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Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

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141–150 of 331 posts

Re: Hard Startups

#141

Post by SolarNet »

killjoywashere wrote: post #126
SolarNet wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Detroit has deep, fundamental problems. the weather, the utilities, the failed neighborhoods. You can cut costs significantly just by moving to San Diego and not have to explain to prospective applicants why living in a windswept frozen wasteland half the year is appealing.

I think you missed the point. The valley used to be (still is actually) a windswept burning desert half the year. Which is part of what makes its 60's self comparable to Detroit.

Re: Hard Startups

#142

Post by bigcohoneypot »

I find ycombinator to be acting completely ignorant of why and how it succeed. The whole notion that they can apply the techniques for an internet startup to hard things is bizarre. As the internet S curve comes to a close, new organizations should be built. Using ycombinator's name to launch unsuccessful startups is just asking to destroy Bs

Re: Hard Startups

#143

Post by mrg3_2013 »

ttul wrote: post #133

A colleague of mine more than a decade ago started a company in the alternative energy space with very interesting yet extremely difficult and unproven technology. It took them a decade to find out that the performance of the technology was not quite good enough to be commercially successful. He burned perhaps a third of his working life grinding away on something that won't succeed - perhaps at all. Yes, there is so…

VCs are incentivized to see more hard startups start. As a founder, I agree you don't want to be doing it, unless you life goal aligns with it or you are already rich.

Re: Hard Startups

#144

Post by aerosmile »

SolarNet wrote: post #141
killjoywashere wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detroit has deep, fundamental problems. the weather, the utilities, the failed neighborhoods. You can cut costs significantly just by moving to San Diego and not have to explain to prospective applicants why living in a windswept frozen wasteland half the year is appealing.

I think you missed the point. The valley used to be (still is actually) a windswept burning desert half the year. Which is part of what makes its 60's self comparable to Detroit.

Sorry, but for all of Valley's problems, the above characterization couldn't be more wrong. You might be thinking of a part of California east of I-5, but Valley as it pertains to the tech hub couldn't be more pleasant from the climate perspective.

Re: Hard Startups

#145

Post by aogl »

outworlder wrote: post #34
streb-lo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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."

The system would probably store all packets in a block chain and routing would be based on a machine learning system.

Ahhh, don't tell all our secrets to the world! "It's not ready yet"

Re: Hard Startups

#146

Post by ablekh »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #134
ablekh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thoughts. Since you apparently have significant experience raising VC funding, I'm curious about your opinion on the following (others, of course, are welcome to chime in). If you were working on a deep tech (science-based) startup and considered using venture capital, would you prefer pitching your idea(s) to VCs, who happen to have relevant domain expertise (most likely, as their educational background)…

You want to pitch to VCs who you can get to believe you're solving a real problem that exists (or will obviously exist) in the market, the solution to that problem that you're providing scales super-linearly when money is added to the pot (i.e. is a product, not a service), and that the actual market opportunity is huge in total Dollars. It helps then if they're familiar-ish with the markets you're addressing so they…

I appreciate you sharing your opinion. So, essentially, you don't seem to think that potential cons of approaching VCs with domain knowledge that I mentioned above (inherent "bias" and lack of belief in possibility of certain solutions) outweigh relevant potential pros. Regarding other aspects, I certainly realize VCs' market size and financial upside considerations.

Re: Hard Startups

#147

Post by aogl »

jedberg wrote: post #119
shoo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder how different interviews were back then by comparison.

Re: Hard Startups

#148

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

readhn wrote: post #62

>The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. I completely disagree. It has nothing to do with being "easy" or "hard". It has everything to do with the RIGHT people heading the team of RIGHT people. Put RIGHT people together and you can solve both easiest and hardest problems out there. Companies fail a lot of times because wrong people wit…

Consider this: When facebook came on the scene and made it super easy for developers to publish apps, what happened? A bazillion people all the sudden jumped in and next thing you knew, within less than a year, there were 100K+ apps in the app store. That's because, it was easy to do so, too easy. And this leads to a ton of competition. Now, imagine for a second, it was much harder: let's say only a 100 engineers in the world knew how to do it, then there'd be far fewer apps in the app store and far fewer competition.

Re: Hard Startups

#149

Post by thorwasdfasdf »

brlewis wrote: post #124
thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #108

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…

You envision a world with exactly one way to share photos? In this world, is there also only one word-sharing site? I think there are more information problems out there than software engineers.

Consider this: every day on ProductHunt, we see dozens if not hundred new apps pumped out. How many of those succeed? Not very many. Why?

Each and every one of those apps was designed to solve a problem. So, why is there so little demand? It's because users already have another app/spreadsheet/website/solution/process that does something too similar and because their existing solution is good enough.

The fact that so many apps are being produced and fail to see traction is an indication of massive oversupply of solutions and talent. It's just too easy to produce yet another app, and so everyone does. this inevitably, must lead to an oversupply of solutions.

Re: Hard Startups

#150

Post by dana321 »

bigcohoneypot wrote: post #142

I find ycombinator to be acting completely ignorant of why and how it succeed. The whole notion that they can apply the techniques for an internet startup to hard things is bizarre. As the internet S curve comes to a close, new organizations should be built. Using ycombinator's name to launch unsuccessful startups is just asking to destroy Bs

So, oh wise one, what should we all be working on?
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