13 ms·

Researchers and Founders

242 points by dmnd 6y ago

cossatot 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
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- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
    > 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.
- paultopia 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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
    - paultopia 6y ago
      Hah, funny, but not quite fair---if by customers we mean students, most academics quite like the students and teaching them---and many (myself included) think that the grading part actually harms the students.
- m-ee 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
ejo0 6y ago
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-Hughes/dp/022604551X https://www.amazon.com/Genentech-Beginnings-Sally-Smith-Hugh...)
underdeserver 6y ago
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-ideas-seriously https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-ide...
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- lisper 6y ago
  > 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.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
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hypewatch 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
  - pouta 6y ago
    What does "attack" in this context supposed to mean?
    - wenc 6y ago
      A potential approach for tackling the problem that may work.
    - wsxcde 6y ago
      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 6y ago
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.
dekhn 6y ago
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.
Tarrosion 6y ago
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 6y ago
  It's an expression, generally used to convey exactly what you said.
- arikr 6y ago
  No. It seems clear to me he's talking about the best people in those groups from the perspective of their work output.
  - jononor 6y ago
    Work output as in financial success/reward, prestige or impact, or something else?
- thrawnaway 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
Frost1x 6y ago
>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.
- robocat 6y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
- vikramkr 6y ago
  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.
liambuchanan 6y ago
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.
- burrows 6y ago
  You’re a wimp.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  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.
mkagenius 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
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).
bonoboTP 6y ago
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...).
- yt-sdb 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.
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- abnercoimbre 6y ago
  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/ https://www.darkpatterns.org/
  - derekdahmer 6y ago
    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.
vzidex 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  > 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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
Previous discussion of the “Hamming question” that Sam referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349
wyc 6y ago
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.
lifeslogit 6y ago
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.
sjg007 6y ago
I am curious about the differences he observed between these two groups.
some_furry 6y ago
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.
zuhayeer 6y ago
Related: PG’s essay on Design and Research http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html
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pplonski86 6y ago
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
locacorten 6y ago
Sam, I know that you now spent a couple of months with researchers, and thus can write "deep" articles on researchers vs. founders now. Everyone knows that the best kind of researchers in the world are all at OpenAI now, and that gives you a chance to observe them. On a serious note, I beg you to write about things other than research and researchers. Leave them alone, outside of the media spotlight and your writings. You see the media and its spotlight have a tendency to disrupt and destroy value. If you truly want do good, leave them alone. Please.
gavriel 6y ago
The only time you should take advice from Sam "failed his way to the top" Altman is if you want to either join or be invested by YCombinator. Really makes you wonder what dirt does this guy have on PG to have him made president without any accomplishments.
m0zg 6y ago
I had the opposite experience pretty much. I've worked with researchers quite extensively, and they nearly universally have one massive weakness: they have a hard time committing to any kind of a product plan. They are great at throwing a bowl of spaghetti at the wall in creative ways, and at determining whether any of it stuck, but beyond that - caveat emptor, you better have a great technologist with product chops on board or you'll be stuck repeatedly throwing spaghetti until money runs out.
itsmefaz 6y ago
John Schulman's article provides better practical insights than the one Sam has authored himself. So, people looking for more concrete views and pieces of advice I'd suggest taking a look at the John Schulman article: http://joschu.net/blog/opinionated-guide-ml-research.html http://joschu.net/blog/opinionated-guide-ml-research.html
oklol123 6y ago
Reading all these comments makes my tummy grumble

242 points by dmnd 6y ago

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.

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toomuchtodo 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
  > 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.
paultopia 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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
  - paultopia 6y ago
    Hah, funny, but not quite fair---if by customers we mean students, most academics quite like the students and teaching them---and many (myself included) think that the grading part actually harms the students.
m-ee 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

ejo0 6y ago

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-Hughes/dp/022604551X https://www.amazon.com/Genentech-Beginnings-Sally-Smith-Hugh...)

underdeserver 6y ago

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-ideas-seriously https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-ide...

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lisper 6y ago
> 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.
vikramkr 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.

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hypewatch 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
- pouta 6y ago
  What does "attack" in this context supposed to mean?
  - wenc 6y ago
    A potential approach for tackling the problem that may work.
  - wsxcde 6y ago
    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 6y ago

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.

dekhn 6y ago

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.

Tarrosion 6y ago

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 6y ago
It's an expression, generally used to convey exactly what you said.
arikr 6y ago
No. It seems clear to me he's talking about the best people in those groups from the perspective of their work output.
- jononor 6y ago
  Work output as in financial success/reward, prestige or impact, or something else?
thrawnaway 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago

Frost1x 6y ago

>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.

robocat 6y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
vikramkr 6y ago
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.

liambuchanan 6y ago

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.

burrows 6y ago
You’re a wimp.
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
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.

mkagenius 6y ago

> 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 6y ago

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).

bonoboTP 6y ago

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...).

yt-sdb 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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.
  - deleted 6y ago
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abnercoimbre 6y ago
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/ https://www.darkpatterns.org/
- derekdahmer 6y ago
  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.

vzidex 6y ago

> 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 6y ago
> 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 6y ago
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 6y ago

Previous discussion of the “Hamming question” that Sam referenced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349

wyc 6y ago

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.

lifeslogit 6y ago

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.

sjg007 6y ago

I am curious about the differences he observed between these two groups.

some_furry 6y ago

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.

zuhayeer 6y ago

Related: PG’s essay on Design and Research http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html

deleted 6y ago

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pplonski86 6y ago

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

locacorten 6y ago

Sam, I know that you now spent a couple of months with researchers, and thus can write "deep" articles on researchers vs. founders now. Everyone knows that the best kind of researchers in the world are all at OpenAI now, and that gives you a chance to observe them. On a serious note, I beg you to write about things other than research and researchers. Leave them alone, outside of the media spotlight and your writings. You see the media and its spotlight have a tendency to disrupt and destroy value. If you truly want do good, leave them alone. Please.

gavriel 6y ago

The only time you should take advice from Sam "failed his way to the top" Altman is if you want to either join or be invested by YCombinator. Really makes you wonder what dirt does this guy have on PG to have him made president without any accomplishments.

m0zg 6y ago

I had the opposite experience pretty much. I've worked with researchers quite extensively, and they nearly universally have one massive weakness: they have a hard time committing to any kind of a product plan. They are great at throwing a bowl of spaghetti at the wall in creative ways, and at determining whether any of it stuck, but beyond that - caveat emptor, you better have a great technologist with product chops on board or you'll be stuck repeatedly throwing spaghetti until money runs out.

itsmefaz 6y ago

John Schulman's article provides better practical insights than the one Sam has authored himself. So, people looking for more concrete views and pieces of advice I'd suggest taking a look at the John Schulman article: http://joschu.net/blog/opinionated-guide-ml-research.html http://joschu.net/blog/opinionated-guide-ml-research.html

oklol123 6y ago

Reading all these comments makes my tummy grumble