10 ms·

There is a weird belief in SV that if you don't know anything, but have access to a lot of capital, you can build a better solution. This has yet to really pro

There is a weird belief in SV that if you don't know anything, but have access to a lot of capital, you can build a better solution. This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.

shermantanktop 2y ago
"<insert semi-fact taken out of context regarding something you don't know about> We are fixing this."
- poslathian 2y ago
  https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html
  - neilv 2y ago
    > The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought that it would be interesting to see how they interacted. I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.) Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy. (I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-andy-cs-s-innovator https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )
  - canucker2016 2y ago
    I vaguely recall the NeXT marketing materials touting their first machine was 3M. Sounds like this is where the seed for NeXT was first planted. Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. "Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we'll want to join your program. But it's not exactly what we've been waiting for." Steve looked a little angry. "What are you waiting for? You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!" "Well, 128K isn't nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We're waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too." "A what?" "A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that's what we need for an effective educational workstation." But wikipedia lists Paul Berg as the inspiration. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT: Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand.[4]: 72 [6] Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education. Some of the people listed in the "Whats a Megaflop" post went over to NeXT with Jobs.
bobbygoodlatte 2y ago
Hasn't this worked out in a few cases? Maybe Uber as a better solution than taxis as an example?
- spankalee 2y ago
  Uber was far more incremental than most people remember now. It started as a luxury black-car reservation service, something better than calling a specific transportation company, and something analogous to other application / marketplace plays. Uber gain experience there to later disrupt a whole industry. And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
  - skippyboxedhero 2y ago
    There has been massive innovation in the area in the last forty years or so. This isn't leapfrogging but attempting to scale up what is known to already work. Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment. And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding). Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
    - mschuster91 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
daveguy 2y ago
The weirdest part to me, especially with that kind of money, is the lack of bringing in external expertise. There are a lot of ag experts that are up to date on the latest greenhouse, climate, and plant science. Many colleges in the US started as agriculture schools and still have strong agriculture programs. With Ellison's money it is baffling why they didn't bring in a team of these experts to point out the basics like "use ag tech from similar climates", "test ag tech in smaller facilities first", and "gather local farming knowledge". Why in the world would someone put a medical doctor in charge of an ag tech venture? Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  One major irony here is if the stated goal is improving agriculture and you've got half a bil to play with the most obvious move would be spin up an equipment manufacturer to compete with John Deere. Pressuring them to halt their ongoing war against their own customers would have a measurable impact on rural suicide rates.
skippyboxedhero 2y ago
Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble. The point is that there is a competition for the best solution in terms of money. The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work. The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something. The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).
- niemandhier 2y ago
  Lots of money surly helps, just pointing out that we as a species can also advance in other situations. Fire,the wheel, farming, animal husbandry, spinning; all probably not the result of an investment bubble. In more recent times: Antibiotics, vaccination ( against smallpox). There are plenty of cases where humanity advance in a higher leap without giant capital concentrations.
  - skippyboxedhero 2y ago
    No, there aren't. There are no examples of this. The exact reason humanity didn't develop economically for tens of thousands of years was because of the very ideas that you have, almost every human has. Do you not look at the rest of the world and think: if this is so easy then why is technical innovation limited to a handful of countries? It makes no sense. How can you look at the economic history and think this? It makes no sense.
fnord77 2y ago
Disruption doesn't come from "experts". Computer science experts could have never built facebook or twitter.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  what exactly did FB and twitter "disrupt"?
  - njarboe 2y ago
    Teenagers?
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    They are making the world a better place.
- etchalon 2y ago
  Computer science experts literally built both of those things.
NoPicklez 2y ago
I think the likes of Uber & Starlink might have to disagree. Often real disruption occurs from people you wouldn't expect
- etchalon 2y ago
  Uber is an iffy case. Starlink was possible due to the expertise within SpaceX, and the ability to subsidize the hoisting of the satellites into orbit.
  - NoPicklez 2y ago
    There will always be a way to explain the events that enabled the disruption and that doesn't take away from the achievement. Put it this way the ISP in my country on the other side of the world has now been disrupted and now Starlink enables farmers in remote deserts can access high speed internet, due to a new Space exploration company subsidizing the cost of satellites based on its technology to hoist satellites into orbit to provide such internet. It is a culmination of things going right and the right industry movement that creates disruption.
    - etchalon 2y ago
      I wasn't discounting the achievement. Just pointing out the achievement was the result of domain-experts, not random people with a lot of capital and a can-do spirit.
      - setr 2y ago
        You need a lot of capital in order to acquire the domain experts. The main question, once you have the capital, is whether you can correctly identify an expert, and set them up to be functional/productive
fragmede 2y ago
Yes it has. I mean, it hasn't worked out in every case, but between Tesla (Ford/GM/Chrysler), SpaceX (Boeing/Lockheed Martin), TikTok (Youtube), Moderna (Pfizer/Merck/GSK/Sanofi), Uber (Taxi industry/Medallion system/Dispatch companies), Stripe (PayPal/Visa/Mastercard), AirBnB (Hilton/Marriot/Expedia/Booking.com), and OpenAI (Google DeepMind/IBM Watson/Academia), I think there's enough of a case to be made that being young and ignorant of the existing incumbent entities has worked out in a couple of cases. SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things. Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

