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The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail. Failures that take decades doesn't work in the startup model. Image working on a f

The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail. Failures that take decades doesn't work in the startup model. Image working on a fusion reactor. It might take 25 years to fail. The failure may not be that your idea doesn't work, but because some other kind of reactor comes along that is a better business (ie, cheaper). At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. You are also now 50 years old, give or take. You don't have 25 years to work on the next hard problem. You certainly don't have time to fail again. Back in the day when lots of people worked on hard technology, they were paid well to work on the problem; their life time earnings did not depend on creating a viable business. Because of that, they usually earned a pension, too. Because if you failed, you could retire comfortably, or, at least have enough to choose a second career that didn't pay as well. That model doesn't work for startups.

shoo 7y ago
> At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. You are also now 50 years old, give or take. > Back in the day when lots of people worked on hard technology, they were paid well to work on the problem is the model closer to "tenured research scientist" rather than "startup founder or employee"?
- jedberg 7y ago
  It's 1/2 way between. Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D. You could spend years working on tech with no commercial viability as long as you could keep making better demos. You were most likely an employee with a PhD and a pension. But then wall street started demanding quarterly growth and they all cut their R&D departments. Think Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
  - aogl 7y ago
    I wonder how different interviews were back then by comparison.
    - brandmeyer 7y ago
      Reputation. Who you knew and who knew you.
      - jedberg 7y ago
        And by extension, where you got your PhD and who your advisors were and who they knew.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D. Isn't this true of many large companies today? I don't see Alphabet making any returns on X anytime soon.
beat 7y ago
Right. Which is why government research is probably a better model for these world-changing basic technologies than Silicon Valley. Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding?
- erobbins 7y ago
  which tcp/ip? There would be 10, all with incomplete feature sets and poor reliability.
  - streb-lo 7y ago
    "Here at bleh we've developed a revolutionary method for transmitting your TCP/IP packets on-chain using AI to perform network level flow control."
    - outworlder 7y ago
      The system would probably store all packets in a block chain and routing would be based on a machine learning system.
      - jerf 7y ago
        "Our router can route an astonishing 2,000 packets per second! No other router can offer you this sort of performance! Blockchain. Go ahead. Ask our competitors if they can match this. You'll find their jaw drops and that they'll tell you that this level of performance shouldn't even be possible on commodity hardware! Our experts hand-tuned the multi-billion parameter neural nets our product uses. The competition wouldn't even dream of putting neural nets of this scale into their routers. That's how far ahead we are on this. You can't get this sort of performance from anyone else in the business!" Your Email: ( ) [ Yes, contact me and tell me MORE! ]
        ignoramous 7y ago
        That made me chuckle. I cringe at exaggerated, buzz-wordy, vague sales-copy as much as the other person, but isn't it shown to work (by Apple et al)? I'd be interested if you or anyone else have examples of to-the-point landing pages / sales-copy with zero exaggeration and gimmicks. I liked the WhatsApp's back in the day [0], but they had a lot going for them and didn't need any extraordinary claims. MissiveApp [1] is another one that feels comfortable, to me. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsa... [1] https://missiveapp.com https://missiveapp.com
underbluewaters 7y ago
Sadly academia for a while now has been subject to the same short-term funding concerns as businesses but without the same flexibility and options for generating that funding.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  I was thinking the exact same thing. Research in academia, research labs, and even in some business environments used to be able to focus on and tackle big problems. These days, funding agencies/sponsors are incorporating more and more business mentality into the research process and focusing on concepts like "sustainability" etc. with short turn around. You can't expect short term results on difficult problems. If they were easy, they'd have already been solved.
luckydata 7y ago
I would replace the "startup model" with "VC funded startup".
- hinkley 7y ago
  I think the assumption in threads like this that VCs have monopolize/colonized the concept of 'startup' so thoroughly that it's the default. If we're talking about "other kinds of startups" they mean "non-VC".
FiatLuxDave 7y ago
