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It's hard for me to find a startup that is NOT boring (When did you hear about a startup that does a meaningful R&D?) The easiest one are B2C: 1) Amazon - se
by streetcat1 7y ago
It's hard for me to find a startup that is NOT boring
(When did you hear about a startup that does a meaningful R&D?)
The easiest one are B2C:
1) Amazon - selling books.
2) Air B&B - renting rooms.
3) Uber - renting cars (advanced taxi).
4) Facebook - a database (My SQL) for Social Network.
But even "hard" tech startup:
1) Google - research done at Stanford.
2) Databricks - research done at Berkley.
3) Microsoft - No research at all, founders drop from
college, Selling interpreters.
5) AWS - Research done at Cornell. Selling VM
6) VMWare - research done at Stanford.
Only today, we see startups (e.g. Cruise) that are trying to tackle autonomous driving, which is still an R&D problem, and see where they are.
As for being successful.
There are two risks in a startup - execution risk and market risk.
With boring, you take out execution risk.
For market risk, the main thing is timing (I.e. most of the market risk is outside your control).
You must be in the right market, at exactly the right time.
Hence you must start the project 2 years in advance and hope that the market will become "hot" when you finish.
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoIn fact doing meaningful research is an anti-pattern if you want to get hyperscale growth. R&D startups have proven that the only thing in their future is an acquisition (using Cruise as your example).
- aaavl2821 7y agoThere are about 40-50 biotech startup IPOs every year. $14B was invested in biotech startups last year and ~75% of that goes to r&d
- DataWorker 7y agoFirst point is what makes China so strong.
- EthanHeilman 7y agoBiotech or fusion energy startups generally require a serious R&D investment whereas a social media webapp does not. MySpace isn't a good model to use for the next Fairchild Semiconductor.
- AndrewKemendo 7y agoI don't even place the former two in the same category of startup as software startups. Again, if we define startup as "Growing company in search of a business model" then fusion energy falls completely outside of that. You don't get "hyperscale" growth with science (biotech) or infrastructure projects (fusion energy). I'm unaware of any biotech startups that have grown to hyperscale. Genentech is the only giant biotech company I'm aware of and it was started 40 years ago and acquired before any kind of hyperscaling like you see with software startups.
- fuzzfactor 7y agoI think the outcome for Packard & Hewlett would have been much different if they had not put so much effort into meaningful R & D. Once you get that much going on, nobody can launch it all anyway. If you could, Thos Edison's lab or Bell Labs would have probably scaled most hyperly themselves. As a technology marketer, I think you should have much more technology that you are not selling compared to what you are promising to deliver. Even better if you can just keep the technology coming to delight customers more so as you go along. Sometimes a highly scaled startup seems to define itself as an unsolved problem where there is exponential uptake begging for a solution. If someone can figure it out.
- EthanHeilman 7y agoNot sure what hyperscale qualifies as. I do agree that companies which are only building a webapp or mobile app can scale and grow in a very different way than companies that need to build infrastructure. >I'm unaware of any biotech startups that have grown to hyperscale. Genzyme[0] comes to mind, founded in 1981, went public in 1986 (raising 28.2 million [1]). It was acquiring other companies, building manufacturing plants at a pretty fast pace. Not sure if you would call it hyperscale. What do you think about companies like spacex or tesla which are science heavy? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genzyme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genzyme [1]: http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/genzyme-corporation-history/ http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/genzyme-cor...
- seem_2211 7y agoI don't think most technical startups are that interesting (especially as a non technical person) in a pure 'solving the problem' way. What makes it interesting is all of the real world variables that come with it. Admittedly I'm not personally a technical person (I studied marketing and now work in sales), but as an example, just as I find it more interesting to work on the creation and process of making real world advertising than it is to do pure academic 'marketing' research. Patrick McKenzie has an interesting bit on how running a software company is something like 90% not coding. That's where the interesting bit comes in, the actual business that surrounds it all. But I think it all ultimately comes down to how are personally wired. Some people prefer working on pushing the limits of theory, others work on practical application, and some people work in the middle somewhere. All are good!