There is a weird belief in SV that if you don't know anything, but have access to a lot of capital, you can build a better solution. This has yet to really prove itself to be the case.

shermantanktop 2y ago

"<insert semi-fact taken out of context regarding something you don't know about> We are fixing this."

poslathian 2y ago
https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html https://www.folklore.org/Whats_A_Megaflop.html
- neilv 2y ago
  > The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought that it would be interesting to see how they interacted. I didn't have that impression of him. Many people will say he has high standards, and can seem intense or maybe grumpy on occasion, but AFAIK, many of the countless people he's helped will also say that he has a heart of gold. (I personally knew two undergrads who said they'd gone through rough spots, and he above-and-beyond helped them.) Also, at times it seemed that Andy knows everyone. My own small experience with this... Years after I'd graduated, a non-tech friend mentioned they'd love to work at this super-cool tech company, but friend did qualitative research, not code. So I email Andy (who I might never have even spoken 1-on-1 with), out of the blue: long shot, but does he happen to know how someone would approach that company, when they probably don't know why they might want this skill they've never heard of. He replied back: sure, the head of engineering there had been his student, and here's how to reach him, with a referral from Andy. (I want to call him Prof. van Dam, out of respect, but reportedly he finds that "stuffy and undemocratic": https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-andy-cs-s-innovator https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2010/11/call-him-an... )
- canucker2016 2y ago
  I vaguely recall the NeXT marketing materials touting their first machine was 3M. Sounds like this is where the seed for NeXT was first planted. Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. "Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we'll want to join your program. But it's not exactly what we've been waiting for." Steve looked a little angry. "What are you waiting for? You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!" "Well, 128K isn't nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We're waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too." "A what?" "A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that's what we need for an effective educational workstation." But wikipedia lists Paul Berg as the inspiration. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT: Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon in Silicon Valley held to honor President of France François Mitterrand.[4]: 72 [6] Berg was frustrated by the time and expense of researching recombinant DNA via wet laboratories, and suggested that Jobs should use his influence to create a "3M computer" that is designed for higher education. Some of the people listed in the "Whats a Megaflop" post went over to NeXT with Jobs.

bobbygoodlatte 2y ago

Hasn't this worked out in a few cases? Maybe Uber as a better solution than taxis as an example?

spankalee 2y ago
Uber was far more incremental than most people remember now. It started as a luxury black-car reservation service, something better than calling a specific transportation company, and something analogous to other application / marketplace plays. Uber gain experience there to later disrupt a whole industry. And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
- skippyboxedhero 2y ago
  There has been massive innovation in the area in the last forty years or so. This isn't leapfrogging but attempting to scale up what is known to already work. Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment. And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding). Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
  - mschuster91 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

daveguy 2y ago

The weirdest part to me, especially with that kind of money, is the lack of bringing in external expertise. There are a lot of ag experts that are up to date on the latest greenhouse, climate, and plant science. Many colleges in the US started as agriculture schools and still have strong agriculture programs. With Ellison's money it is baffling why they didn't bring in a team of these experts to point out the basics like "use ag tech from similar climates", "test ag tech in smaller facilities first", and "gather local farming knowledge". Why in the world would someone put a medical doctor in charge of an ag tech venture? Move fast and break things seems to only work in software where "broken" means roll back to the previous state. But we have a ridiculous amount of wealth tied up with billionaire fools who think that this is the most efficient way to make progress. At this point, SV takeover of capital is actively detrimental to progress that benefits the average person and economy.

