My insomniac brain automatically filled in "prison experiment" after Stanford, and then I started to think, what if startup-VC-founder-unicorn culture is all an elaborate psychology experiment?
shhhh don't say the quiet part out loud
The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#52The article strikes me as somewhat OK but overly critical of the MIT startup and overly forgiving of the Stanford startup. Also prior to the mid 1990s it seems like the Stanford startup thing really hadn't begun yet. You look at the old guard of SV companies and they operated much more like east coast culture. To me it seems like the modern "Stanford startup" culture arose from VC money from the investors who made to…
I went to school out East and work out west, and consumer tech is way more of a NYC thing than a Bay Area thing because the personas and professional networks are out there. West Coast is also enterprise or business tech driven, but those founders aren't as media friendly or sexy despite being the majority (hence the Musks and increasingly Altmans hogging the limelight). Boston has potential, but it honestly isn't le…
> The elitism is rife to a level unlike in California.
Awhile ago, to students at MIT, I mentioned suspiciously "MIT shop" companies, and said that, if you don't think there's people at Northeastern who could hold their own, then recalibrate worldview.
There's absolutely a lot of elitism around certain NE schools known around the world, agreed. Those schools actively promote it, and it's evident in some post-graduation things, including companies.
But I also see variations on that elitism around Stanford, Google, and some other Bay Area icons.
One difference between the elitism I notice most commonly around MIT, and around Bay Area, is that MIT's version is often about having survived a trial by fire, and being uniquely stronger due to that (not that I fully agree). Bay Area versions more often come across as less-secure reaching for and clinging to symbols of status, and nurturing artificial frat-like exclusivity. (Clinging to Leetcode hazing rituals is just one example.)
Of course, on an individual person level, you'll find a lot of smart and thoughtful people who don't subscribe to the elitism -- maybe the majority of people who could claim the same exclusive club as the elitists. And some of the smartest people are the most humble in thought and manner. But elitism does seep into a lot of things.
I suppose that club elitism might also be involved in some of the more arrogant actions you see affecting large swaths of society, separate from money/power motivations. The Bay Area sure does have a lot of that arrogance, sometimes labeling it "disrupt". (But maybe most often "disrupt" is more about grabbing money/power, than a genuine but arrogant belief that one can and should make decisions for society. Maybe all that matters to some is that they can, and anything else, like "changing the world [for better/worse, who cares]" is rationalization that's been blessed as virtuous.)
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#53The article names its archetypes not entirely fairly, based on my experience at three MIT startups. Two were novel-tech academic spinoffs, and the third was alumni applying/integrating COTS tech driven by customer problem domain. Of those three, two were business-thinking much like the article's "Stanford" archetype. The other had, like the article's "MIT" archetype, a period to develop tech from the lab, and a chall…
And Google is a pretty good counter-example to “The Stanford startup has developed no new technology”
(Google is huge, and does real tech, i.e. advances in deep learning. The following only applies to their search startup phase.)
PageRank was innovative, and had great "market fit" (or "user fit", prior to ad revenue), but wasn't very deep as technology goes.
Google's (original) business success came from leveraging that into a three-way network-effect as the middleman connecting web content users, web content providers, and web advertisers. Even today, PageRank's successor algorithms appear to be aimed more at ad revenue optimization than improving search as a technology.
Likewise. Netflix, Facebook, Expedia, Spotify, Uber, Airbnb, ... use tech as operations, it is not the product. Their primary defenses are not unique technology, but network effects, customer information lock-in, and other market-side moats.
They have great technical people doing great work. But a high proportion of their innovation is aimed at their own operations, customer engagement, etc., not creating and offering new technology.
--
Technology first companies typically end up as part of a supply chain.
nVidia is a good example They have become huge, but are still a parts maker in a lot of ways. They have created a sticky ecosystems, but their primary work and moat remains keeping up a relentless technological cadence.
