Just 10 years ago the dominant message was, startups today are lucky that they are easy and cheap to spin up. It makes testing hypothesis easy. That brought in

Just 10 years ago the dominant message was, startups today are lucky that they are easy and cheap to spin up. It makes testing hypothesis easy. That brought in a flood of small angel and seed investors with thousands of bonkers ideas. When I think of hard startups, I think of FitBit, GoPro, or even Oculus. Yet, all those companies did was prove that people want fitness trackers or smart cameras, or screens wrapped around eyes. Those companies early employees were all specialized PhD employees with very specific skill-sets. You aren't going to go to an 8 week bootcamp and come out able to contribute meaningful to the research needed to pull off those products. Sam is right, yes, you will have an enthusiastic group of people knocking on the door to work there, but the bar is exceptionally high to hire the people you need to be successful. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, AMD, Nvidia, etc, they are all paying top salaries with great perks to work on hard problems with the resources to be successful. Want to build custom servers, Amazon has a dedicated Gravitron engineering team and internal customers salivating at deploying them. Microsoft is currently already shipping AR glasses with a cohort of trained developers already able to write software for them. Apple, well, there's a rumor they are building an ARM laptop, and we know only Apple will be able to shift the industry in that direction. No hard startup could do that. On and on... Anyway, not trying to be cynical, but I do think the problem is deeper and VCs will need to give huge initial rounds, with really long several years runways, just to bring in the talent needed to compete against the established players. Then, these hard startups need to be prepared for the sea of copycats who will swoop in for free after all the hard research was done. Another example of what I mean by huge rounds: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/23/rivian-adds-1-3-billion-in-funding-for-its-electric-utility-and-adventure-vehicles/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/23/rivian-adds-1-3-billion-in...