121–130 of 331 posts
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…
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Is 2.5mm really viable for 10 people within SF Bay Area? That would mean compensation would be around $250k per person (not including payroll taxes, office rent, and whatever else cuts into that). That's distant from the compensation packages being given out by Big N.
I would take a pay cut if it meant working with a high talent concentration team that was small enough to be agile end to end in the full sales -> ops -> product/dev -> support cycle. But that's a unicorn. You don't find a unicorn, you stumble upon it one day and miss the opportunity because you can't rationalize the fact that you actually saw a mythical creature.
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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 be…
NASA is the obvious next example. They pay for a lot of esoteric stuff that once made they don't actually end up needing - but having paid the startup costs - end up contributing to other fields.
I think FEMA also does similar things though at a much less parallel (but a higher volume).
Most of the "regulate and promote an industry" (a dumb idea for structuring them but I digress) agencies also do this. The NRC for example does a lot of research on storing and recycling nuclear waste, but also on new nuclear technologies.
And other military agencies aren't worth leaving out. The army core of engineers pushes a lot of contractors to deliver unique solutions that end up getting resold, see the concrete barriers in Iraq.
I agree with most of this post. But there's one part he's wrong about. The most precious commodity is not talent. As he said "That year, probably over 1,000 photo sharing startups were funded". That means, when that original photo sharing startup was hiring, it could have filled every position x1000 times, if they could find all those candidates. That's an indication of a vast oversupply of talent. The most precious…
I think there are more information problems out there than software engineers.
I feel like the money quote was buried in the postscript. > Another solution to this problem is to think about startups that can become quite successful with less than ten people. As compensation packages from the giant tech companies continue to increase, I suspect this will become a trend. As cash comp at big public companies grow and the future value of startup options plummet, we need to start thinking about diff…
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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,…
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 be…
> I actually just mean DARPA NASA is the obvious next example. They pay for a lot of esoteric stuff that once made they don't actually end up needing - but having paid the startup costs - end up contributing to other fields. I think FEMA also does similar things though at a much less parallel (but a higher volume). Most of the "regulate and promote an industry" (a dumb idea for structuring them but I digress) agencie…
NIH and CDMRP grant programs is several additional billion.
Is this actually true? I have plenty of "hard startups" that I would love to work on. But these hard startups require far more investments and manpower, even to get to the MVP stage. As someone with minimal prior-startup-success and investor-contacts, I get the impression that no one is going to bet significant sums on me and my unproven idea. Am I wrong?