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> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented OpenAI, Stripe,

> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented OpenAI, Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit, and many more. Interesting, comparing core scientific research and output by Bell Labs to just techi-ifying existing industries and not really adding much new value (other than OpenAI).

jrvarela56 3y ago
Funny how you just picked out OpenAI, maybe Stripe and the others create value too?
- sonicshadow 3y ago
  Naw I'm not trying to get VC funding so I don't feel like brown-nosing them too.
- adventured 3y ago
  OpenAI shook the planet with something fairly groundbreaking. It's closer to the iPhone in the rapid impact it had, moving a lot faster than the iPhone did, than the extension of a payment processor made easier (which is what Stripe is). Stripe, Airbnb, Doordash, Uber etc. They're services that add value by extending existing concepts to the Internet or in a slightly better way. There's nothing revolutionary or earth shaking about them. They're eBay, taking auctions and putting it online; it's not revolutionary, it's modestly evolutionary. They certainly add very real value (although Airbnb's value add at this point may be going backwards; most services peak in value creation at some point before heading south). The connected world took notice of GPT extremely rapidly. Only a few tech lightning strikes have been like that in the past 50 years, and only a few have moved very fast. Downplaying the dramatic impact of GPT 3 / 4 would be silly, frankly. And we're only in the first or second inning. It has set off a remarkable chain reaction that is reverberating globally. It's a eureka moment the likes of which you only see a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky.
  - jrvarela56 3y ago
    yeah sure, they just packaged Google's research and put it behind an API you can make comments like this for just about any product taken to market and downplay the value of the making it mass market, affordable, usable, etc
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    Openai hasn't really proven itself to be a profitable business so the economic research is at best incomplete. I'm sure AI has real value, but what percent of that comes from LLMs and what contribution OpenAI will wind up making to the business of AI is not very clear. I don't really think the world will be different in ten years than it would have been without openai.
    - sonicshadow 3y ago
      I would be willing to bet a lot of money that OpenAi will change the world 10 fold more than Stripe, Airbnb, and all other YC companies combined in the next 10 years
mattlondon 3y ago
Yeah I think there is a lot of sentiment that these ideas/founders are somehow unique and that if those people didn't do anything with those ideas then something like Airbnb or Reddit or Dropbox wouldn't have ever happened. I think people need to be realistic - none of those are particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact that there are countless competitors and in many cases even predecessors that were not in the right place at the right time. These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's. Great for them, but I think it is worth staying grounded and realise that they're not visionaries and had they not even been born, someone would have thought up the same idea anyway. Monkies and typewriters and all that. So maybe we'd not have "Reddit", but we'd no doubt have something largely identical that would fill that same niche. Equating any of these trivial things with something like the transistor is just absolute arrogance. </unpopular-opinion>
- fragmede 3y ago
  But by that argument, we'd no doubt still have transistors if the transistor hadn't been invented. The traitorous eight, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts shaped our world in a way that no one else could. Same with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We'd no doubt still have computers, and smartphones, but the landscape would be much different and we'd be poorer without them. The larger picture is to say that you can have an effect on the world. Even if it is just being in the right place at the right time, what you do, and how you do it matters. If Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter, there would still be a Twitter, but with less Elon Musk brand of shittery. Maybe a different brand of shittery, but it would be that other person's brand.
  - mattlondon 3y ago
    The point I was trying to make is that just ordering take out food on a computer or storing files on a computer on the network or sharing URLs and comments on a public website are not ground breaking ideas - these are trivial ideas that I am sure anyone here could have come up with. But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day. I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.
scrozier 3y ago
lol...I came to post this EXACTLY. Having been in, or on the periphery of, the startup world for a long time (ending about ten years ago), I've come to see it as pretty vapid, unimaginative, and even downright destructive. If a bunch of young-ish guys (and a few women) with elite upbringings want to have an incestuous little money party, well, good on them, I guess. But all the eloquent words trying to obscure the theme of "I want to make a whole bunch of money" is wearing thin on me.
- sonicshadow 3y ago
  I'm not in the startup world and live in a city that Silicon Valley considers "tech-adjacent". I excitedly attended a start-up event a few months ago where people pitched ideas, and I was massively disappointed by how unoriginal every single idea was. Everyone proposed creating an app that does xyz pointless service that they think will make money. I also hated how many people showed up thinking they could con some hyper-intelligent but obviously socially retarded dev to "bust out an app" for them over the weekend, presumably for free.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    I wonder if our Brightest Young Minds pursuing solely/overwhelmingly financially rewarding undertakings has anything to do with the persistence of the various "unsolvable" problems humanity constantly whines about. I suspect we will never know.
efficax 3y ago
lol, imagine telling Bill Shockley: "oh, you invented the transistor? well I built an iPhone app that dispatches a pizza order". The only thing here even close to a real invention is OpenAI and even they didn't invent the core tech (neural nets, transformers, linear regression, gpu farms) but just threw a bunch of money at applying it in a new way.
- adventured 3y ago
  You're overly downplaying the role of combination in creation, which is what most creation consists of (including inventing the transistor, although to a lesser degree). Imagine downplaying the iPhone by saying they merely combined some things that already existed, as they didn't invent most of the core tech in the first iPhone. Apple just threw a bunch of money at combining tech that already existed by that premise; and they definitely didn't invent the smartphone. And SpaceX didn't invent rocketry either. And Tesla didn't invent the electric car. It'd be absurd to downplay these things and how difficult they were to bring into routine existence. And Netscape didn't invent the Web browser, and Google didn't invent the search engine, and Amazon didn't invent ecommerce, and Atari + Nintendo didn't invent the video game, and Ford didn't invent the automobile. Impact also matters a lot more than just being first.
tom-_- 3y ago
I think people are reading this line the wrong way. The author isn't implying Instacart is as important as the transistor, that would be ludicrous. He's simply drawing an analogy between the output of laboratories like Bell Labs that produce breakthrough scientic research and "economic labs" like YC that produce breakthrough businesses. Yes, AirBNB, Instacart etc are breakthrough businesses in the sense that they disrupted long-standing and deeply entrenched business models. The ideas themselves are not extraordinary but building and scaling a business from zero often against much better financed competitors is no easy feat and takes a unique amount of persistence (and often good timing) to succeed.
xigency 3y ago
Actually seems like a prescient comparison to me. Relevant here is ‘economic research’ which is developing new methods in business, not technology. If YC isn’t a function which transforms startups, then at least it’s a transistor which amplifies VC capital.
- sonicshadow 3y ago
  Economists do ecomomic research. The founders of Stripe, Airbnb, etc are not researchers, just unrepentant opportunists.
bowsamic 3y ago
I find it quite distasteful. Founders should just admit that they want to make the next big thing that explodes into huge money, a la "The Social Network". It's sad that they feel like they have to do this self-deception to try and convince themselves they are doing something noble

