[HN Gopher] Researchers and Founders
___________________________________________________________________
Researchers and Founders
Author : dmnd
Score : 181 points
Date : 2020-06-19 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.samaltman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.samaltman.com)
| ejo0 wrote:
| I agree with this, definitely have seen this with the culture of
| the early R&D team at Genentech, where a number of the early
| employees had these attributes right from the beginning. I have
| reread the book below numerous times, which I recommend, which
| discuss the dual nature for being both a founder & researcher,
| having an incredible long-term vision that seems to be almost
| impossible, but remaining very focused in the short term.
| "Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Synthesis)" by Sally Smith
| Hughes (https://www.amazon.com/Genentech-Beginnings-Sally-Smith-
| Hugh...)
| underdeserver wrote:
| I wonder what these differing qualities are, then.
|
| It sounds very generic, but I've found it to be true. If I spend
| time thinking about what's the best way forward, then just do it,
| relentlessly and persistently, and with a healthy disregard for
| cynicism and disbelief from others, I get a lot done.
|
| It also reminds me of the concept of "taking ideas seriously":
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-ide...
| [deleted]
| vikramkr wrote:
| In the link you posted, there's a disclaimer that the author no
| longer endorses the post. Do you know why/is there an updated
| post from the author? I'm curious what changed in the author's
| thinking and what particularly they no longer agree with.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I just noticed that too. No idea.
|
| I also disagree with a lot of how the idea is presented in
| that text, but the idea itself - that if you get convinced of
| a basic point, you should extract the second, third, fourth
| and fifth order effect of that idea - is profound.
|
| It reminds me of a story of a startup that did cybersecurity
| for SCADA systems, for factories. They would connect to
| diagnostics APIs, do anomaly detection, and could then alert
| on any cyber attacks.
|
| Turns out factories are _extremely_ sensitive to downtime
| (millions lost per hour of downtime), and a lot of them
| operate under "if it works don't touch it". So they pivoted
| - instead of actively tapping APIs, they would passively
| sniff network traffic, draw a picture of the network and what
| talked to what, and do anomaly detection on that.
|
| But reality took the passivity idea seriously - and the value
| to factory operators ended up being visibility into the
| network topology. The company pivoted away from cybersecurity
| and into analytics and made a lot of money.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I wondered if maybe he'd posted something else in the blog
| and I think I found it. Something about bad style, too few
| details, and something about contributing to bad norms?
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QePFiEKZ4R2KnxMkW/posts-i-
| re...
|
| ""Taking Ideas Seriously": Stylistically contemptible,
| skimpy on any useful details, contributes to norm of
| pressuring people into double binds that ultimately do more
| harm than good. I would prefer it if no one linked to or
| promoted "Taking Ideas Seriously"; superior alternatives
| include Anna Salamon's "Compartmentalization in epistemic
| and instrumental rationality", though I don't necessarily
| endorse that post either."
| dbt00 wrote:
| This appears to be his latest statement in that forum on that
| post.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QePFiEKZ4R2KnxMkW/posts-i-
| re...
| lisper wrote:
| > I wonder what these differing qualities are, then.
|
| The most obvious is that researchers care about finding truth
| for its own sake even if that truth doesn't have any commercial
| value, and founders care about producing a product for a
| market, even if that means ignoring some truths.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| 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...).
| [deleted]
| vikramkr wrote:
| 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?
| ScottBurson wrote:
| Yes, this is what I was hoping the post would be about.
| [deleted]
| hellofunk wrote:
| I think it's common among many founders who became very
| successful for them to assume they have a special and deeper
| insight into how the universe works.
| closeparen wrote:
| How would you check whether someone has special and deep
| insight into how the universe works? Making a lot of correct
| predictions seems like some of the best evidence available.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Making accurate, specific and surprising predictions.
| hellofunk wrote:
| Many people have accurate predictions, it's not so unusual.
| But not everyone has the ambition or circumstance to do
| anything about it (or even the desire). Being a successful
| founder is not always about anything other than an
| orthogonal motivation separate from intuition.
|
| And how do you factor all the predictions that were
| incorrect? The success to failure ratio of a well-known
| founder is not necessarily any different than many
| "average" people, it's just been scaled up out of their own
| interests, and thus more visible.