Former fusion startup founder here. This is a very good point. My startup took 6 years to fail and much of our competition at the time is still at it 20 years later. There are a number of things which are also impedance mismatches between the typical SV startup mode and hard startups. One of these is the failure path. When an adtech startup fails, the founders just go get well-paying jobs at a FAANG, or at least that what the perception appears to be. When your fusion startup goes bust, you... get evicted and live in your car for a while. There's no on-ramp for failed founders back into the industry. Heck, if its a hard startup, there may be no industry yet to go back to. So, you have to go find something else to do to pay the bills. The personal cost of failure can be much higher than typical startups. "Our incredible journey" for hard startups is more like, "Well, none of us died". Another thing which doesn't mix well between the typical SV expectations and hard startups is that all the things which VCs think are advantages to being located in SV are generally disadvantages to people working on hard problems. Doing web software with ads? Lots of people to recruit in the Valley. Doing nuclear fusion... is there anyone doing nuclear fusion in the Valley? How do they afford to live when competing with all that cheap ad money? Perhaps I should locate on Madison Avenue, it has the same "advantages". Then there is the typical way that VCs filter, starting with step one, "Know someone who can introduce you". That's a lot easier when you are in the same location, working in similar industries. It's a poor filter when most of the people working on a problem live far away, doing stuff very different from everyone you know. There are far fewer serial entrepreneurs when the failure time is measured in decades, so networking is more difficult. I'm happy to see VCs try to return to working on hard problems. The Valley used to be good at that, before they became a center of the advertising industry. But Valley VCs need to read their history. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, New York was the center of finance and advertising. The idea that somewhere out in the wilds of California would become a center of a new industry with its own finance ecosystem was crazy. But everyone in the early Valley knew what those East Coast people were like. The Valley is now the new East Coast people, the new Madison Avenue. Doing a hard startup in the Valley now is like trying to start Intel in 1960 New York. Hard startups are hard enough, without trying to do that.
- m0zg 7y ago
  How do you maintain momentum at these kinds of time scales? When I ran engineering at a startup, I tried to structure things such that we deliver something worthwhile at some kind of predictable cadence. It's the best set-up for everyone: the employees feel like they've accomplished someting, the investors feel like there's progress being made. With software this is pretty easy to do (and even so, people often fail to do it). But with a "hard" startup the gap between concrete deliverables can be years, and while you could put together some intermediate milestones, they'd probably feel contrived. How do you keep people engaged over long timescales like that?
wwweston 7y ago
Very much agree with most of your comment, but: > At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. I strongly suspect that anyone who can become a world class tech expert to the point where they can push at the boundaries of what's possible has transferable skills. Now, that's a different statement from "can get hired on transferable skills," at least depending on the capacity of hiring insights in the industry at large. But I figure it needs to be said lest we reinforce the problem.
scottlocklin 7y ago
> The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail No, not really: you know pretty much from the outset if a venture will fail because nobody knows how to do it. Altman has staked his career on an idea that is guaranteed to fail, for example. There is no step-1 towards a definable goal. Not even sure there is a real goal! There is no example of a "hard startup" like this in the history of the human race. Only silly con valley hubris could imagine a different outcome than total failure. This sort of thing is what governments are for.
yummypaint 7y ago
This model of making incremental progress still exists, it's called research. Startups couldnt be further from the optimal tools to solve those kinds of problems. In my mind, startups are for problems that can be solved by plugging mature tech A into less mature tech B and turning the crank. If someone's first priority is to make the world a better place and expand human knowledge, they should stay away from the business world.
batmansmk 7y ago
Nintendo was selling playing cards, Facebook was a student only network, Google wanted to index the whole world, SpaceX sends rockets in space and Uber's founder wanted to get a cab. Hard or soft, there is no rule of thumb.
smacktoward 7y ago
There are some problems that just aren't amenable to the startup approach. The Manhattan Project wasn't three guys in a garage living on ramen noodles for a year. Neither was the Apollo program. Some problems just require huge amounts of people, money and time to crack -- and even then, as you correctly note, there's no guarantee you'll actually be the one to crack them. (Ask the Germans who worked on their A-bomb project, or the Russians who worked on their moon shot.) The problem is that, when you're a VC, the only model you have to apply to problems is the startup model. And when all you have is a hammer, etc.

