Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 331 posts

Re: Hard Startups

#231

Post by vapemaster »

rexreed wrote: post #222

Silicon Valley loves to shine its turds. And they love to believe their own stink about how much they're disrupting and changing the world. And yet the most funded startups are just car services and rooms-for-rent and song-sharing-apps and the next social media whatever. When the top 10 SV funded startups are solving really big problems, then I'll start believing this nonsense.

So where is the geographic location that does fund hard problems?

SV $ is far from perfect but it is surprisingly audacious and fault tolerant.

A few examples old and young:

Genentech

SpaceX

Joby

TAE Technologies

Re: Hard Startups

#232

Post by unlinked_dll »

rexreed wrote: post #226

Unpopular opinion: Silicon Valley is in the beginning stages of a period of decline. There's lots of great entrepreneurial activity elsewhere, and for building these sorts of "hard startups", the truth is that SF and SV are not the best places to do it. People and rent simply cost too much, and the venture scene lacks depth in these areas.

I disagree, having worked both outside and in the Bay Area.

The network effects are unparalleled. We're paid far better (my salary nearly doubled when I moved to the Bay, my rent didn't). It's far easier to find quality talent and freelancers for startups than elsewhere.

But most importantly, the money and culture is here. Raising money outside of the VC scene here is orders of magnitude more difficult and you get far less for the time you spend.

And I could go on about how places I've been (South Florida, Chicago, Research Triad, etc) all claim to want to be the "next Silicon Valley" but they won't. Partly because SV didn't become the "next" anything, it garnered a unique culture that funded massive amounts of innovation, and anyone chasing a trend is too late. But mostly because the money and tech people in those cities are too cowardly to do anything truly innovative, by and large. There are outliers, of course. But frankly there's not a lot interesting going on anywhere outside the Bay and it pays way, way worse.

Re: Hard Startups

#233

Post by Axsuul »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #149
brlewis wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are wrongly correlating apps launched on ProductHunt to be representative of all problems being solved. If I were to describe one word for ProductHunt launches, then it would be "sensationalist". Most of the apps being launched there are moreso trying to go viral than solving a profound and/or boring problem. The YC launches are probably more representative of the landscape and most of them have never had a ProductHunt launch.

Re: Hard Startups

#234

Post by rexreed »

vapemaster wrote: post #231
rexreed wrote: post #222

Silicon Valley loves to shine its turds. And they love to believe their own stink about how much they're disrupting and changing the world. And yet the most funded startups are just car services and rooms-for-rent and song-sharing-apps and the next social media whatever. When the top 10 SV funded startups are solving really big problems, then I'll start believing this nonsense.

So where is the geographic location that does fund hard problems? SV $ is far from perfect but it is surprisingly audacious and fault tolerant. A few examples old and young: Genentech SpaceX Joby TAE Technologies

The geographic location of the company or the money? These aren't the same thing.

* There's a lot more biotech in Boston than SV * There's even more biotech in Pennsylvania * Battery tech companies are all over the country * There's a ton of space tech in Texas and Mississippi. Yes, Mississippi. And Florida. * Telecom? Look outside the US for strength * Cybersecurity? Maryland. Virgnia. and Israel. * AI? Literally every major country in the world. * Advanced materials? So many places.

Increasingly SV has less and less to offer. Maybe raw money, but I thought companies were looking for smart money, not dumb money.

Re: Hard Startups

#235

Post by Axsuul »

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…

...or maybe there are an infinite number of boring problems out there to solve but that's why they aren't solved, cause they're boring. On the other hand, juicero is exciting.

But seriously, most entrepreneurs are too within their own bubble to know about the problems to solve that are outside their sphere. And there an endless number of them.

Re: Hard Startups

#236

Post by staticautomatic »

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…

Email people who write papers that are useful to you.

Re: Hard Startups

#237

Post by Paul-ish »

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…

Gosh, a lot of what you are talking about sounds like what it is like to finish a PhD that doesn't have a future in academia as well. Sometimes I feel like a failure for choosing software engineering, but I should probably be grateful I have that option.

Re: Hard Startups

#238

Post by rexreed »

unlinked_dll wrote: post #232
rexreed wrote: post #226

Unpopular opinion: Silicon Valley is in the beginning stages of a period of decline. There's lots of great entrepreneurial activity elsewhere, and for building these sorts of "hard startups", the truth is that SF and SV are not the best places to do it. People and rent simply cost too much, and the venture scene lacks depth in these areas.

I disagree, having worked both outside and in the Bay Area. The network effects are unparalleled. We're paid far better (my salary nearly doubled when I moved to the Bay, my rent didn't). It's far easier to find quality talent and freelancers for startups than elsewhere. But most importantly, the money and culture is here. Raising money outside of the VC scene here is orders of magnitude more difficult and you get fa…

Not for the sort of "hard tech" that Samalt is talking about here. Those network effects aren't as prevalent for those working with nuclear fusion, or space tech, or advanced materials, or battery technology.

Yes, you can find lots of brogrammers cranking away at the next advanced app using React, etc. in the Silicon Valley / SF / Bay area and get paid better there for doing that sort of thing. For that, Silicon Valley has the tech in spades.

But if you want to start an advanced lightning company, for example, the Research Triangle (not Triad) that you refer to above is the place to do it. It's the home of CREE and many other LED innovators. Not Silicon Valley.

Re: Hard Startups

#239

Post by pfdietz »

lmm wrote: post #201
Animats wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That came up recently in connection with a VR-related startup. They've been working for years, and they just canned the project and laid off about 60 people. It's all in-house code. So now the people laid off have to find new jobs. They don't have any of the buzzwords resume scanners want. Heroku? No. React? No. Unreal Engine? No. Unity? No. SpatialOS? No. WebAsm? No. Kubernetes? No. Docker? No. AWS? No. Javascript?…

> Maybe they can get a job fixing legacy C++ applications. There's big money in that - those legacy applications are vital to the functioning of big corporations. Specialising in large in-house C++ applications obviously doesn't help develop a career in trendy webdev (and nor should it), but it absolutely gives you some good options.

Hell, there's good money in legacy COBOL applications (both maintaining them, and trying to modernize them.)

Re: Hard Startups

#240

Post by qchris »

spectramax wrote: post #169
qchris wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first point on your list is something that I come back fairly frequently when reading through blog posts like this, or (for example) listening to things like TED talks. I understand that there's a need to stand behind any given thesis, but it seems to me that there is often a lack of distinction between "I'm claiming this to be true primarily based on my experience" and "I'm claiming this to be true based on wide…

I think you summarized it better than I could. When stating facts, be assertive and provide source. When stating opinions, state them as opinions, not facts. As a reader, I wanna chuck the whole thing out of the window. This is pretty common place - Harari's Sapiens suffers from this behavior excessively - I cannot read it and I don't understand why people like this book so much. Full of unsubstantiated claims.

I appreciate you saying that. I haven't read Sapiens, but since we're on HN, I figure it's worth mentioning that I think Paul Graham's writing wanders into this territory a lot. Hackers and Painters has been sitting only half-read on my shelf for a long time because I got too frustrated with it to continue for that exact reason.
Post reply on HN