I love this idea. However I am not too surprised that YC is doing this. YC is a different kind of corporation. Instead of hiring engineers, they hire startups. And just like any well established company, they are now investing in R&D. Make no mistake, there will be a commercial bent to the R&D that YC does and there is nothing wrong about that. R&D should not be just about publishing papers but advancing new ideas in the market too. So overall I hope this takes off and they bring ground-breaking research out of this venture.
YC Research
321–330 of 389 posts
Re: YC Research
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
In fairness, all systems are broken, academia isn't much more broken than anything else involving large numbers of mortals. The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on object…
>As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently.
I wouldn't call throwing out your trained experts and starting with fresh trainees in a five-to-seven year cycle all that efficient.
Re: YC Research
#323Hope YCR works. Suggestion:
Get a board of advisors who
have had a lot of experience
managing research, and let them
occasionally advise you on
opportunities and pit falls.
I got an applied math Ph.D., just to improve the good career I already had going in applied math and computing, had no intention of being a professor, but for a while, having to do with my wife in her long illness, I was a professor.
The biggest problem I had in research was just getting the mathematical word processing done. The typing was much more difficult than the research! I published some papers in some good journals and never had a paper rejected or needing significant revision. I could have done a lot more in research, but I was really interested just in making money.
For research in academics, that is, the STEM fields, I have long had a suggestion: Borrow from research in medicine!
Why, how, in what respects? Sure: Research in medicine also has a clinical side, and a lot of the research, applied research intended to connect with applications, very much needs the clinical side.
E.g., instead of all the seminars being professors and students presenting solutions still looking for applications, have about half the seminars with people from the real world outside academics present problems looking for solutions. Have professors with their students attack such problems. That way could get some problems to work on, simple, medium, and really difficult and important, e.g., P versus NP just from applications of optimization to, say, vehicle scheduling or communications network design. E.g., I was working on something applied and rediscovered k-D trees -- a few years earlier and I would have been the inventor of k-D trees. And there are other examples of starting with a real problem from the real world and getting good results for that problem, getting a good research problem, and getting some good research progress.
Besides, such research already has one application and, thus, is much more likely to have two or many more than two.
Have an expectation that a professor pursuing applications is a professional and needs to practice their profession. And the students need to be there also as apprentices.
Also, have codes of ethics, standards on how revenue is to be distributed, and professional peer review of the clinical practice.
For more, it would help if the venture capital community were ready, willing, and able to evaluate original research intended as the crucial core of startups.
Re: YC Research
#324I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.
I mean, I didn't go to MIT, but I just finished a PhD in CS from UPenn, and I'll attest that he's not wrong. Perhaps excessively pessimistic on it, but like, what he's expressed is not an uncommon sentiment. Like you'd hear the same thing from like a third of the grad students I personally know (across the entire spectrum of top-20 CS departments). I myself was fairly ambivalent on my own PhD, but ended up finishing it because
1) I had some strong publications early on in my grad career (first 2 years) so it made it much easier to get to the eventual finish line without much hassle.
2) I'm not a US citizen, and graduating means that the immigration pathway gets a lot easier (EB-1 green card application instead of EB-2, for instance, and since I'm from India that's a huge difference).
3) My advisor let me study/work on what the hell I wanted in my final 2 years (essentially some macroecon + finance research at the Wharton school, and spending a bunch of time reading up and working on large scale graph computation) so the opportunity cost was low to "finish up" the main line of thesis work, with the understanding that any future academic career was out of the question.
Re: YC Research
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft Research is also an excellent organization for CS related research.
MSR has published lots of great papers but it has not yet replicated the success of PARC or Bell Labs by any means. I am not sure why this has happened, but it has been pretty obvious to everyone in the research community. Google, which came in with a research agenda pretty late, has more or less single handedly pushed the boundaries of industrial research in the last decade.
Funny: back when I was in school, we always used to say that Google publishes mediocre papers with great marketing.
Re: YC Research
#326This is great.
I always considered getting a PhD and becoming a researcher, but decided to remain an engineer for the time being because I've heard so much about how the academic research system is broken, both with politics and low pay.
If this model works, it might not only help existing researchers be more productive, but it might motivate other people considering this career to actually do it instead of other careers.
Re: YC Research
#327I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.
I want to clarify that I don't mean MIT is completely broken. Academia is inefficient, and I wanted to point that out.
Re: YC Research
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Academics isn't really that bad. It's full of many of the smartest people in the world trying to do things which are fundamental but aren't seen by the market as important and can't be funded any other way besides charity. Sometimes it doesn't go that smoothly and there's some bureaucracy like in any organization (people are constantly fighting very hard to cut what little funding there is so academics have to fight…
Graduate school was one of my best experiences, and I wouldn't trade my years here for anything. My co-workers were fantastic, and my advisor is golden.
My complaint is with those inefficient bureaucratic systems that you mention in passing. Life's much easier without them. :)
Re: YC Research
#329I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.
I want to clarify that I don't mean MIT is completely broken. Academia is inefficient, and I wanted to point that out.
Thanks for the clarification. Sorry if my comment came off rude.
Re: YC Research
#330I 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…
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…
Since this is getting some attention, I want to point out that I had a great experience at MIT, and physics research hasn't stopped working.
YCR is a great idea because there are issues in academia that need resolving. It's certainly not completely broken.