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Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Hard Startups

#241

Post by buzzkillington »

lmm wrote: post #204
buzzkillington wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. VC backed rockets have already taken longer to take a human to orbit than government money took to take a human to the moon. This is on top of the fact that they have had 60 years of technological improvement. Simply p…

The amount of money matters too. I'm sure if we were willing to plough 5% of the US budget into the VC approach we'd see bigger results.

It took 5 years to go from the creation of Nasa to a manned Mercury-Atlas.

We still haven't seen any of the space startups match a manned Mercury-Redsone, which took 3 years.

During the Mercury program Nasa was using on average 0.4% of the federal budget, which was little over 2 billion a year in 2020 dollars.

The big spending was on the Apollo missions which are pipe dreams for any of the current space startups 15 years after their foundation.

Re: Hard Startups

#242

Post by stainforth »

Animats wrote: post #166
cbhl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Novell had NetWare and IPX. Apple had AppleTalk. There was also Token ring...

Even the Stanford/Cisco people were thinking "multiprotocol gateway" back then. Much of the push for TCP/IP came from the buy side. I did my networking work when I was at a big aerospace company, and we wanted everything to talk to everything else. Not have DECNET SNA XNS X.25 TP4 gateways trying to interconvert. The vendors all pushed their proprietary systems. Even Berkeley didn't get it at first. Early Berkeley TC…

I truly believe suppliers have more influence on market creation direction than buyers, to all of our detriment.

Re: Hard Startups

#243

Post by ablekh »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #225
ablekh wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood, thank you. I agree with your points. However, just to clarify, the basis for my original question is whether it is possible to predict VCs' "(dis)agreeableness", based on their domain expertise or lack thereof. I appreciate your opinion and look forward to hearing more thoughts from this community.

That I don't think is likely to be any kind of stable predictor. It has more to do with their personality than their background as near as I can tell.

Fair enough. Keeping this in mind, I think that I should do my best to refocus on working more on validating my ideas as opposed to over-analyzing potential funding issues that might or might not happen down the road. :-)

Re: Hard Startups

#244

Post by barry-cotter »

lastres0rt wrote: post #138
kortilla wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is urban farming a serious problem to solve?

Food deserts ARE a serious problem. Growing [X] amount of produce locally would provide a much-needed source of cheap produce and/or revenue to the local community. There's also general health benefits of the added greenery consuming excess CO2. Even better, captured rain runoff goes back into the soil sooner rather than becoming further concentrated with toxic chemicals before it reenters the ecosystem.

Food deserts are a non-problem arising almost entirely from lack of demand for healthy produce.

> Neighborhood Food Outlets, Diet, and Obesity Among California Adults, 2007 and 2009

> Food outlets within walking distance (≤1.0 mile) were not strongly associated with dietary intake, BMI, or probabilities of a BMI of 25.0 or more or a BMI of 30.0 or more.

https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2013/12_0123.htm

> The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States

> Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same availability and prices experienced by high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand.

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDe...

The most energy and carbon efficient way of providing produce is to grow it where it’s easiest to do so and transport it to where there are consumers who want to buy it.

Re: Hard Startups

#245

Post by TuringNYC »

buzzkillington wrote: post #241
lmm wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of money matters too. I'm sure if we were willing to plough 5% of the US budget into the VC approach we'd see bigger results.

It took 5 years to go from the creation of Nasa to a manned Mercury-Atlas. We still haven't seen any of the space startups match a manned Mercury-Redsone, which took 3 years. During the Mercury program Nasa was using on average 0.4% of the federal budget, which was little over 2 billion a year in 2020 dollars. The big spending was on the Apollo missions which are pipe dreams for any of the current space startups 15 y…

You are comparing a different time in the US to now. I dont think this is a fair comparison, everything takes longer now -- buildings, bridges, tunnels. I'm amazed to hear how quickly subways in NYC were built -- these days it takes a decade to build a handful of stops.

I dont think it has to do with startups vs not.

Re: Hard Startups

#246

Post by glbrew »

matchagaucho wrote: post #135

It's also true that "easy startups" can iterate into solving progressively harder problems. The "hard" idea doesn't need to be the mission day one. Amazon was just an online bookstore at one time.

The set "easy problems iterated" is a subset of "hard problems" and I would argue a very small and uninteresting subset. Biotech, energy, next gen computing physics; I don't see any of those as iterating on a simple problem.

Re: Hard Startups

#247

Post by kristiandupont »

hef19898 wrote: post #66
kristiandupont wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

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

Not at all. You can send me an email: [redacted]

Re: Hard Startups

#248

Post by kristiandupont »

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!

You too are welcome to send me an email. [redacted]

Re: Hard Startups

#249

Post by kristiandupont »

pier25 wrote: post #120
kristiandupont wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

I guess it does! :-) I'm not blogging very consistently at the moment but I do seem to have a lot of ideas lately so maybe I should try and get back into the groove.

Re: Hard Startups

#250

Post by kristiandupont »

rland wrote: post #85
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…

HNCS (Hacker News Comment Section) is turning into AWZ (A WarZone) with these acronyms. Here are some definitions of acronyms: B2B: Business to business. SME: Small and Medium Enterprise? Subject Matter Expert? CRUD: Create Read Update Delete. B2SMB: Business to Small Business? CEO: Chief exec officer, SEO: search engine optimization, they have nothing to do with one another. VC: venture capital I'm not sure what SME…

My apologies, I dislike it myself when people do that. SME's are indeed Small and Medium Enterprises. For my particular case, I am targeting companies with around 50-250 people.
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