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Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Hard Startups

#111

Post by eaenki »

enraged_camel wrote: post #92
hef19898 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind if we have a short chat about your sales approach? This is something I am still struggling with a little bit!

Same. :) Wish there was a venue/forum/platform to share tips and advice on this type of stuff!

I have a question: at a previous startup we emailed and called small and micro businesses in NY-SF-LA to sell an SMS marketing service. Kinda like messagebird but not for developers. Basically a web app to be able to send a list of numbers an sms with one tap, in an automated fashion.

Out of 4000emails/calls, which were not pushy at all and focused on understanding their needs, no one ended up paying ($3.6k/y).

What do you do differently?

Re: Hard Startups

#112

Post by rossdavidh »

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?

There are a few examples of government agencies which can make many parallel bets, on the understanding that most will fail but a few may pay off big. But, by "a few examples", I actually just mean DARPA. I'm sure there are others, not many though.

Politics does not work well with "most of these projects failed". It's too easy of a target. Anything that failed, is an easy target for a congressman to take aim at as being "wasted", because in some sense that particular investment was wasted, in the same sense that every insurance payment is wasted except for the one right before you need insurance.

But, the logic behind "many long-shot bets in parallel" is inherently more difficult to explain in the political arena, which is why I think VC may actually be better at some of these kinds of things.

Re: Hard Startups

#113

Post by otoburb »

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #98
m0zg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you maintain momentum at these kinds of time scales? When I ran engineering at a startup, I tried to structure things such that we deliver something worthwhile at some kind of predictable cadence. It's the best set-up for everyone: the employees feel like they've accomplished someting, the investors feel like there's progress being made. With software this is pretty easy to do (and even so, people often fail t…

That's a good question. My first thought was, "We didn't". But that's really just pessimistic memories speaking. My second thought was, "A perpetual state of stress and fear!". Also pessimistic memories, but closer to the truth. In reality, we had initial seed funding for about a year. We had a number of goals we had established, including vacuum chamber, getting the ion source running, first beam, first neutrons. We…

If you attempted another fusion startup today would the odds of success be higher, or is fusion still about as far away as it was 20 years ago?

Re: Hard Startups

#114

Post by beat »

1996 wrote: post #41
marcosdumay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding? It was. Several times. It was developed by a lot of large companies too. Nobody remember those, for obvious reasons, but people used to use them.

People like to forget. It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes. Your example may be a bit too old. Even novell netware, token ring etc won't ring a bell to many people. Try a simpler one instead: Do you guys remember about the various wireless standards before Wifi? The Orinocos and the Intel 2011 PCMCIA were IIRC among the first ones of the 802.11b - quickly eclipsing ever…

You're talking about the product of standards committees there, not startups. Standards committees are sort of "We're doing this so no one company owns/controls this basic tech, so we can all build new and interoperable products with the basic tech and make money!"

Re: Hard Startups

#115

Post by grandridge »

jimkri wrote: post #77
jrkelly wrote: post #24

"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!…

I'm currently in the research phase for an idea using algae/other plants that sequester CO2 rapidly and continue to have questions, which lead to more questions. Thankfully there is a ton of research that has been done, which makes diving into the topic easy. But having someone to work with that has a PhD/postdoc in this area could help build the idea faster. How can I meet someone with a PhD/postdoc in a specific fi…

You mean like, photosynthesis?

Re: Hard Startups

#116

Post by SolarNet »

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #63
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…

Former fusion startup founder here. This is a very good point. My startup took 6 years to fail and much of our competition at the time is still at it 20 years later. There are a number of things which are also impedance mismatches between the typical SV startup mode and hard startups. One of these is the failure path. When an adtech startup fails, the founders just go get well-paying jobs at a FAANG, or at least that…

> The Valley is now the new East Coast people, the new Madison Avenue. Doing a hard startup in the Valley now is like trying to start Intel in 1960 New York. Hard startups are hard enough, without trying to do that.

I think places like Detroit are promising for this. Lots of cheap real-estate, a local history of technical skills, and serious problems to solve (urban farming for example).

Also due to the internet age, developing nations are also pretty promising for their lack of regulation, and extremely cheap location. But have other serious problems (like availability of smart trained talent).

Re: Hard Startups

#117

Post by hinkley »

luckydata wrote: post #46
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…

I would replace the "startup model" with "VC funded startup".

I think the assumption in threads like this that VCs have monopolize/colonized the concept of 'startup' so thoroughly that it's the default.

If we're talking about "other kinds of startups" they mean "non-VC".

Re: Hard Startups

#118

Post by 1996 »

beat wrote: post #114
1996 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People like to forget. It helps pretend government research and alliances always produce the best outcomes. Your example may be a bit too old. Even novell netware, token ring etc won't ring a bell to many people. Try a simpler one instead: Do you guys remember about the various wireless standards before Wifi? The Orinocos and the Intel 2011 PCMCIA were IIRC among the first ones of the 802.11b - quickly eclipsing ever…

You're talking about the product of standards committees there, not startups. Standards committees are sort of "We're doing this so no one company owns/controls this basic tech, so we can all build new and interoperable products with the basic tech and make money!"

The beauty of standards is that there are so many to chose from! So it's not very different from startups.

Eventually, somethings dominate whether it comes from a standard body or is "branded" as a standard ex-post.

Re: Hard Startups

#119

Post by jedberg »

shoo wrote: post #14
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"?

It's 1/2 way between. Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D. You could spend years working on tech with no commercial viability as long as you could keep making better demos. You were most likely an employee with a PhD and a pension.

But then wall street started demanding quarterly growth and they all cut their R&D departments.

Think Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

Re: Hard Startups

#120

Post by pier25 »

kristiandupont wrote: post #40
rogerkirkness wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this, except we decided on closing CEO deals, we sucked at SEO by comparison.

Oh I am not doing any SEO either. I am still writing emails and making calls, just not the kind that start a 6-month long sales process ending with cigars :-)

That sounds like blog post material ;)
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