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Researchers and Founders

blog.samaltman.com

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81–90 of 115 posts

Re: Researchers and Founders

#81

Post by rytill »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #68
alexashka wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it feels like Gary Vee's cancerous idea of 'there is never enough content, post everywhere, all the time' has infiltrated culture - people have realized that they can stay popular and receive the many perks that come with it, from simply posting 'content' that barely has any actual content in it :) I couldn't comprehend why anybody would watch daily videos from a guy/gal who does nothing but films him/herself…

> people have realized that they can stay popular and receive the many perks that come with it, from simply posting 'content' that barely has any actual content in it :) Mark Twain I think said: That man can pack the smallest ideas into the most words of any man I know. Personal Hate: Essays that follow the NPR style of layering vast amounts of extraneous sub-anecdotes before getting to the point.

I think I know what you mean, but what do you mean by "sub-anecdote"? Pure curiosity.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#82

Post by garmaine »

randomsearch wrote: post #74
eanzenberg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCs, too. Interesting how researchers are a bit more humble or realistic about achievements.

This is entirely inaccurate. Researchers are not as you describe at all, at least those who become professors. They are exactly the same.

Why do you think "researchers" meant professors? That seems like a leap.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#83

Post by cossatot »

paultopia wrote: post #10
cossatot wrote: post #2

I'd love to hear a bit more about the differences. I've spent my adult life in research environments (academic, nonprofit and industrial R&D) and while much of the activity seems entrepreneurial (particularly grant writing), the overarching structural differences between building something for profit vs. for the public good makes a lot of aspects of building a business a bit mysterious to me.

It seems to me that a big part of the difference in some fields at least is a desire to build relatively solo vs in a group. In the social sciences/humanities researchers don't have to deal with any other people very often; in the lab sciences there's a very small organization to work with. And 2/3 of the things all academics hate the most are the things that involve having to work closely with others and bureaucrati…

> And 2/3 of the things all academics hate the most are the things that involve having to work closely with others and bureaucratic organizations (faculty meetings/service and grant writing. The third, incidentally, is grading.)

"This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" --Randal, Clerks

Re: Researchers and Founders

#84

Post by solumos »

garmaine wrote: post #82
randomsearch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is entirely inaccurate. Researchers are not as you describe at all, at least those who become professors. They are exactly the same.

Why do you think "researchers" meant professors? That seems like a leap.

I think what they're saying is that there are plenty of researchers/professors with ego, who think they're God's Gift. At the same time, there are many more researchers who are very humble and realize their contributions are a small part of a larger whole.

In startups, it seems that a strong ego is an advantage - if not a necessity (see: Elon Musk, Adam Neumann, Steve Jobs). There's an attitude (usually explicit, but sometimes implicit) of "we're disrupting the _____ industry and changing the world!".

Overall, I think you can find strong egos in any industry or job. However, my guess is that if you (somehow) ranked researchers and founders by ego, you'd find that the distributions were quite different. My guess is that the majority of founders have strong egos, with a long tail of those less ego-centric and that researchers would be quite the opposite - generally less ego-centric, with a long tail of strong-ego individuals.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#85

Post by ramraj07 »

Frost1x wrote: post #23

>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 typica…

This is very true for _good researchers_. Unfortunately the grant system nowadays does not look kindly to self-doubt: your proposals have to be authoritative and confident for them to be funded; if there's any whiff of a "maybe" there it does not get funded anymore. Thus, professors who are over-confident (or, surprisingly often, even oblivious) about the potential pitfalls in their proposal are more likely to be funded, if they are even proposing something that's novel. Many researchers don't even bother writing the actual proposal, they write a proposal for a projct that's already half way done, so they know for sure it's going to work (and they can also provide preliminary data). When the money comes they will use it for a future project and then repeat the cycle applying for the grant for that project afterwards. Futile cycle to the drain unfortunately.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#86

Post by ScottBurson »

vikramkr wrote: post #44
bonoboTP wrote: post #34

This post would not survive blind review, though. The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision. Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

I think it's because they just launched a new moonshot venture fund? Though in that context I'd be more curious about what they find different between researchers and entrepreneurs since presumably, they want to turn a lot of the former into the latter. What'll they have to do to bridge the gap and make their venture firm a success?

Yes, this is what I was hoping the post would be about.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#87

Post by paultopia »

cossatot wrote: post #83
paultopia wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that a big part of the difference in some fields at least is a desire to build relatively solo vs in a group. In the social sciences/humanities researchers don't have to deal with any other people very often; in the lab sciences there's a very small organization to work with. And 2/3 of the things all academics hate the most are the things that involve having to work closely with others and bureaucrati…

> And 2/3 of the things all academics hate the most are the things that involve having to work closely with others and bureaucratic organizations (faculty meetings/service and grant writing. The third, incidentally, is grading.) "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" --Randal, Clerks

Hah, funny, but not quite fair---if by customers we mean students, most academics quite like the students and teaching them---and many (myself included) think that the grading part actually harms the students.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#88

Post by garmaine »

solumos wrote: post #84
garmaine wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think "researchers" meant professors? That seems like a leap.

I think what they're saying is that there are plenty of researchers/professors with ego, who think they're God's Gift. At the same time, there are many more researchers who are very humble and realize their contributions are a small part of a larger whole. In startups, it seems that a strong ego is an advantage - if not a necessity (see: Elon Musk, Adam Neumann, Steve Jobs). There's an attitude (usually explicit, but…

Right, but a professor specifically is someone who in most instances can at best be said to have once done some research before graduating into managing researchers (grad students). It's like saying "programmers don't behave like _____, based on my experience with mid-level managers in technical organizations."

Re: Researchers and Founders

#89

Post by locacorten »

Sam, I know that you now spent a couple of months with researchers, and thus can write "deep" articles on researchers vs. founders now. Everyone knows that the best kind of researchers in the world are all at OpenAI now, and that gives you a chance to observe them.

On a serious note, I beg you to write about things other than research and researchers. Leave them alone, outside of the media spotlight and your writings. You see the media and its spotlight have a tendency to disrupt and destroy value. If you truly want do good, leave them alone. Please.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#90

Post by GuiA »

lazyjeff wrote: post #56
bonoboTP wrote: post #34

This post would not survive blind review, though. The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision. Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

That's pretty harsh, maybe because the expectations are unfairly high for Sam. It's just someone writing on their blog some thoughts they had, so maybe we should treat it like that. But for some constructive criticism, there are some actual topics I'd be interested in hearing discussion about, on researchers vs founders. I've been a bit of both, and I'd say the more practical similarities are: - "unlimited" freedom t…

> It's just someone writing on their blog some thoughts they had, so maybe we should treat it like that.

I don’t disagree, we should all be kind.

That said, this post gets voted to the top because it has (samaltman.com) next to it. If it had (jonnybeeble.blogspot.com), it’d get maybe a few upvotes and comments and that’d be that. But here it immediately gets upvoted to the front page, therefore receiving intensive scrutiny, and here we are at 80+ comments all kind of saying the same thing.

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