161–170 of 219 posts
YC will need a change in their funding model if they want to fund these type of technologies. $14k to $20k is irrelevant if you need 3 years R&D and/or $5M capital to prototype; we need new metrics for funding businesses with high capital cost and/or long incubation time.
This sounds terrific, but it doesn't seem self-consistent between wanting companies with the scale of ambition of SpaceX and Tesla, but insisting on early momentum being critical and avoiding a big and expensive initial project. Tesla took four years to introduce their first product, the Roadster. When they went public two years later, they had gone through a net loss of around 300 million dollars, and were still two…
ScaledComposites followed a somewhat similar model: it took them 3 years to build SpaceShipOne[1] and win the X-Prize. That attracted enough investment for them to begin work on the VirginGalactic stuff.
3 years may be a lot longer than the typical 3 months YC development cycle, but it's easy to imagine building a scaled down drone version in 3 months (After all: "it's just a remote control plane").
SpaceShipOne took 18 months to get to first (unmanned) flight.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_SpaceShipOne
Why should YC be involved in areas where it has no experience? The money YC gives is minimal, so the main benefit for YC involvement is experience. If YC has nobody who has expert knowledge in biotech, it would be waste of everyones time to get involved. Another thing is money. Most science startups need more than just people with PhD's willing to live with ramens. They need lab equipment, samples etc that cost tens…
This is a noble goal and I'm glad that YC wants to invest in these sort of companies, but they need to do a lot more work to convince startups of this sort that the value proposition makes sense for them.
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I 100% agree when it comes to software, but if we are talking about long term ground breaking technology.. how can you start a spaceship company without a $100M initial investment? what results can you show at an early stage? it's an honest question and I think about this all the time. If you can solve the funding issue, I would bet a lot more people will choose the more ambitious projects. What can a spaceship compa…
By not starting with spaceships, but instead with something that can evolve into spaceships. Here's the first product of Boeing, which built the bottom stage of the Saturn V: http://www.boeing.com/boeing/history/boeing/bw.page
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Tesla would not exist if Elon Musk hadn't bet his personal fortune. He showed terrible results at first so all his investors gave up on him. Your average YC founder would not have been in a position to pony up $40M to do the Series E himself.
People usually don't realize that Tesla was days from insolvency back in 2008: http://www.autotrends.org/2008/11/17/avoiding-insolvency-tes... Elon is an all-in kind of guy, but has his hands full. More Elons please.
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Take an interest in anthropology and observe how communities interact and shape the environment (and systems of hierarchy and control) around them, and then consider how software can influence interactions. Not that I'd argue with you with where we're at today. The destination may be over the horizon, but the first milestone is right in front of us and looks like we've barely moved. Which is true.
The internet does rewire the fabric of society. Facebook has a big role in modern revolutions. I'm just skeptical that the forum format has the potential to bring further material advances.
Almost regardless of how impact is quantified, the answer is going to be yes.
Looking at any influential forum within any given vertical, that same pattern is repeated over and over.
Impact is material and real, when enough people with a shared interest come together.
Could the impact have been more measurable if the technology that powers forums been more supportive of the users needs? Again it's hard to answer that software that more easily helps pull people together in the real (as well as in the virtual) world and strengthen those bonds within a community wouldn't have more impact than software that didn't.
Forums are impactful, and do bring about advances. But currently only in small groups and without the impact or advances being accessible to other groups. The question isn't whether this happens in forums, but whether it's possible to encourage it to happen and what may emerge if it happens more often in similar ways. Could forums be used as a testing ground for new political structures within large groups of people, could they be used to evolve and prove those structures, and could the mechanisms of self-organisation within a forum be mapped back onto the real world.
It's not as crazy a thought as you might imagine, the seed is there and the tools do not support the way people are already trying to work. The tools today hold people back from what they naturally try to do, but if the tools supported people better things could be different.
"It used to be the case that governments funded a lot of development of breakthrough technologies. The bad news is that they have mostly stopped; the good news is that the leverage of technology is such that now small startups can do what used to take the resources of nations." Honest question: if small startups can now do what used to take the resources of nations, isn't there something even cooler that the resource…
As is becoming abundantly clear, the world is run by politicians with little to no understanding or respect for science. These people, like most, believe in the "genius" theory, where an Einstein just magically appears and make a huge breakthrough once every hundred years. They don't understand that science is a slow, incremental process which happens over hundreds of years, and requires steady investment for progres…
There are schleps involved in doing great work of all kinds. People capable of true greatness overcome them.