Another example was Amazon. They started by adapting others' tech to create an online store. But instead of simply optimizing that, they fully developed distributed computing as a service, and spun that out as its own business. Now they are a provider in other companies' supply/resource chains.
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#54The article names its archetypes not entirely fairly, based on my experience at three MIT startups. Two were novel-tech academic spinoffs, and the third was alumni applying/integrating COTS tech driven by customer problem domain. Of those three, two were business-thinking much like the article's "Stanford" archetype. The other had, like the article's "MIT" archetype, a period to develop tech from the lab, and a chall…
SBIRs can be useful, but they can also be a trap where a company just keeps going after SBIRs and never takes the technology to market.
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#55The Stanford startup looks AMAZING for five years, and then, after getting hundreds of millions in investment, they realize they are only making tens of thousands in revenue, everyone starts fighting, friendships and money are lost.
Meanwhile, the slow growing MIT company discovers a tangential product while developing their technology. They release the pivot product which slowly grows revenue. They build under revenue, never take investment money, and share revenues. Everyone gets rich and stays friends, and the VCs get nothing.
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#56The article strikes me as somewhat OK but overly critical of the MIT startup and overly forgiving of the Stanford startup. Also prior to the mid 1990s it seems like the Stanford startup thing really hadn't begun yet. You look at the old guard of SV companies and they operated much more like east coast culture. To me it seems like the modern "Stanford startup" culture arose from VC money from the investors who made to…
I went to school out East and work out west, and consumer tech is way more of a NYC thing than a Bay Area thing because the personas and professional networks are out there. West Coast is also enterprise or business tech driven, but those founders aren't as media friendly or sexy despite being the majority (hence the Musks and increasingly Altmans hogging the limelight). Boston has potential, but it honestly isn't le…
honest question, what's wrong with the CIC?
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#57The MIT startup is like a breath of fresh air - a company that is actually doing something! Stanford style startups are a way better way to make money - but I wish people would just stop making them. Filling the economy with parasitic middle men hasn't worked out too well for us.
What about the tech economy hasn't worked out well? Americans and tech workers in particular have never been better off
The enshittification of the Internet? Search results overrun with SEO, internet-connected dishwashers, toxic social media full of dark patterns, discarded Juuls littering the streets, ads on paid streaming services that cut half their content because of mergers, meanwhile the planet is burning.
Yes, there's a burgeoning middle class of engineers who design those Juul pods and build those ad networks, but imagine if all those people were hard at work engineering desalination plants and better batteries. Imagine if that paid better.
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the tech economy hasn't worked out well? Americans and tech workers in particular have never been better off
The enshittification of the Internet? Search results overrun with SEO, internet-connected dishwashers, toxic social media full of dark patterns, discarded Juuls littering the streets, ads on paid streaming services that cut half their content because of mergers, meanwhile the planet is burning. Yes, there's a burgeoning middle class of engineers who design those Juul pods and build those ad networks, but imagine if a…
That all sounds dramatically preferable to an economy that follows what you suggested and companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Salesforce, etc etc don't exist because we haven't solved desalination yet
Re: The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup (2013)
#59The article strikes me as somewhat OK but overly critical of the MIT startup and overly forgiving of the Stanford startup. Also prior to the mid 1990s it seems like the Stanford startup thing really hadn't begun yet. You look at the old guard of SV companies and they operated much more like east coast culture. To me it seems like the modern "Stanford startup" culture arose from VC money from the investors who made to…
I would say that MIT has jumped on the entrepreneurship train (for better and worse) much more wholeheartedly in the decade since this account of an even older (!) anecdote.
That's not to say that the startups aren't doing hard tech and they're still different than west coast startups. However, scientists are perfectly fine at using the scientific method for business development once you explain it to them and are much smarter about getting initial revenue and market validation and know perfectly well it's important -- if you mentor them even a little bit.
MIT started working much harder to explain this in the mid '00s when it truly was much more like what this story says.