|
| Some people relish their position in the world as more than
| it is, that's all I'm saying, when in reality it is usually
| from factors beyond simple wisdom.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Being the CEO of Ycombinator, the business consulting firm,
| would give him very special insights into the industry, as
| many new companies would come straight to Ycombinator,
| looking for advice. Altman was in a good position to study
| the whole industry.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| You're saying he has special access to data, but it
| doesn't _necessarily_ follow that he has special insight
| based on that data. That said, Sam is a smart guy, so he
| probably does have some special insight - but it 's not
| immediately obvious and this is hardly an evidence-based
| argument.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Sam Altman's mind will never be beyond doubt. It's in his
| skull, so we can never know it. I'm just focusing on the
| concrete, observable details. I'll let the psychologists
| argue about Altman's mind.
| eanzenberg wrote:
| VCs, too. Interesting how researchers are a bit more humble
| or realistic about achievements.
| pphysch wrote:
| A mathematician once said something like, "if the solution
| to the problem in front of you is not obvious, then you are
| not yet ready to work on it".
|
| Which is to say that intellectual pioneers are often
| necessarily humble about their achievements, yet worked
| very hard to get there.
|
| One wonders if it might be the opposite for some founders
| who were in the right place at the right time to hit the
| VC/acquisition jackpot.
| randomsearch wrote:
| This is entirely inaccurate. Researchers are not as you
| describe at all, at least those who become professors. They
| are exactly the same.
| garmaine wrote:
| Why do you think "researchers" meant professors? That
| seems like a leap.
| solumos wrote:
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| This is an interesting point. Why _does_ it feel like these
| blogs are getting shallower? For PG, more of his older blog
| posts were more interesting than his newer ones, with more
| concreteness in advice and experiences. The latest ones seem
| more observational of trends instead, which can be more vague
| in nature.
| GuiA wrote:
| Because they're getting further and further away from their
| maker/hacker roots, and are now fully in the
| investor/politician/executive role. Two very different kinds
| of thinking and seeing the world, and the former typically
| have a strong dislike for the thinking/operating style of the
| latter.
| yt-sdb wrote:
| Right? Feels like an absurdly low-effort attempt at "thought
| leadership" with easily made connections to recently popular
| topics like Hamming and that ML guide. As a researcher, I have
| also thought about the similarities between starting a lab /
| research agenda and a startup, but this is a superficial
| analysis.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> As a researcher, I have also thought about the
| similarities between starting a lab / research agenda and a
| startup, but this is a superficial analysis._
|
| Yeah, academic research labs are strikingly similar to seed-
| stage start-ups (mid six/low seven annual burn for 3-20
| employees laser focused on a particular vision). It's not at
| all surprising that the two career tracks attract similar
| types of people.
| some_furry wrote:
| If it weren't Sam Altman who published this article, it
| probably never would have made the HN front page. (None of my
| blog posts have done so, and I can say with confidence that my
| worst blog posts are still more fleshed out than this post.)
|
| Sam, if you're reading this and want to challenge my
| hypothesis, all you need to do is make a pen name and register
| a domain name to go with it, then publish your next post of the
| same caliber under that persona and see how well it sinks/swims
| on HN.
| lazyjeff wrote:
| 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 to work on what you think is important,
| usually in something you think is different, but with a
| existential constraint. For founders, it's the business model
| -- your pitch deck needs a convincing business model to survive
| regardless of the product (which is what a lot of founders
| really care about). Whereas in research, you need a long-term
| vision that is attracting to funding to survive, which can be a
| deep expertise in something societally-relevant, or evidence of
| success in doing something novel
|
| - the game: there's sort of a game to play for both. With
| startups, there's the optimization of MAUs and acting like a
| startup and growing fast; there's the established ways of
| getting funding from angel investment to series of investments,
| attorneys and payments, and then different ways to exit. For
| research, there's the game of publishing, annual cycles of
| recruiting great students and advising, reputation and finding
| your niche, and the academic system in general.
|
| - management: on both cases you're managing a small team,
| usually under 50 people, so small enough that you know everyone
| and can be a bit involved in what they're doing, but big enough
| that you need a bit of hierarchy.
|
| There's also some major differences:
|
| - Equity vs reputation. Early startup employees work for less
| pay (moreso in the past) for the chance their equity will be
| highly valuable. Early stage researchers (PhD students or
| Postdocs) work for less pay for the chance to discover/invent
| something amazing to become a tenured professor or leading
| scientist.
