281–290 of 333 posts
If not attitude it's the time commitment - founders should be spending 50%+ of their time with their first customers and refining/pivoting, which interferes with going to (outdated) classes.
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In an ideal world, sure. In reality, a PhD[1] is about publishing papers in the hope that you learn something along the way. [1] My experience in ML in 2026.
Which is ironic, because self-publishing then should automatically qualify you for a PhD. In fact, I believe more people should take this approach. As far as I'm aware, there's no law or regulation from declaring yourself a "PhD" backed by autoresearch.
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When I was an undergrad (35 years ago) I had at least 2 days a week where I was so busy that I had to choose between eating or sleeping. I usually picked eating because not sleeping meant I could pick up another shift or grind on a class project (also because I was young... if I tried that now I'd probably die)
And there's someone on the opposite end of the Bell curve that balances you out.
can vc money just fund basic research? im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. i am in grad school right now. a lot of funding and opportunities come from guys who are like "we need you to innovate we need you to act like a startup." its honestly kinda annoying. i just want to do basic research. i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. but the way this article frames it- is fo…
> im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. > i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. These are incompatible. If you start a company, whether you're CTO or CEO, you'll need to sell things. Both founders have to focus on the product, since it's being sold to people. And people refuse what they don't like. Which means your most valuable feedback mechanism comes from trying to sel…
what i mean is less the goal being making money, more the goal being getting money to fund research. theres no way to avoid "selling" in life. (alas.) what i would be selling would be my research topic to venture capitalists, instead of a product to people. (obviously making some mentions of "well um this could be a sellable product one day" and like, a halfassed marketing campaign in order to better sell my idea to vcs.)
company failing isnt incompatible with the goal of doing research. if i can get a few years of funding by at least putting up the illusion of a sellable product it could be worth it. maybe i'd even get lucky and end up with an actual product that makes money. but uh, comfort in failure. the process of learning over the promise of success.
sorry i sound so evil and scammy rn ahhhhh promise im not trying to be on forbes 30 under 30. just considering vc funding as an alternate route to academia with regard to getting funding for research. (i will need to dance for dollars either way. but vc funding is seeming like it has less uh, annoying interpersonal academic hoops to jump through.) but id need a few years working under people and gaining experience before i would try at this lol.
I am more interested in the question of how Y-Combinator has changed Stanford over the last two decades rather than the question of how Stanford should change to accommodate Y-Combinator. Notice there is no mention of ethics, philosophy, or human connection, except maybe Zuck being a psych major. Do we really want the future of education to be an incubator pipeline? That said I wholehearted agree with the second half…
Elizabeth Holmes, SBF, Do Kwon, Phoebe Gates (anyone else?) all needed a Stanford freshman ethics seminar.
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That’s compatible with the thesis though. Read past the headline. He says good founders learn actual stuff at college and get good at something, without any ambition to make it profitable initially.
It's... not? He's describing how to cultivate founders in university. I'm saying that it's not what a university should be focused on. A startup is not a technical project, it's an organisational endeavour. They don't live or die by the product alone, but by the market demand, organisational robustness and a little bit of luck.
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That's not what he is arguing, though, is it?
Is founding a company not a thing some humans experience?
> benefit wide areas of the human experience
So no, I don't think founding companies has much to do with the wide human experience. It's actually a pretty rare thing. And I argue that most startup founders are not concerned with the human experience and are just focused on what the exit looks like.
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> im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. > i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. These are incompatible. If you start a company, whether you're CTO or CEO, you'll need to sell things. Both founders have to focus on the product, since it's being sold to people. And people refuse what they don't like. Which means your most valuable feedback mechanism comes from trying to sel…
well. to an extent. one always has to sell themselves. view selling as "convincing people to give me money." that i feel is pretty similar regardless of if i am applying for academic grants or applying for vc funding or running political fundraisers. (the latter being my area of experience.) theres kinda no way to avoid "selling" when you have an novel idea you want executed. what i mean is less the goal being making…
can vc money just fund basic research? im slowly getting confused on what founding a company even is. i am in grad school right now. a lot of funding and opportunities come from guys who are like "we need you to innovate we need you to act like a startup." its honestly kinda annoying. i just want to do basic research. i dont want to sell anything. i just want to build things. but the way this article frames it- is fo…
As a result, in a sense, founding a company can be getting funding for a research project.
A good example is nuclear fusion. There’s no nuclear fusion company, or research institute for that matter, that’s within even 50 years of having a commercially viable end product. There’s no strong evidence that that’s even possible. In other words, the entire field is still very much in the research phase, with no clear path to a commercial outcome.
Yet there are something like 50 - 80 funded nuclear fusion companies, collectively funded to the tune of at least about $14 billion. They’re all essentially doing research, which includes building prototypes and testing.
Of course, in order to get that funding, most of these companies have announced milestone dates of various kinds, including dates by which they’ll have a saleable product. All of those dates are ridiculously optimistic, and any investor who’s done due diligence should know that.
Which leads one to wonder what these investors are thinking. Some of them are explicitly indulging in moonshots: funding something desirable that may not work. They’re essentially funding research, and they know it. There are several other categories though, including people that are hedging - betting on a possible payoff. There are also presumably some people who actually believe the target dates (who also presumably have not done good due diligence.)
Is what these fusion companies are doing unethical? A case can be made that it is, particularly when it comes to that last category of investor I mentioned. On the other hand, in an environment where basic research is discouraged, “life will find a way,” and you get these weird distortions of what a funded company is.
> could i just pull up with a list of my research interests, convince people its a sellable product, and score funding?
If you can pull off the middle part about convincing people, the answer is definitely yes. That’s ultimately what the situation you described is about.