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Most databases I see on HN are a case of take algorithm X and apply it to problem Y through interfaces Z[], which is fantastic if you have problem Y and no good solution. Infinitely scalable nosql db running on raw SSDs is fantastic, for example, but not even close to designing a theoretical spaceship. Would or could ycombinator fund a company that could only tell you what to expect in 0.25 + n years where n>9 and Bo…
We'd fund anything that had big potential and effective founders. It might be harder to raise money after YC for something that was going to take a long time, but there are certainly some VCs who'd like an idea that was going to take a long time but had proportionately high expected value.
Here is my stream of consciousness post about this. I could have thousands of words about it so this is intentionally brief. I am always trying to improve my abilities on this subject, and will discuss it more but this is what I've got right now.
Breakthrough technology innovation is fundamentally different.
This could be tough for teams which have been geared to a goal within sight.
In natural science especially, it takes a research laboratory which has to be built in advance, and this means a much further stage of bug-free completion compared to release 1.0 of software (where traction may immediately begin).
And then you get to start the pursuit of a/the breakthrough, over an unknown time-frame, only after which if you succeed, then you can begin to package and monetize it.
When you "pivot", you usually need a new or additional laboratory, and be prepared to set R&D back to square one.
Capital is needed for different things, in different ways, in different amounts, and at different times with differing terms than other high-profit or high-return operations. Compared to software engineering & marketing projects, these differences are so drastic, it's been interesting to me so I've been looking at it when I can.
My interest in capital would be for natural science breakthroughs but to outsiders most available capital only appears on the "map" due to the search for the next facebook.
I guess that's a concept where capital would be on a "map" and entities worth investing in would be good to have on their "radar".
I wouldn't want to be shot down, I would want my technology to be guided in for a safe landing. Aviation fuel, and a wonderful takeoff.
Some of these capital projects are so strong that tech capital is like Hollywood money & connections where the talent does not actually have to be that good any more. They can make a star out of anyone, and the system now tends to exclude the kinds of talent that made it great to begin with.
It would be interesting to see what that type of west coast machine could do with one of my technologies, areas of expertise, or even simple innovative ideas. This has captured my imagination for a while now, but I guess I just have an over-active imagination.
Ideas especially are not supposed to be worth anything on their own without action, but in natural science, if you are successful enough to have an actionable idea or breakthrough, and take action, it will usually be a longer-term committment than a software project, and before you have a chance to complete and/or leverage the development, most likely better ideas will come along which even if recognized as better will have to wait until later on for attention. If you are really advanced at things they don't teach in school, you will also have trouble getting your point across. Either way you end up with better ideas than anyone including yourself has had a chance to take action on or leverage in any way, so the best ideas lie dormant and unappreciated since they are just ideas and can not be worth anything compared to ones that have already been invested in.
If your life's work is geared toward breakthrough innovation in natural science, you end up with a lab like Thos. Edison and not many people can relate to that any more.
This is what has been on my mind for a couple hours now, since I first got the "RFS" in my email. I just subscribed to the Sam Altman blog not that long ago because I ran into some material of his which was inspiring.
I'm not a social networker or a software engineer, and I'm not from a silicon valley industry, so I've been trying to get realistic ideas how these kinds of companies get off to such a good start with their capital. Now all of a sudden horizons here have broadened to include natural science, this is even more inspiring.
I would expect some people would figure I'm too old for this ycombinator type stuff, but here I am now.
> "We are getting close to spending 20% of our GDP on healthcare; this is unsustainable." Really? Why should 20% be unsustainable?
Healthcare costs grow faster than inflation, which is unsustainable.
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I 100% agree when it comes to software, but if we are talking about long term ground breaking technology.. how can you start a spaceship company without a $100M initial investment? what results can you show at an early stage? it's an honest question and I think about this all the time. If you can solve the funding issue, I would bet a lot more people will choose the more ambitious projects. What can a spaceship compa…
By not starting with spaceships, but instead with something that can evolve into spaceships. Here's the first product of Boeing, which built the bottom stage of the Saturn V: http://www.boeing.com/boeing/history/boeing/bw.page
If your life's work was geared toward making money for investors someday in case you encounter capital, and you were not going to let a lack of capital keep you from starting your pressing research anyway, a number of decades would be expected to have elapsed before you had the most attractive technology you could offer up for investment into.
For those things that truly require decades before maximum fruition, there is no substitute for decades, just do it.
-Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability.... We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.
-Pretty much everything will come to him who hustles while he waits.
--TAEdison