jrvarela56 3y ago

Funny how you just picked out OpenAI, maybe Stripe and the others create value too?

sonicshadow 3y ago
Naw I'm not trying to get VC funding so I don't feel like brown-nosing them too.
adventured 3y ago
OpenAI shook the planet with something fairly groundbreaking. It's closer to the iPhone in the rapid impact it had, moving a lot faster than the iPhone did, than the extension of a payment processor made easier (which is what Stripe is). Stripe, Airbnb, Doordash, Uber etc. They're services that add value by extending existing concepts to the Internet or in a slightly better way. There's nothing revolutionary or earth shaking about them. They're eBay, taking auctions and putting it online; it's not revolutionary, it's modestly evolutionary. They certainly add very real value (although Airbnb's value add at this point may be going backwards; most services peak in value creation at some point before heading south). The connected world took notice of GPT extremely rapidly. Only a few tech lightning strikes have been like that in the past 50 years, and only a few have moved very fast. Downplaying the dramatic impact of GPT 3 / 4 would be silly, frankly. And we're only in the first or second inning. It has set off a remarkable chain reaction that is reverberating globally. It's a eureka moment the likes of which you only see a few times in a lifetime if you're lucky.
- jrvarela56 3y ago
  yeah sure, they just packaged Google's research and put it behind an API you can make comments like this for just about any product taken to market and downplay the value of the making it mass market, affordable, usable, etc
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Openai hasn't really proven itself to be a profitable business so the economic research is at best incomplete. I'm sure AI has real value, but what percent of that comes from LLMs and what contribution OpenAI will wind up making to the business of AI is not very clear. I don't really think the world will be different in ten years than it would have been without openai.
  - sonicshadow 3y ago
    I would be willing to bet a lot of money that OpenAi will change the world 10 fold more than Stripe, Airbnb, and all other YC companies combined in the next 10 years