shoo 7y ago

> At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. You are also now 50 years old, give or take. > Back in the day when lots of people worked on hard technology, they were paid well to work on the problem is the model closer to "tenured research scientist" rather than "startup founder or employee"?

jedberg 7y ago
It's 1/2 way between. Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D. You could spend years working on tech with no commercial viability as long as you could keep making better demos. You were most likely an employee with a PhD and a pension. But then wall street started demanding quarterly growth and they all cut their R&D departments. Think Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
- aogl 7y ago
  I wonder how different interviews were back then by comparison.
  - brandmeyer 7y ago
    Reputation. Who you knew and who knew you.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      And by extension, where you got your PhD and who your advisors were and who they knew.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Back in the day all the big "tech" firms had long term R&D. Isn't this true of many large companies today? I don't see Alphabet making any returns on X anytime soon.

beat 7y ago

Right. Which is why government research is probably a better model for these world-changing basic technologies than Silicon Valley. Ugh, can you imagine how bad TCP/IP would have sucked if it had been developed by venture capital funding?

erobbins 7y ago
which tcp/ip? There would be 10, all with incomplete feature sets and poor reliability.
- streb-lo 7y ago
  "Here at bleh we've developed a revolutionary method for transmitting your TCP/IP packets on-chain using AI to perform network level flow control."
  - outworlder 7y ago
    The system would probably store all packets in a block chain and routing would be based on a machine learning system.
    - jerf 7y ago
      "Our router can route an astonishing 2,000 packets per second! No other router can offer you this sort of performance! Blockchain. Go ahead. Ask our competitors if they can match this. You'll find their jaw drops and that they'll tell you that this level of performance shouldn't even be possible on commodity hardware! Our experts hand-tuned the multi-billion parameter neural nets our product uses. The competition wouldn't even dream of putting neural nets of this scale into their routers. That's how far ahead we are on this. You can't get this sort of performance from anyone else in the business!" Your Email: ( ) [ Yes, contact me and tell me MORE! ]
      - ignoramous 7y ago
        That made me chuckle. I cringe at exaggerated, buzz-wordy, vague sales-copy as much as the other person, but isn't it shown to work (by Apple et al)? I'd be interested if you or anyone else have examples of to-the-point landing pages / sales-copy with zero exaggeration and gimmicks. I liked the WhatsApp's back in the day [0], but they had a lot going for them and didn't need any extraordinary claims. MissiveApp [1] is another one that feels comfortable, to me. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsapp.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090914114259/http://www.whatsa... [1] https://missiveapp.com https://missiveapp.com

underbluewaters 7y ago

Sadly academia for a while now has been subject to the same short-term funding concerns as businesses but without the same flexibility and options for generating that funding.

Frost1x 7y ago
I was thinking the exact same thing. Research in academia, research labs, and even in some business environments used to be able to focus on and tackle big problems. These days, funding agencies/sponsors are incorporating more and more business mentality into the research process and focusing on concepts like "sustainability" etc. with short turn around. You can't expect short term results on difficult problems. If they were easy, they'd have already been solved.

luckydata 7y ago

I would replace the "startup model" with "VC funded startup".

hinkley 7y ago
I think the assumption in threads like this that VCs have monopolize/colonized the concept of 'startup' so thoroughly that it's the default. If we're talking about "other kinds of startups" they mean "non-VC".

