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Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Hard Startups

#11

Post by rafiki6 »

Something that really bugs me about this is the lack of examples where this succeeds. In my mind, a good one is Intel. To that end, how many microprocessor startups actually ended up succeeding at the same working on some fundamental and challenging things? Also, the thing about hard startups is there is a lot of luck involved. Counter to what the author is saying, you do need a degree or some level of measurable expertise to start a hard startup, because not only do you need the expertise, you also need the credibility to get people to work with you and you need that solid team to get funding.

The reality is, many "hard" startups actually were things birthed by experts in a field that got lucky enough to have the right expertise at the right time, but also managed to derisk many aspects of the business by being experts.

Re: Hard Startups

#12

Post by ssharp »

zwieback wrote: post #2

> for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful Is this really true? I would hope so but apparently the definition of meaningful is different for everyone. From my point of view funding and talent has been allocated poorly in recent years.

"Meaningful" is definitely a range and may not even entail just the company they work for. For example, if you work for a company's whose product you may not be overly passionate for, but your job is satisfactory to you and pays you well so your family can have a nice, comfortable life, I'd consider that meaningful.

There is also a distinction between "meaningful" and "most meaningful". If you believe enough if your company's end product and results, that will result in a certain level of meaningfulness for you, even if you aren't solving world hunger or curing cancer.

Re: Hard Startups

#13

Post by cm2012 »

kristiandupont wrote: post #4

Before I started Submotion, I did a fairly thorough analysis of what kind of startup I wanted to create. I decided that I wanted to create something that - was B2B. Consumers are fickle, things can explode but they can also go out of style just as fast. It's more sexy and makes for better smalltalk but my assessment is that they are much more difficult to grow predictably. - targets SME's. I am somewhat extroverted f…

I love B2SMB, which is why my company specializes in it. Lots of growth potential.

Re: Hard Startups

#14

Post by shoo »

pjdemers wrote: post #7

The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail. Failures that take decades doesn't work in the startup model. Image working on a fusion reactor. It might take 25 years to fail. The failure may not be that your idea doesn't work, but because some other kind of reactor comes along that is a better business (ie, cheaper). At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that…

> At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. You are also now 50 years old, give or take.

> Back in the day when lots of people worked on hard technology, they were paid well to work on the problem

is the model closer to "tenured research scientist" rather than "startup founder or employee"?

Re: Hard Startups

#15

Post by sp527 »

sp527 wrote: post #9

It’s odd (read: motivated by self-interest) that he didn’t make any attempt to establish the failure rate of these startups and the distribution of outcomes for employees. Further, he didn’t even argue for a referendum on equity comp. He’s blatantly peddling the same broken model of “sell them your fugazzi so they can’t tell their talent is being plundered for (founder/investor) economic gain”. It’s downright insulti…

Note to people downvoting without commenting and raising a counterargument: you’re complicit.

Re: Hard Startups

#16

Post by beat »

pjdemers wrote: post #7

The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail. Failures that take decades doesn't work in the startup model. Image working on a fusion reactor. It might take 25 years to fail. The failure may not be that your idea doesn't work, but because some other kind of reactor comes along that is a better business (ie, cheaper). At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that…

Right. Which is why government research is probably a better model for these world-changing basic technologies than Silicon Valley.

Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding?

Re: Hard Startups

#17

Post by maxlamb »

dickjocke wrote: post #3

This seems very related to the blog post that introduced me to Paul Graham, and in turn Hacker News, about a phenomenon he calls Schlep Blindness. http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html I would be curious what people think today's most obvious schelps or hard problems are? Nuclear Fission as in OPs post is cool, but Im thinking more along the lines of something a team of competent developers could do.

To me it seems more related to Paul Graham's essay "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas"

http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

A startup working on Schelp might not necessarily be working on a very hard problem but more of a tedious problem, or one that doesn't sound that interesting/exciting to most people (like fixing payments).

Re: Hard Startups

#18

Post by ummonk »

rafiki6 wrote: post #11

Something that really bugs me about this is the lack of examples where this succeeds. In my mind, a good one is Intel. To that end, how many microprocessor startups actually ended up succeeding at the same working on some fundamental and challenging things? Also, the thing about hard startups is there is a lot of luck involved. Counter to what the author is saying, you do need a degree or some level of measurable exp…

It seems odd, given that highly successful startups overwhelmingly were "easy" startups (including one of the examples he mentions - Instagram).

Re: Hard Startups

#19

Post by underbluewaters »

pjdemers wrote: post #7

The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail. Failures that take decades doesn't work in the startup model. Image working on a fusion reactor. It might take 25 years to fail. The failure may not be that your idea doesn't work, but because some other kind of reactor comes along that is a better business (ie, cheaper). At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that…

Sadly academia for a while now has been subject to the same short-term funding concerns as businesses but without the same flexibility and options for generating that funding.

Re: Hard Startups

#20

Post by erobbins »

beat wrote: post #16
pjdemers wrote: post #7

The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail. Failures that take decades doesn't work in the startup model. Image working on a fusion reactor. It might take 25 years to fail. The failure may not be that your idea doesn't work, but because some other kind of reactor comes along that is a better business (ie, cheaper). At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that…

Right. Which is why government research is probably a better model for these world-changing basic technologies than Silicon Valley. Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding?

which tcp/ip? There would be 10, all with incomplete feature sets and poor reliability.
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