mattlondon 3y ago

Yeah I think there is a lot of sentiment that these ideas/founders are somehow unique and that if those people didn't do anything with those ideas then something like Airbnb or Reddit or Dropbox wouldn't have ever happened. I think people need to be realistic - none of those are particularly ground breaking ideas, as evidenced by the fact that there are countless competitors and in many cases even predecessors that were not in the right place at the right time. These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's. Great for them, but I think it is worth staying grounded and realise that they're not visionaries and had they not even been born, someone would have thought up the same idea anyway. Monkies and typewriters and all that. So maybe we'd not have "Reddit", but we'd no doubt have something largely identical that would fill that same niche. Equating any of these trivial things with something like the transistor is just absolute arrogance. </unpopular-opinion>

fragmede 3y ago
But by that argument, we'd no doubt still have transistors if the transistor hadn't been invented. The traitorous eight, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts shaped our world in a way that no one else could. Same with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We'd no doubt still have computers, and smartphones, but the landscape would be much different and we'd be poorer without them. The larger picture is to say that you can have an effect on the world. Even if it is just being in the right place at the right time, what you do, and how you do it matters. If Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter, there would still be a Twitter, but with less Elon Musk brand of shittery. Maybe a different brand of shittery, but it would be that other person's brand.
- mattlondon 3y ago
  The point I was trying to make is that just ordering take out food on a computer or storing files on a computer on the network or sharing URLs and comments on a public website are not ground breaking ideas - these are trivial ideas that I am sure anyone here could have come up with. But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day. I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.

scrozier 3y ago

lol...I came to post this EXACTLY. Having been in, or on the periphery of, the startup world for a long time (ending about ten years ago), I've come to see it as pretty vapid, unimaginative, and even downright destructive. If a bunch of young-ish guys (and a few women) with elite upbringings want to have an incestuous little money party, well, good on them, I guess. But all the eloquent words trying to obscure the theme of "I want to make a whole bunch of money" is wearing thin on me.

sonicshadow 3y ago
I'm not in the startup world and live in a city that Silicon Valley considers "tech-adjacent". I excitedly attended a start-up event a few months ago where people pitched ideas, and I was massively disappointed by how unoriginal every single idea was. Everyone proposed creating an app that does xyz pointless service that they think will make money. I also hated how many people showed up thinking they could con some hyper-intelligent but obviously socially retarded dev to "bust out an app" for them over the weekend, presumably for free.
- mistermann 3y ago
  I wonder if our Brightest Young Minds pursuing solely/overwhelmingly financially rewarding undertakings has anything to do with the persistence of the various "unsolvable" problems humanity constantly whines about. I suspect we will never know.

efficax 3y ago

lol, imagine telling Bill Shockley: "oh, you invented the transistor? well I built an iPhone app that dispatches a pizza order". The only thing here even close to a real invention is OpenAI and even they didn't invent the core tech (neural nets, transformers, linear regression, gpu farms) but just threw a bunch of money at applying it in a new way.

adventured 3y ago
You're overly downplaying the role of combination in creation, which is what most creation consists of (including inventing the transistor, although to a lesser degree). Imagine downplaying the iPhone by saying they merely combined some things that already existed, as they didn't invent most of the core tech in the first iPhone. Apple just threw a bunch of money at combining tech that already existed by that premise; and they definitely didn't invent the smartphone. And SpaceX didn't invent rocketry either. And Tesla didn't invent the electric car. It'd be absurd to downplay these things and how difficult they were to bring into routine existence. And Netscape didn't invent the Web browser, and Google didn't invent the search engine, and Amazon didn't invent ecommerce, and Atari + Nintendo didn't invent the video game, and Ford didn't invent the automobile. Impact also matters a lot more than just being first.

tom-_- 3y ago

I think people are reading this line the wrong way. The author isn't implying Instacart is as important as the transistor, that would be ludicrous. He's simply drawing an analogy between the output of laboratories like Bell Labs that produce breakthrough scientic research and "economic labs" like YC that produce breakthrough businesses. Yes, AirBNB, Instacart etc are breakthrough businesses in the sense that they disrupted long-standing and deeply entrenched business models. The ideas themselves are not extraordinary but building and scaling a business from zero often against much better financed competitors is no easy feat and takes a unique amount of persistence (and often good timing) to succeed.

xigency 3y ago

Actually seems like a prescient comparison to me. Relevant here is ‘economic research’ which is developing new methods in business, not technology. If YC isn’t a function which transforms startups, then at least it’s a transistor which amplifies VC capital.

sonicshadow 3y ago
Economists do ecomomic research. The founders of Stripe, Airbnb, etc are not researchers, just unrepentant opportunists.

bowsamic 3y ago

I find it quite distasteful. Founders should just admit that they want to make the next big thing that explodes into huge money, a la "The Social Network". It's sad that they feel like they have to do this self-deception to try and convince themselves they are doing something noble