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Hard Startups

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Hard Startups

#271

Post by blackrock »

Animats wrote: post #171
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…

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?…

Apply to an AR hardware company?

Re: Hard Startups

#272

Post by saagarjha »

chrisco255 wrote: post #263
m0zg wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> And people instinctively believe this even if they overtly signal that they don't.

I think it's rather condescending to literally claim you know people's beliefs, even when they vehemently voice otherwise.

Re: Hard Startups

#273

Post by saagarjha »

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…

> 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.

The problem is that people aren't necessarily great at investing for the long term, especially if they think they'll be dead by the time the benefits arise.

> 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.

Because of flawed optics on nuclear, mostly.

Re: Hard Startups

#274

Post by Cthulhu_ »

swalsh wrote: post #203
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?…

I used to work on an in-house framework. The trick is to write like "used proprietary JS framework xyz.js, a framework similar to react.js". The scanners will still pick it up.

And of course to keep an eye on the ecosystem. Honestly, if you're a decent developer, learning something you're not familiar (e.g. React) takes a day at best to get at a good enough level to be productive at a new job. It's just a different way to cough up HTML in the end.

Re: Hard Startups

#275

Post by saagarjha »

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.

> Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D.

Isn't this true of many large companies today? I don't see Alphabet making any returns on X anytime soon.

Re: Hard Startups

#276

Post by kilroy123 »

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 agree with you. I'm going to attempt to start a "hard startup" and it will be outside of the bay area.

Re: Hard Startups

#277

Post by mkl »

starpilot wrote: post #125
jkubicek wrote: post #49

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…

Side note, but I've noticed how less/fewer confusion has ceased being considered a grammatical error. Interesting since pg has previously stated how important good writing is, and the YC app contained the same error.

It was never actually a grammatical error. The idea that it was "in fact arose as an incorrect generalization of a personal preference expressed by a grammarian in 1770." [1] Less has been used for countable things at least as far back as Alfred the Great in 888 CE [1], i.e. before English was English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_versus_less

Re: Hard Startups

#278

Post by modo_mario »

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…

A lot of this tbh is probably because of infighting between renewables and nuclear.

Fusion seems like a bit of a black box to throw money into which isn't appreciated. Throw too little and you don't get there. Throw enough and you don't know when you'll get there.

Fission solves a lot of problems but nobody likes it in their back yeard and some countries have gotten a scare of it (japan, germany,etc) It also takes a very long time to build a new planet and there's many people saying gov should invest more in solar/wind/etc instead whilst we're in a time where a lot of nuclear plants are reaching their planned life time or have had it extended for a long time. Hell I think only the UK is planning a new one which is sad to see.

Re: Hard Startups

#279

Post by Jestar342 »

Arelius wrote: post #190
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?…

Meh, I've worked 15 years almost entirely at companies using almost entirely in-house technology. Maybe it's because I don't interview for web-tech roles, but I really have never had any problems getting opportunities, and I don't think I'm unique. I think buzzwords are less relevant if you have any amount of specialist skills or significant experience. For instance, I constantly head hunted for jobs with Unreal Engi…

To counter your experience, mine (in London) was almost exactly what Animats described. I worked on the same application for a decade, we introduced new tech when appropriate, but we also stuck with the fundamentals we chose right at the start simply because they weren't broken. That did mean, however, that when I came to looking for a new role I was _way_ behind other candidates.

Re: Hard Startups

#280

Post by rl3 »

ssivark wrote: post #269
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…

For sure. I'm fortunate to at least have a couple friends I can bounce anything off, even if it's just talking to myself sometimes.

As far as keeping the fire alive, I've had little trouble thus far. In fact, the fire's done nothing but increase in intensity for the most part. However when you have a lot of free time, that's perhaps natural.

Being too tired to do anything else outside of job and a long-overdue social/romantic life is a very real concern. The other side of that coin is grinding to a halt on startup progress because my personal life is in tatters. I suppose it's like anything else, where you make time for whatever is most important and practice effective time management.

Arguably the more ambition you have, the better your time management must be. Which is ironic because some of the best ideation and thinking in my experience has come from a lack of structure. Then again, no reason one can't schedule unstructured thinking time when needed.

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