Hard Startups

Post by zimpenfish » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:31 AM UTC

Jestar342 wrote: post #279

Arelius wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by Chris2048 » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:35 AM UTC

Paul-ish wrote: post #237

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…

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.

Post by Mvandenbergh » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

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…

Post by golergka » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 12:54 PM UTC

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?…

Post by AstralStorm » Thu, Feb 27, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

_Microft wrote: post #270

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…