|
| - Formal mentorship credit: researchers get credit for being
| mentors for people that leave and do well later. PhD students
| are partly known for who their advisor is. When a student does
| well at an institution and goes to another one, the first
| institution is acknowledged indefinitely. Papers credit the
| authors as well as the institution before a single line of
| text. In startups, when someone amazing leaves it's a major
| negative thing. When someone says "GreatProgrammer was
| previously at Foo startup with HappyCTO" there isn't that same
| admiration for Foo startup or HappyCTO as if you say
| "GreatResearcher did their PhD at Foo University in Professor
| Happy's lab."
| alexashka wrote:
| 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 filming shit
| (Casey Neistat being the first I believe), but I think I've
| figured it out.
|
| It's like having an internet friend - if they _like_ you, it no
| longer matters what you do, the same way you aren 't having
| deep conversations with your friends, you're just 'hanging
| out'.
|
| Sam Altman is doing the daily video version of hanging out,
| except he does it in blog format because he's an 'intellectual'
| or maybe just camera shy and the frequency seems to be a week
| or two apart.
|
| It used to be that people would actually provide some value - a
| blog would at least aggregate interesting news stories (Daring
| Fireball) and provide some insight, but people have realized
| that doing all that work of actually reading, thinking and
| providing insight, is optional - you just need others to want
| to consume whatever you're providing and the bar has turned out
| to be far lower than any intelligent person can readily
| comprehend.
|
| There's also a great deal of 'ignorance is bliss' when it comes
| to people like Paul Graham. His posts on Twitter strike me as
| him sharing what he considers to be insightful or interesting.
| It's revealing that rather than actually studying people who've
| come before him and devoted their life to contemplation, he's
| perfectly content to have 'insights' about his children's
| latest quip. You can't fault someone for it and I don't think
| Paul has ever claimed to be an intellectual, so it is perfectly
| good that he gets to have his simple fun of re-discovering the
| tried and true, rather than working hard on attempting to
| discover the novel. It's when he generalizes his personal
| little joys into theories about the rest of the world without
| any felt need for diligence (besides editing) or response to
| feedback, that his simple-mindedness is revealed and catches
| people who haven't lived a while, off-guard. Sam Altman may
| fall into this category.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > 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.
| rytill wrote:
| I think I know what you mean, but what do you mean by "sub-
| anecdote"? Pure curiosity.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> this post would not survive blind review_
|
| If I wrote a post like this, people would very reasonably
| wonder what sort of experience I had informing these
| generalizations. Sam's background is very relevant for figuring
| out whether his thoughts are worth paying attention to here.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| On the blog I can't even properly query who the author is!
| Clicking on the Twitter button triggers a weird referral that
| requires me to login? I'm inclined to submit this as a dark
| pattern [0].
|
| [0] https://www.darkpatterns.org/
| derekdahmer wrote:
| Sam's name is the heading of the page, in the title and the
| domain name. The blog doesn't have an about page.
|
| Twitter is asking you to login because you clicked the
| "tweet" button to post a tweet linking the article and
| tweeting requires a twitter account.
|
| Sam Altman is the former president of YC.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| I _was_ inquiring about an About page; of course the name
| is visible.
|
| The Tweet button says "Follow @sama" which isn't about
| tweeting. The convention is to link to
| https://twitter.com/sama and not to ask you to log in.
|
| I'm happy to know who he is now.
| Isamu wrote:
| But a surprisingly common alternative view is: it's all about
| BORN TALENT, no amount of work will help you if you are not
| anointed.
|
| Personally I find the born talent view to be lazy and not a
| little bit creepy.
| some_furry wrote:
| I have a relevant anecdote for this!
|
| I was placed into the "gifted" program in the 1st grade of
| elementary school and told for many years that I was somehow
| special or "very" intelligent.
|
| I never believed them, of course, because of two
| observations:
|
| 1. The adults who were telling me this did a lot of stupid
| stuff, which undermined the credibility of their claims.
|
| 2. Despite their best efforts to insulate us from the normal
| students, I knew people my age outside of the gifted program
| who were as clever -- if not even more so -- than my so-
| called "gifted" peers.
|
| As an adult, I'm glad I never bought their hype. It's a one-
| way high-speed trip to narcissism, laziness, entitlement, and
| creepiness.
