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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

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?
- tucaz 7y ago
  I know nothing about businesses like these, but I assume that the people who need to be engaged with the idea and work know that things come at a slow pace and are fine with it. It's different than getting someone who wants to see results every day. In that type of work, progress is measured differently.
- FiatLuxDave 7y ago
  That's a good question. My first thought was, "We didn't". But that's really just pessimistic memories speaking. My second thought was, "A perpetual state of stress and fear!". Also pessimistic memories, but closer to the truth. In reality, we had initial seed funding for about a year. We had a number of goals we had established, including vacuum chamber, getting the ion source running, first beam, first neutrons. We fell way behind in the first six months because I made the stupid decision to try to build a duoplasmatron ion source to save money. This cost us about 4 months to make a shitty ion source that was full of leaks and barely usable. Luckily the experienced electrical engineer came up with an RF ion source bought used that did the job well enough. We actually ended up meeting all of our 1st year goals in just over a year if I recall correctly. By that time the money was running out, so DFJ basically extended the funding by issuing us convertible debt in 3 month increments. Every three months we would have a set of goals mutually agreed upon by the board, which was two of us and Tim Draper. This was pretty stressful for us, as we were living paycheck to paycheck and we had no idea if we didn't meet a goal if Draper would pull the plug. Tim was never anything but supportive but we understood the point of milestones. That is also when things got technically difficult, as everything we had done before was using existing techniques but when we went off-the-map things slowed down a lot. That went on for about 3 years. Basically the same dynamic as software guys tend to see in the classic death-march sprint. I blame leadership (myself). Eventually we ran up against some hard limits that wouldn't work with our design. We faced a choice between making an expensive bet on a supersized ion source (an inelegant brute force solution, which I know now would not have worked) or a new risky design (which also would not have worked). Tim was in favor of the brute force design, because he saw that as money being the barrier. I had my doubts about the brute force design, and I didn't want to waste the money on something that would only fix one of the 3 major problems we faced. I tried building the long-shot design. Then a piece of plastic got into the main turbopump and it ate itself. The 2000 market crash happened. Everything fell apart.

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?

tucaz 7y ago
I know nothing about businesses like these, but I assume that the people who need to be engaged with the idea and work know that things come at a slow pace and are fine with it. It's different than getting someone who wants to see results every day. In that type of work, progress is measured differently.
FiatLuxDave 7y ago
That's a good question. My first thought was, "We didn't". But that's really just pessimistic memories speaking. My second thought was, "A perpetual state of stress and fear!". Also pessimistic memories, but closer to the truth. In reality, we had initial seed funding for about a year. We had a number of goals we had established, including vacuum chamber, getting the ion source running, first beam, first neutrons. We fell way behind in the first six months because I made the stupid decision to try to build a duoplasmatron ion source to save money. This cost us about 4 months to make a shitty ion source that was full of leaks and barely usable. Luckily the experienced electrical engineer came up with an RF ion source bought used that did the job well enough. We actually ended up meeting all of our 1st year goals in just over a year if I recall correctly. By that time the money was running out, so DFJ basically extended the funding by issuing us convertible debt in 3 month increments. Every three months we would have a set of goals mutually agreed upon by the board, which was two of us and Tim Draper. This was pretty stressful for us, as we were living paycheck to paycheck and we had no idea if we didn't meet a goal if Draper would pull the plug. Tim was never anything but supportive but we understood the point of milestones. That is also when things got technically difficult, as everything we had done before was using existing techniques but when we went off-the-map things slowed down a lot. That went on for about 3 years. Basically the same dynamic as software guys tend to see in the classic death-march sprint. I blame leadership (myself). Eventually we ran up against some hard limits that wouldn't work with our design. We faced a choice between making an expensive bet on a supersized ion source (an inelegant brute force solution, which I know now would not have worked) or a new risky design (which also would not have worked). Tim was in favor of the brute force design, because he saw that as money being the barrier. I had my doubts about the brute force design, and I didn't want to waste the money on something that would only fix one of the 3 major problems we faced. I tried building the long-shot design. Then a piece of plastic got into the main turbopump and it ate itself. The 2000 market crash happened. Everything fell apart.