FiatLuxDave 7y ago

Former fusion startup founder here. This is a very good point. My startup took 6 years to fail and much of our competition at the time is still at it 20 years later. There are a number of things which are also impedance mismatches between the typical SV startup mode and hard startups. One of these is the failure path. When an adtech startup fails, the founders just go get well-paying jobs at a FAANG, or at least that what the perception appears to be. When your fusion startup goes bust, you... get evicted and live in your car for a while. There's no on-ramp for failed founders back into the industry. Heck, if its a hard startup, there may be no industry yet to go back to. So, you have to go find something else to do to pay the bills. The personal cost of failure can be much higher than typical startups. "Our incredible journey" for hard startups is more like, "Well, none of us died". Another thing which doesn't mix well between the typical SV expectations and hard startups is that all the things which VCs think are advantages to being located in SV are generally disadvantages to people working on hard problems. Doing web software with ads? Lots of people to recruit in the Valley. Doing nuclear fusion... is there anyone doing nuclear fusion in the Valley? How do they afford to live when competing with all that cheap ad money? Perhaps I should locate on Madison Avenue, it has the same "advantages". Then there is the typical way that VCs filter, starting with step one, "Know someone who can introduce you". That's a lot easier when you are in the same location, working in similar industries. It's a poor filter when most of the people working on a problem live far away, doing stuff very different from everyone you know. There are far fewer serial entrepreneurs when the failure time is measured in decades, so networking is more difficult. I'm happy to see VCs try to return to working on hard problems. The Valley used to be good at that, before they became a center of the advertising industry. But Valley VCs need to read their history. In the late 1950s/early 1960s, New York was the center of finance and advertising. The idea that somewhere out in the wilds of California would become a center of a new industry with its own finance ecosystem was crazy. But everyone in the early Valley knew what those East Coast people were like. The Valley is now the new East Coast people, the new Madison Avenue. Doing a hard startup in the Valley now is like trying to start Intel in 1960 New York. Hard startups are hard enough, without trying to do that.

m0zg 7y ago
How do you maintain momentum at these kinds of time scales? When I ran engineering at a startup, I tried to structure things such that we deliver something worthwhile at some kind of predictable cadence. It's the best set-up for everyone: the employees feel like they've accomplished someting, the investors feel like there's progress being made. With software this is pretty easy to do (and even so, people often fail to do it). But with a "hard" startup the gap between concrete deliverables can be years, and while you could put together some intermediate milestones, they'd probably feel contrived. How do you keep people engaged over long timescales like that?

wwweston 7y ago

Very much agree with most of your comment, but: > At this point, you are now a world class expert at a technology that is not economically viable. But, you can't transfer that knowledge, or at least most of it. I strongly suspect that anyone who can become a world class tech expert to the point where they can push at the boundaries of what's possible has transferable skills. Now, that's a different statement from "can get hired on transferable skills," at least depending on the capacity of hiring insights in the industry at large. But I figure it needs to be said lest we reinforce the problem.

scottlocklin 7y ago

> The problem with startups building hard tech is it takes a long time to fail No, not really: you know pretty much from the outset if a venture will fail because nobody knows how to do it. Altman has staked his career on an idea that is guaranteed to fail, for example. There is no step-1 towards a definable goal. Not even sure there is a real goal! There is no example of a "hard startup" like this in the history of the human race. Only silly con valley hubris could imagine a different outcome than total failure. This sort of thing is what governments are for.

yummypaint 7y ago

This model of making incremental progress still exists, it's called research. Startups couldnt be further from the optimal tools to solve those kinds of problems. In my mind, startups are for problems that can be solved by plugging mature tech A into less mature tech B and turning the crank. If someone's first priority is to make the world a better place and expand human knowledge, they should stay away from the business world.

batmansmk 7y ago

Nintendo was selling playing cards, Facebook was a student only network, Google wanted to index the whole world, SpaceX sends rockets in space and Uber's founder wanted to get a cab. Hard or soft, there is no rule of thumb.

smacktoward 7y ago

There are some problems that just aren't amenable to the startup approach. The Manhattan Project wasn't three guys in a garage living on ramen noodles for a year. Neither was the Apollo program. Some problems just require huge amounts of people, money and time to crack -- and even then, as you correctly note, there's no guarantee you'll actually be the one to crack them. (Ask the Germans who worked on their A-bomb project, or the Russians who worked on their moon shot.) The problem is that, when you're a VC, the only model you have to apply to problems is the startup model. And when all you have is a hammer, etc.