The dual PhD problem of today’s startups

...did you miss the entire GPT3 hype wave?

I'd be interested in seeing citations for the known death valley. This is the second time I've heard this anecdote but have never seen the evidence.

There's another issue.

Things close the edge are risky. Things close to two edges are even more risky.

Risk isn't reduced by reward.

Oh, no one would probably bother to cite it because it's right there in the request for proposals in black and white and they explicitly talk about it repeatedly at the SBIR conferences.

You finish your phase 1 in 9 months to a year depending. Then you apply for phase 2 which takes 3-6 months to review and fund. That's the death valley I mean, the lag between finishing phase 1 and starting phase 2.

If you don't have non-grant funding by then, you're self-funding the company for six months of being strung along waiting for them to make a decision. It sucks, especially when VCs have no interest in funding projects that are as hard to understand as my stuff (catalysts and chemicals and machine learning) when they can just fund Uber for cats or whatever.

I'm too tired to keep trying for it, but at least people are finally starting to recognize that chemical manufacturing infrastructure is pretty critical and that we don't understand much of it at all and that if we want to use bio-sourced chemicals we need to really understand this at a global systems level an awful lot better.

But we won't, we'll just try to bolt on bio stuff to horrible legacy systems and make a marginal improvement instead of a generational breakthrough. But if anyone reading this happens to actually be working on this give me a ring... it's my passion in life to fix this because I see it as reducing energy consumption and also improving agriculture through improved ammonia production processes. I am just unable to work on it because of life. And I really don't want to start another company at this point.

Our hubris is rooted on our systems. We expect accelerating growth without bound. And, by Conway’s Law: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.” We have a social and economic system of Survival of the Fittest, which is loosely based on evolution. Evolution has killed 99.9% of the species that have every existed, and our systems do the same. My internal dialectic tells me that there’s three responses to this: 1) The metaphor is lost, and that the statement is “all over the place”, exemplifying the point of the article, that, we cannot communicate effectively outside of our limited understanding. That we cannot have new thought, in part because it cannot be clearly stated. 2) Full throated support for the system prevents us from being able to objectively question why were doing the things that we are doing, which is precisely what Conway’s Law is trying to state. 3) Having a understanding, but idealistic perception, of the world means not being able to do anything about it. Survival of the Fittest means that cooperation will be exploited, and definitely not reciprocated.

In order to find new ground, you may find yourself needing to do something truly out of the ordinary. Try holding board meetings in Swahili. Try “running your business” (which loses context given the next few words) without the concept of ownership or property. Seek sources of knowledge and wisdom outside of the scientific method, religion, business schools, political systems. Of course these would obviously fail (see 3 above) in the current system. We don’t tolerate failure. And we like to see out-of-the-box thinking fail because it further validates our existence systems. We may very well be at a maxima for social and economic development. The cost to try something new would be tremendous. We’re also disadvantaged that we have homogenized culture and thought. Even the simplest changes may require a step back that would be considered another dark age.