be covered by grants too. The academic institutions would argue all the 'overhead' they take is legit funding of things necessary for the research to take place, but even if you think they are spending it inefficiently or 'stealing' money for unrelated things...

I think as a rough napkin calculation, the $500K is probably still closer to that same $500K when YC Research spends it too, not twice as much.

Re: YC Research

#229

Post by cossatot »

omnisci wrote: post #218
silverlake wrote: post #215

> We think research institutions can be better than they are today. I hope you'll expand on this. Is there something that YCR can do that academic research can't do? You might have more impact if you use that money to influence US and EU gov't to invest more in basic research. A 1% increase in annual gov't funding will be vastly larger than YCR's total budget. The Gates Foundation is tackling difficult health issues…

To answer your first question, 1. they can move much faster than academic research. More money in basic research isn't going to fix the antiquated process in which academics live. It's also not going to help researchers learn how to budget properly, or learn to manage people. So that alone is a value add. A 1% increase in gov spending simply adds money without fixing a problem that currently exists....not really goin…

I agree with this. The most interesting thing I got out of Paula Stephan's How Economic Shapes Science is that a few years' back, the NIH basically doubled its research funding and all that happened was a post-doc bubble and university admin hoovering up the money to build buildings.

Re: YC Research

#230

Post by noelsusman »

matheweis wrote: post #162
biswaroop wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is…

Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).

I'm in a similar situation and I don't know a single person who doesn't think academia is horribly broken. Internet rants from people leaving academia are practically a monthly occurrence these days, and nobody ever disagrees with them.
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