241–250 of 389 posts
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If it's any consolation, they were "normal people" before they became insanely wealthy. If anything, that's the point of YC .. to give "normal people" with intellect, determination and good ideas the chance to become "insanely wealthy" while improving the world.
I'd probably argue that it's a bad thing for anyone to have the chance to be "insanely wealthy."
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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 --…
Maybe, maybe not. I debated bringing it up, and honestly YCR is likely to have a large, up-front facilities cost (regulations, certifications, etc.). It would make sense to start easy - don't start off with infectious diseases of humans - and build from there. But still, I'd wager that YCR will run far more efficiently than your average university. Someone above brought up the UC system: management-level positions ha…
For starters, I'm prejudiced to think any smaller org will run more efficiently than a larger one (even though I realize this is literally the opposite of conventional/mainstream assumptions!).
But TWICE as efficient?
Also, I think all those administrator salaries are probably being funded by tuition (that is, by government subsidized student loans that the students will be paying back for most of the rest of their lives), rather than research grants. :)
Or actually you didn't even suggest twice as efficient, you suggested virtually ZERO costs other than direct research costs -- would we call that INFINITELY more efficient with a zero in the denominator? :) (Not even including salaries? Aren't those also funded in part by the 'overhead'?)
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It is possible to structure it as "patent granted to everyone, but expires the moment they bring up a lawsuit against us or any of our licensees" to do doubly good for the world.
Then it would no longer be free.
All my life I had wanted to go into industry, follow that classic Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel dream that many CS High Schoolers go into.
But recently, I got into research. The CollegeBoard opened up a class called AP Research I am now in, and I spent my last summer researching Machine Learning at my local private university. I was surprised by how much I loved it, the math behind it fascinates me (context: am currently taking Adv. Diff Eq and Linear Algebra my Senior Year.)
I am now trying my own Deep Learning algorithms and working on my paper. I have always been conflicted between industry and academia, since all of my fellow HS CS friends just want to found companies in industry. Things such as YCR make research a bigger dream for youth, whom I would currently argue are too under-exposed to it. It just doesn't seem as glamorous to them.
Thank you for YCR, it reminds me of the cool things research can do. I can't wait to hopefully apply one day.
I love this idea. Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups. I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade. Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created…
e: Here's some hard facts - http://universityprobe.org
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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…
Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.
> 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…
Similarly, although I wouldn't guess is what YCR is thinking because it doesn't have the same cachet (though I really don't know what YCR thinks) is building tools for science. In my field (geoscience) there are boundless slopes of fresh, trackless powder in the mountains of computational geoscience just waiting to get skied. Building tools to do, say, probabilistic graphical modeling of stratigraphic systems requires approaching a traditionally intuitive and descriptive science with a much more formal and precise mindset and re-casting a lot of ideas and methods, while at the same time keeping everything accessible for those without the requisite background in probability or graphs... To me this gets closer to the real roots of science than a lot of what gets funded or makes headlines, but won't by itself get funded or make headlines (until you build it and sell it).