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Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Hard Startups

#21

Post by foobiekr »

Another fairly common take on this is a preference for technical risk over business risk. For the VCs that are from the "real" technology era, there seems to be a distinct preference for "if you can solve the technical challenges, you'll mint gold" businesses over things like social networking which simply work or do not in a way that cannot be addressed by the addition of technical or business skill.

These companies tend to be very expensive and take 3Y or so to be tested on the market, so in a way they are not for people who want to follow the as-quick-as-possible MVP approach, but they also tend to have defensibility which your generic SaaS does not have.

Re: Hard Startups

#22

Post by andreilys »

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.

> for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful

Which in most cases is not economically viable so you have talent that gravitates towards maximizing total comp to achieve financial independence

Re: Hard Startups

#23

Post by stevoski »

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 went through a similar thought process a couple of years ago before starting Feature Upvote.

Until then I had spent too many years on a technically difficult consumer product. It had drained away my life force and my passion for coding.

In my case I decided my next product should be:

- B2B

- target SME's

- a simple CRUD app: a nice UI on top of a simple database schema.

It is a nice business to run. Pleasant customers, simple to maintain and support, and quite lucrative.

Re: Hard Startups

#24

Post by jrkelly »

"If you want to start a company working on a better way to build homes, gene editing, artificial general intelligence, a new education system, or carbon sequestration, you may actually be able to get it funded, even if you don’t have a degree or much experience."

I encourage anyone to give hard startups a shot, but there are tons of PhDs/Postdocs out there who would make amazing founders -- they should make the leap! Often feels to me like recent undergraduates get more encouragement to launch startups than recent PhDs/postdocs -- which is a weird miss especially when it comes to hard startups where PhDs have the advantage of deep understanding of a hard field.

Re: Hard Startups

#25

Post by streb-lo »

erobbins wrote: post #20
beat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Here at bleh we've developed a revolutionary method for transmitting your TCP/IP packets on-chain using AI to perform network level flow control."

Re: Hard Startups

#26

Post by gonehome »

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.

I think most people are pretty good at retroactively creating a narrative around whatever they find themselves doing to imbue it with meaning and purpose.

I think most people do want to work on something meaningful, but few start with the purpose and then pursue that.

Then given the difficulty of actually getting into what you want (either access restrictions via things like admission, the randomness of technical interviews, or the thing you want not being very lucrative) - you're better off doing what you can until you have the money to be free. Unless you can tolerate lots of risk, don't worry that much about having a family, or have some existing family wealth.

Re: Hard Startups

#27

Post by mef »

erobbins wrote: post #20
beat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and all proprietary

Re: Hard Startups

#28

Post by stopachka »

I love the spirit of this, but I'm not sure this reflects reality as well.

There are some examples that come to mind (boom, openai), but I think many more examples that have a different impetus.

The most common successful impetus i.m.o is "tinkering"

Playing, solving something lightly, and realize it's taking off like crazy.

I think this can be a better light to follow, because it removes the pressure of thinking of the excellent idea out of the bat. Just play, show stuff to users, and see where it grows.

Examples of these kind of successes: Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, YCombinator, PG's first startup, etc

Re: Hard Startups

#29

Post by avmich »

> Be willing to make a very long-term commitment to what you’re doing.

Is it always the case that successful founders do this commitment?

Re: Hard Startups

#30

Post by heartbeats »

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?

If you want a vision of the future, imagine JavaScript running on a cloud - forever.
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