| Frost1x wrote:
| >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.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| 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.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I'll second that. In my anecdotal and limited experience, the
| outliers in successful entrepreneurship are the ones that
| project vulnerability/self-doubt, while the outliers in
| successful research are the ones that project a lack of self-
| doubt and create reality distortion fields around their work.
| The best of both seem to have self-confidence in their ability
| to succeed, and successful researchers seem confident that
| problems can be solved, and that they can solve them, but that
| seems to come with an embrace of uncertainty and an allowance
| for self doubt.
| choppaface wrote:
| Perhaps the idea is self-belief is more "I think I can get it
| done" versus "I think I'm right." A lot of good researchers
| will fail every which way very quickly until finally getting
| somewhere that once looked impossible.
|
| In research, this process is usually a personal one (perhaps
| with a lot of discussion). But in industry, a CEO is giving
| orders and dragging a lot of people along with what feels
| wrong, and the CEO isn't in a position to show deep self-doubt
| if it exists.
|
| Not sure here about the message, but am sure the wording as Sam
| has chosen is very poor.
| robocat wrote:
| I love this quote from Jim Keller:
|
| "I imagine 99% of your thought process is protecting your self-
| conception, and 98% of that is wrong."
|
| Quote is at @1:23 (during the last half hour where the
| interview is mostly philosophical) of
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
| sjg007 wrote:
| I am curious about the differences he observed between these two
| groups.
| dekhn wrote:
| I would have thought this was obvious- the archetype in Silicon
| Valley would be Fred Terman, but there are a lot of others. In
| particular, Arnold Beckman, who was an intern at Bell Labs where
| he learned to make vacuum tube amplifiers, moved to Caltech to be
| a professor and founded the amazingly successful Beckman
| Instruments company, invented the pH meter (which used a vacuum
| tube amplifier to turn the tiny signal into a useful one) and the
| DU spectrometer. He used his proceeds to fund the first
| transistor company in Silicon Valley, and made huge contributions
| to the US war effort.
|
| I've worked with researcher/founders a lot; many of the people
| from my PhD program (Biophysics, UCSF) went on to start companies
| (Amyris, Zymergen) and we had strong educational pathways to
| learn how to start biotech companies. The two groups of people
| are definitely drawn from a highly overlapping distribution,
| although many scientists would make poor founders, and vice
| versa.
| [deleted]
| wyc wrote:
| I had to make the decision whether to start companies or pursue a
| career in research, and chose the former. I think I would've been
| happy with either. The thing I enjoy about both is that there are
| rarely closed-form solutions, as the problems are mostly open-
| ended in nature. This in turn has the potential to grant you
| absolute freedom to pursue what best matches your interests and
| values, even as they evolve. You just have to be okay with risk
| and uncertainty in the pursuit of what is interesting.
| liambuchanan wrote:
| 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.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| They are rare, friend. Most people havent grown up enough to be
| able to work on important problems, though they can be trained.
| Could you handle it, if you saw your best friend get struck by
| an explosive harpoon, fall into the ocean, drowning and
| bleeding to death in front of your very eyes? What about a mile
| long stretch of highway, almost a thousand charred bodies, dead
| or screaming in the middle of the night? How about watching an
| elderly woman waste away into nothing as her "caretakers"
| starve her to death? Can you really trust yourself to watch
| over millions of dollars for decades without stealing a little
| off the top? Are you ready for the feelings of loneliness and
| isolation that can occur when youre the only person who's
| willing or able to do the work?
|
| I mean, youre always welcome to give it a shot if you think
| youre so good. I can guarantee though that the results will
| surprise you. Most people cant even handle raising a child, the
| most important work there is.
| burrows wrote:
| You're a wimp.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Related: PG's essay on Design and Research
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html
| mkagenius wrote:
| > They are extremely persistent and willing to work hard.
|
| I think it might be important to quantify these terms, but then I
| think it is pretty hard to do so. If I worked on some idea for 2
| months, then am I persistent enough? And if I worked on it 10
| hours a day, have I worked hard enough?
|
| I guess, you just know it when you work hard or are persistent
| enough, but sometimes you dont know and you are hurting inside
| that you are not working hard enough or being persistent enough
| as you don't see any success
| skosuri wrote:
| 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).
| some_furry wrote:
| This article seems a little half-baked to me, like it's missing
| the great insight that ties these seemingly random observations
| together and then a conclusion.
|
| Instead, it just kinda stops abruptly.
