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Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Hard Startups

#261

Post by seanhunter »

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…

I don't see this at all as related to oversupply of solutions and talent. It's a darwinian structural feature of many of these domains that a very small number of winners will beat out all other solutions, and if the problem is valuable a large number of candidates will compete for the chance to be a winner.

Likewise with talent, roles are not fungible. If I'm engineer #5 at one of 100 photo-sharing startups that's a totally different proposition to being engineer #500 at one large photosharing company. A different sort of candidate is going for that second role and you actually need somewhat different personality and skills. That implies a really different competitive dynamic as well.

Re: Hard Startups

#262

Post by m0zg »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #254
pfdietz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion used to be aiming at being better than fission, because that was the default post-fossil energy source. But now renewables are cheaper than that. So the competition has gotten better since then, and continues to improve rapidly, and it's not clear fusion can ever get cheap enough to compete with them. Another argument is that fusion reactors will require robots to maintain them (even the aneutronic ones will b…

People say that about molten salt fission reactors too. The maintenance robots will need maintenance robots. Just sell the robots. Lots of people still in fission and fusion are assuming trouble with renewables related to intermittency, land use, grid integration, EROI, raw materials, etc. might arise as we approach deep decarb. If that doesn't happen, wonderful! If it does, then it may be nice to have some low-carbo…

If the climate change situation was really as dire as we're being told, we'd have nuclear coming out of our ears by now, and nothing whatsoever would be able to stop it. It doesn't have to be ultra-expensive if it's not bespoke every time you build it. The investment into fusion would also be 10x what it is today, and we'd already have a viable version of it, after a Manhattan-project style, do-or-die effort.

What's puzzling to me is why the opposite seems to be happening: some parts of the world shut down completely carbon neutral stuff and build things that are going to emit gigatons of CO2 for decades to come.

If we are to reach point of no return (or worse, have already reached it), the focus should be on building such an abundance of energy generation capacity that it would not only replace all carbon-emitting energy generation, but also help power atmospheric carbon capture at a scale that we'd need to avert the climate disaster.

Re: Hard Startups

#263

Post by chrisco255 »

m0zg wrote: post #262
acidburnNSA wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say that about molten salt fission reactors too. The maintenance robots will need maintenance robots. Just sell the robots. Lots of people still in fission and fusion are assuming trouble with renewables related to intermittency, land use, grid integration, EROI, raw materials, etc. might arise as we approach deep decarb. If that doesn't happen, wonderful! If it does, then it may be nice to have some low-carbo…

If the climate change situation was really as dire as we're being told, we'd have nuclear coming out of our ears by now, and nothing whatsoever would be able to stop it. It doesn't have to be ultra-expensive if it's not bespoke every time you build it. The investment into fusion would also be 10x what it is today, and we'd already have a viable version of it, after a Manhattan-project style, do-or-die effort. What's…

CO2 has a logarithmic effect on temps. Doubling the current PPM will have half as much of an effect. I don't think the situation is dire or critical at all. It's mild. And people instinctively believe this even if they overtly signal that they don't.

Re: Hard Startups

#264

Post by rhlsthrm »

Arelius wrote: post #197
aerosmile wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might be right, but as a San Franciscan, who had to stop by the office in Palo Alto today, the sun did feel a bit oppressive =)

I feel like a lot of people don't realize how gloomy and cold SF's microclimate is.

Re: Hard Startups

#265

Post by rainyMammoth »

titanomachy wrote: post #214
FiatLuxDave wrote: post #63

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…

You're putting a lot of emphasis on ads, but lots of major SV companies have nothing to do with ads... Netflix, Uber, Apple, for example. Maybe you mean "software companies"?

Those are the notable outliers though, most of the B2C Bigtechs are adtech companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapshat etc. Those adtechs are the cancer of our century.

The B2C business is fortunately more product oriented.

Re: Hard Startups

#267

Post by sybarita »

fenwick67 wrote: post #159
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.

San Diego has deep, fundamental problems. the cost of living, the homelessness, the failed neighborhoods. You can cut costs significantly just by moving to Detroit and not have to explain to prospective applicants why living in a feces-riddled yet expensive nightmare is appealing.

lol "feces-riddled" san diego is probably the cleanest city in the country but ok

Re: Hard Startups

#268

Post by choonway »

spectramax wrote: post #45

What bothers me about Sam Altman's writing is the following: 1) He talks about X, X being an observation with survivorship bias painted all over it, but Sam Altman asserts as if it is true. Stop writing with authority over unsubstantiated claims - you can only be humble and say "Perhaps X is true because of my observations, take it with a grain salt". 2) Statements like "Easy startups are easy to start but hard to ma…

You know, I take most articles like this as a signal to say, “hey I’m still alive”, rather than to dispense some secret knowledge. There’s no need to take it too seriously.

Re: Hard Startups

#269

Post by ssivark »

rl3 wrote: post #207

It would be nice if part of the ecosystem was structured more in terms of supporting founders who want to take on hard problems via way of dedicating their life to it. I'll provide my own perspective here in case anyone finds it interesting: I've been working on my startup for 7 years now, and the damage it's done to my personal life and well-being has pretty much ground progress to a halt, with the exception of adva…

> Get a well-paying engineering job I'll probably hate, because money, quality of life, and sanity all have instrumental value. Hopefully keep the fire alive during this period.

Based on what I've observed and heard in discussions (both IRL and on HN), keeping the fire alive over the years is a significant challenge. One key ingredient to that is finding the right community/people for healthy feedback (both positive and negative, as appropriate, over years).

Re: Hard Startups

#270

Post by _Microft »

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…

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but would it have been possible to create products along the way that would have made enough money to have a longer or maybe even infinite runway? Would such an approach have flown with the VCs?

I am thinking about something like creating an own ion source first, keep building and selling these and using the money to tackle the next problem. Then tackle the next problem. And so on.

Two examples of different hard engineering problems being approached in different ways:

Compare Blue Origin's and SpaceX' approach to developing reusable rockets. Blue Origin is financed by Mr. Bezos. If Bezos stopped that (certainly not intentionally but a bus factor of 1 is bad anyways), Blue Origin would be left with no sustainable business from what we can tell. I am convinced that in the worst case a defense contractor would happily buy in but for the company as a whole it might be over. SpaceX was developing reusable rockets by creating rockets (hard but not as hard as going directly to reusable rockets) first and selling services (that's even better than selling products) to customers to finance the development. They were even using already paid for rocket launches for their experimental landing attempts. That's a lot cheaper than having to pay multiple for a rocket just to see it blow up on landing (or reentry or sometime in between).

The same could be said about Tesla, Waymo and self-driving. Waymo has to reach full self-driving (FSD) to start making money. If they fail, they company is dead or also needs to be sold. If Tesla fails to reach FSD? That would suck, they would have to pay back the customers who bought the FSD package early, maybe deal with a class-action lawsuit because of this and but they could carry on selling cars nevertheless.

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