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Having co-founder DNA in the market is easiest, and second best is being open minded (ex: young and naive, a PhD, ...) and immerse yourself in the customer spac

Having co-founder DNA in the market is easiest, and second best is being open minded (ex: young and naive, a PhD, ...) and immerse yourself in the customer space. We did the latter, and it took us ~4 years to match our inhouse deep tech with customer problems, and another few years for the market to catch up. And now genAI has put it into overdrive, and our Product #2 (louie.ai) is much easier bc it is now more like Scenario 1. For related reasons, I'm bullish on growing a consulting arm of most b2b startups to help accelerate this process + figuring out profitable scalable revenue.

crackalamoo 2y ago
I'm curious, why does having a PhD help you be open minded in a young and naive way and immerse yourself in the customer space? Or is it that fresh PhDs without much experience are still young and naive?
- lmeyerov 2y ago
  A good PhD isn't just about learning how to solve problems but also how to quickly ramp up & identify worthwhile ones. To give a feel, I might have read 20-200 papers for every new one that I came up with, I'd write a few a year, and the pressure was to, every year, reliably come out with at least 1 new thing that'd resonate with top-tier peer review. Imagine having to come out with a new community-approved intellectual product every year, 5 years in a row! The result is that PhD skills are great for quickly soaking in everything about a new space, figuring out what's important, and combining grit + clarity to solve it. That helps for figuring out product/market, executing on an early roadmap, and at a meta-level, how to become an entrepreneur. Same-but-different for when switching from 0-1 to growth. Being young works for those too. There's likely a lot more stumbling and pain, but also more energy and lack of awareness that all these avoidable inefficiencies seem normal and fun IMO easier and less risky is get a co-founder who is experienced in the space. There are other trade-offs and nothing in life is guaranteed, but why play life on hard mode?

crackalamoo 2y ago

I'm curious, why does having a PhD help you be open minded in a young and naive way and immerse yourself in the customer space? Or is it that fresh PhDs without much experience are still young and naive?

lmeyerov 2y ago
A good PhD isn't just about learning how to solve problems but also how to quickly ramp up & identify worthwhile ones. To give a feel, I might have read 20-200 papers for every new one that I came up with, I'd write a few a year, and the pressure was to, every year, reliably come out with at least 1 new thing that'd resonate with top-tier peer review. Imagine having to come out with a new community-approved intellectual product every year, 5 years in a row! The result is that PhD skills are great for quickly soaking in everything about a new space, figuring out what's important, and combining grit + clarity to solve it. That helps for figuring out product/market, executing on an early roadmap, and at a meta-level, how to become an entrepreneur. Same-but-different for when switching from 0-1 to growth. Being young works for those too. There's likely a lot more stumbling and pain, but also more energy and lack of awareness that all these avoidable inefficiencies seem normal and fun IMO easier and less risky is get a co-founder who is experienced in the space. There are other trade-offs and nothing in life is guaranteed, but why play life on hard mode?