| vzidex wrote:
| > They are creative idea-generators--a lot of the ideas may be
| terrible, but there is never a shortage.
|
| I feel like I almost never have creative ideas - the entirety of
| my (short) engineering career has been spent working on school
| projects, contributing to a design team, or set projects at work.
|
| Am I screwed if I want to be successful as a computer engineer?
| (specifically hardware)
| war1025 wrote:
| > Am I screwed if I want to be successful as a computer
| engineer?
|
| Being able to do the work is really all it takes to be
| "successful" in the sense that you can support yourself and pay
| the bills.
|
| Beyond that, it really depends on what your definition of
| "success" is. One of the biggest realizations on the path to
| maturity is that "success" has a different definition for
| basically every individual.
| switz wrote:
| Absolutely not -- in fact, being self-aware of your
| deficiencies is hugely important. You should find people that
| compliment your skillset. Not everyone needs to be a creative
| firehose. If you're capable of understanding and implementing
| other people's visions, you'll find a lot of success in almost
| any industry.
|
| But also keep in mind -- creativity is a muscle that can be
| flexed. Don't sell yourself short. Work on it.
| divbzero wrote:
| Previous discussion of the "Hamming question" that Sam
| referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349
| [deleted]
| pplonski86 wrote:
| The title could be: Researchers and Founders and Mothers. I think
| mothers have a lot in common with successful researchers and
| founders. They are laser focused on tasks (can do many in
| paralell) and have long term vision (a family). Although mothers
| dont get attention and press. They are very underrated
| Tarrosion wrote:
| A small point only tangential to the main point of this post, but
| something I've noticed about Sam's writing before:
|
| Is anyone else offput by the phrase "best people"? I get (or at
| least hope) it's a shorthand for "best at their respective job of
| researcher/founder," but it really seems to reduce people's
| innate worth and goodness to this single dimension in a somewhat
| unnerving way.
| netcan wrote:
| It's an expression, generally used to convey exactly what you
| said.
| arikr wrote:
| No. It seems clear to me he's talking about the best people in
| those groups from the perspective of their work output.
| jononor wrote:
| Work output as in financial success/reward, prestige or
| impact, or something else?
| thrawnaway wrote:
| Social status is maybe the most important thing to people after
| their basic needs are met. Having someone publicly lower your
| social status is therefore extremely painful.
|
| And it's a one-dimensional quantity, to a first approximation.
| allenu wrote:
| My issue with it is that a hand-wavy qualification that
| communicates only what you want it to mean.
|
| How does one define "best" at all in this context? If you
| devote all your efforts to researching a problem no one is
| looking at and still come up with nothing, are you still
| considered one of the "best people"? What if you are
| researching a problem many others are investigating and then do
| find something new? It feels very much like hindsight bias to
| apply such a moniker.
| indymike wrote:
| People are emotionally affected by exclusion. The phrase "the
| best people are ___" is exclusionary if you don't match the
| fill in the blank. I don't think Altman is trying to offend
| anyone. He's trying to contrast the behavior of top
| researchers/founders with everyone else...
| lifeslogit wrote:
| For a researcher, this difference can lead to deep unhappiness. I
| moved from a research-heavy institution to a founder-heavy
| culture thinking the freedom and increased salary would lead to
| improved happiness, however this was very far from the case.
| After about 1 year, my CEO began to understand the difference and
| support me, however, the time and stress prior to that point was
| very difficult. It required Investor-level individuals with
| research careers to validate my perspective. Sam's post validates
| my struggle and I am happy to see it publicized by someone with
| clout. I hope more founders will begin to give researchers a bit
| more room and support.
| cossatot wrote:
| 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.
| paultopia wrote:
| 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 bureaucratic organizations
| (faculty meetings/service and grant writing. The third,
| incidentally, is grading.)
|
| I get the sense that the work of almost all founders involves
| having to get stuff from other people lots more pervasively,
| from funding to hiring to organization building.
|
| (Different attitudes to risk might also be a part of the
| difference.)
| cossatot wrote:
| > 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_
| [deleted]
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Lack of respect for traditional authority, entrenched
| interests, and boundaries would be my take. Forgiveness >
| permission mindset, with a healthy risk tolerance above
| baseline.
|
| Founders take their research and drive towards profitable
| exploitation of that knowledge relentlessly.