forgetfreeman 2y ago
One major irony here is if the stated goal is improving agriculture and you've got half a bil to play with the most obvious move would be spin up an equipment manufacturer to compete with John Deere. Pressuring them to halt their ongoing war against their own customers would have a measurable impact on rural suicide rates.

skippyboxedhero 2y ago

Every significant technological innovation has been accompanied by an investment bubble. The point is that there is a competition for the best solution in terms of money. The context of these comments often imply that at no point before SV existed did anyone invest large amounts of money in something that failed to work. The reason why economic growth is rare (most economic growth that occurs globally is due to the impact of technology invented outside the country, 95% of countries globally have zero organic growth) is because it is extremely disruptive and means that someone with nothing other than money, who may not have been approved by society can invent something. The point about disrupt vs reform above is correct...it just ignores the fact that reform has never been successful (despite it being repeatedly tried by politicians) because economic growth is so damaging to vested interests (there are multiple books about this topic, Innovator's Dilemma is one...I worked as an equity analyst, the number of examples of a company actually turning it around when faced with technological change are very few, the number of examples of a company bailing-in taxpayers due to political connections when faced with technological change is too large to count, this is particularly case outside the US because so much technological change comes from the US so calls to "protect" domestic industry are frequent and economically crippling).

niemandhier 2y ago
Lots of money surly helps, just pointing out that we as a species can also advance in other situations. Fire,the wheel, farming, animal husbandry, spinning; all probably not the result of an investment bubble. In more recent times: Antibiotics, vaccination ( against smallpox). There are plenty of cases where humanity advance in a higher leap without giant capital concentrations.
- skippyboxedhero 2y ago
  No, there aren't. There are no examples of this. The exact reason humanity didn't develop economically for tens of thousands of years was because of the very ideas that you have, almost every human has. Do you not look at the rest of the world and think: if this is so easy then why is technical innovation limited to a handful of countries? It makes no sense. How can you look at the economic history and think this? It makes no sense.

fnord77 2y ago

Disruption doesn't come from "experts". Computer science experts could have never built facebook or twitter.

skeeter2020 2y ago
what exactly did FB and twitter "disrupt"?
- njarboe 2y ago
  Teenagers?
- datavirtue 2y ago
  They are making the world a better place.
etchalon 2y ago
Computer science experts literally built both of those things.

NoPicklez 2y ago

I think the likes of Uber & Starlink might have to disagree. Often real disruption occurs from people you wouldn't expect

etchalon 2y ago
Uber is an iffy case. Starlink was possible due to the expertise within SpaceX, and the ability to subsidize the hoisting of the satellites into orbit.
- NoPicklez 2y ago
  There will always be a way to explain the events that enabled the disruption and that doesn't take away from the achievement. Put it this way the ISP in my country on the other side of the world has now been disrupted and now Starlink enables farmers in remote deserts can access high speed internet, due to a new Space exploration company subsidizing the cost of satellites based on its technology to hoist satellites into orbit to provide such internet. It is a culmination of things going right and the right industry movement that creates disruption.
  - etchalon 2y ago
    I wasn't discounting the achievement. Just pointing out the achievement was the result of domain-experts, not random people with a lot of capital and a can-do spirit.
    - setr 2y ago
      You need a lot of capital in order to acquire the domain experts. The main question, once you have the capital, is whether you can correctly identify an expert, and set them up to be functional/productive

fragmede 2y ago

Yes it has. I mean, it hasn't worked out in every case, but between Tesla (Ford/GM/Chrysler), SpaceX (Boeing/Lockheed Martin), TikTok (Youtube), Moderna (Pfizer/Merck/GSK/Sanofi), Uber (Taxi industry/Medallion system/Dispatch companies), Stripe (PayPal/Visa/Mastercard), AirBnB (Hilton/Marriot/Expedia/Booking.com), and OpenAI (Google DeepMind/IBM Watson/Academia), I think there's enough of a case to be made that being young and ignorant of the existing incumbent entities has worked out in a couple of cases. SV needs people who are young and dumb enough to go up against established players that older smarter people who are entrenched in the system know better than to go up against the giants to disrupt things. Hell, the Traitorous Eight, once they managed to lock up enough capital are the ones who founded Silicon Valley, went up against the incumbent Shockley Semiconductor, founding Fairchild and Intel. They were the leading experts in their field at the time though, so maybe that's a bit different, but plenty of people, knowing too much about the whole situation have decided it's not worth it to try. Innovation doesn't come at the hands of those who don't try.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]