Researchers and Founders

A potential approach for tackling the problem that may work.

>Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief).

This is an interesting quote. From my experience and personal perspectives, many of the best researchers and scientists doubt themselves, a lot, and are typically hesitant to make definite statements in general. Research is inherently high risk and prone to failure... that's fundamental to what makes it research. If you work in research for awhile, you're wrong so often that it creates an environment of constant self-doubt and constant questioning of ideas.

On top of that, from my experience, the more I learn about an area or subject, the more I realize how little I knew before and the more I've discovered in terms of what I don't know. As the space of your knowledge grows, the surface area also increases and you eventually begin questioning things some fundamentally just accept while the deeper you dig, the more you know where the current frontiers of uncertainty and knowledge truly lie. Combine that with the understanding of where you started (knowing even less but thinking you knew more) and how in hindsight, you were so wrong.. leads to lower confidence in your assessments, even if most might consider you an expert.

An attack is a reason to believe that you can solve the problem. I have no idea how'd I go about solving P=NP, but I did have some thoughts on provable security against transient execution attacks. Which is why I work on the latter but not the former.

People with the ability to "work hard" on "important problems" are not rare. People who have the privilege to do so are incredibly rare. It's disappointingly thoughtless not to acknowledge that in a post published on Juneteenth. If gatekeepers, like Sam, put a little more effort into acknowledging how they perpetuate systemic inequality, and trying to avoid it, they could have a huge impacts.

Being an academic researcher (kosurilab.org) and a founder (octant.bio), while I do think there are some similarities (working hard, etc), I think there are some really big differences too. Some of these might be more particular to academic research than research more broadly, but some quick thoughts:

1. Bias towards action & clear eyed => I think that's right, but there is another part of this too, that is more important as a founder – making decisions even under massive uncertainty. In a company, it's not just uncertain technical decisions, but also market decisions, cultural decisions, people decisions, etc. This is stomach churning, and most researchers can focus on the technical challenges in ways that founders can't. You have to do this in research decisions too; but as a founder it feels like it happens way, way more often with broader and broader sets of decisiosn.

2. One of the thing that I feel very different about founders is you have be honest about what the actual problems you have to solve are, and not turn your nose at the seemingly mundane and important tasks like managing a company. Great researchers are focused on their scientific problems over decades - founders are focused on building a lasting organization. These have pretty different consequences on what one chooses to spend their time on.

3. In academia at least, there are some really big differences in running a company versus running a lab. In a lab, my main mission is training people, while working on problems I find interesting... slowly moving towards my long-term scientific/technical goals. In a company, it's building a product that people will buy, and slowly moving towards those same goals. Again, this has pretty big consequences on what one spends their time doing and the types of problems you get to solve. There are positives and negatives to both approaches, some of which are quite subtle. For example, reputation games are far more important in academia than industry - I also find authority becomes a lot more pernicious in academia than industry. Anyways, lots here that are very different (but again this might be academia rather than research itself).