| cossatot wrote:
| > Lack of respect for traditional authority, entrenched
| interests, and boundaries would be my take. Forgiveness >
| permission mindset, with a healthy risk tolerance above
| baseline.
|
| This is an interesting take. A lot of researchers are pretty
| anti-authoritarian, at least initially, and the scientific
| process involves a lot of tearing down existing knowledge and
| rebuilding. We all really, deep down want to prove everyone
| else wrong.
|
| However, when the funding comes from institutional sources,
| there are certainly limits on how rebellious one can actually
| be.
|
| Furthermore the peer review process encourages a kind of
| camaraderie and politics where you compete with each other,
| and are actively tasked with finding fault in everyone else's
| work, but you are also stuck with them for decades, so you
| don't want to screw anyone over too hard, because their turn
| to review your grant proposal will come around soon.
|
| > Founders take their research and drive towards profitable
| exploitation of that knowledge relentlessly.
|
| Yeah, this latter part is what I've never really gotten. My
| goal is always to take my research and drive relentlessly
| towards... more research. Ideally while freely disseminating
| the products and tools used so that others can do the same,
| thereby letting everyone share in the fruits of the labor.
| m-ee wrote:
| I joined a small startup headed by a former professor, financed
| by a mix of SBIR grants and seed funding, and he was really
| poorly suited to running a hardware company. The biggest gap
| was the ability to push for schedule and manufacturability vs
| perfecting one of prototypes. Sometimes you have to say "this
| solution may be better, but the tooling costs and schedule
| impacts are untenable. Run with what we have" In his mind as
| long as we had money to keep making prototypes that was what we
| should do until it was absolutely perfect, it made for a great
| demo product that had no chance of seeing the light of day at
| scale. He didn't really understand what it took to get from
| proto to EVT, investors did and they slowly faded from the
| picture.
| Frost1x wrote:
| As much time as I've also spent time in R&D through industries,
| over the years it's moved from R&d to R&D to r&D... approaching
| D. The two, IMO, are converging.
|
| There's awfully skinny budgets for most research these days and
| so much focus on 'success' (short term ROI) and '[financial]
| sustainability' (translating research into products/services in
| business form).
|
| This is growing ever more true even in basic research, which is
| IMHO absurd. It's growing to the point it might as well just be
| 'D' with higher risks, less flexibility, and lower rewards
| which is making entrepreneurship more alluring.
|
| I don't know who is going to fund long term research if the
| federal government doesn't. I suppose we can rely on the
| international market to produce research and hope it's useful.
| Businesses tend to be highly risk averse anymore.
| cossatot wrote:
| Yeah I am with you on this. In my current role, I can do R in
| as much as it links with D. But really I spend a lot of time
| building that ampersand rather than R or D specifically:
| constructing a framework to translate research results into a
| product, testing that product and then being able to guide
| the research based on the performance of the product.
|
| That is in and of itself interesting, and the work (making
| earthquake forecasts and seismic hazard/risk models) is
| generally fun and has a lot more positive human impact than
| studying earthquakes because they are simply fascinating
| geophysical phenomena. But there are regularly a lot of great
| research ideas that go unexplored because we don't have the
| resources or immediate incentive to investigate them.
| hypewatch wrote:
| I've never heard of the phrase "problem taste" until this post,
| so if Sam just coined that phrase, well done!
|
| This is such an important issue in the startup world. The most
| common mistake that founders I've worked with make is that they
| focus on the wrong problem or even worse focus on too many
| problems.
|
| Having good "problem taste" is critical for anyone who wants to
| start a successful company or publish breakthrough research.
| wenc wrote:
| I'm not sure if the phrase itself is novel. The idea of having
| good taste in problems is certainly not; and is very useful --
| Richard Hamming (cited by Sam Altman) spends a great deal of
| time talking about how to choose problems [1].
|
| The basic idea is that you need to work on an important
| problem. But an important problem isn't what you think (e.g.
| time-travel, teleportation, antigravity, etc.) -- instead it is
| a problem for which there exists an "attack".
|
| [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
| pouta wrote:
| What does "attack" in this context supposed to mean?
| wenc wrote:
| A potential approach for tackling the problem that may
| work.
| wsxcde wrote:
| 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.
| diNgUrAndI wrote:
| I like the comparison. Both types of people chase the most
| important problem.
|
| Having met people from both groups, the other word I hear a lot
| is _impact_. That 's a qualitative metric to define success.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-06-19 23:00 UTC)