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I agree, but I don't think it's just that you can't play with the latest node.js module: you also can't really spend time on developing new technology or making

I agree, but I don't think it's just that you can't play with the latest node.js module: you also can't really spend time on developing new technology or making real technological advances, especially anything that has high risk or a >12 months to payoff. A startup's main job is to put together a product, ASAP, and ideally also monetize it. This usually means relying on technology that has already been developed, at least mostly: it's not the place for R&D. An ideal situation for a startup is that the technology already exists, maybe has even been lightly validated, but just hasn't been turned into a product. You see the market opening, and you take some existing pieces of technology, putting them together into an MVP with the right pitch and business strategy. There are some exceptions for startups whose real pitch is precisely the R&D, and who are able to pull large amounts of up-front funding from investors who are willing to bet on the technological development. Tesla is one example, in part because Musk's large amount of self-funding meant it could afford to take a full 5 years between founding and product-to-market. Very few startups have 5-year R&D runways, though; if you want to do R&D on that timescale you're usually better off at a place like Google or MSR, in parts of academia, or even a big engineering company (BBN, Lockheed, Intel, etc.).

gfodor 13y ago
I'm sorry to call you out, but this post is pretty depressing. You are speaking as if what you are saying is some known fact, that startups are not the place for R&D. Startups are the best hope for R&D to make it out of the lab. You have been brainwashed by the Lean Startup movement. It's a good strategy but it is not the only way to skin the cat, and if you are looking to change the world it's probably a bad way to do it. Look at the greatest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley over the last several decades, and you will see companies which started out with products that took a lot of time, capital, and R&D to launch. The two largest market cap companies in the world, Google and Apple, were not created through the Lean Startup approach of throwing together existing technology and pivoting around trying to find a local optimum, but came about from the hope that if you spend your time up front, get investment, do the R&D and hard work, and build something with an eye towards the future, you will be rewarded. Intel. HP. Microsoft. Should I keep listing companies that did big R&D up front? Who do you think is more likely to change the world, the latest startup that throws together some B2B app on AWS with no vision and just is trying to find product market fit, get their Google acquisition, and live happily ever after, or companies like Oculus, Meta, MakerBot, hell even Soylent, who have put in serious big-bet, R&D, and say lets shoot for the moon or lose everything trying? I'm not saying that the lean startup approach shouldn't be done ever, but to get up and claim that startups are not the place for R&D basically goes against everything that makes Silicon Valley an amazing place. If this is the mentality that comes out of the pop-culture-ization of startup life I don't want to be a part of it.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Google's founders did the up-front R&D in academia: they were Stanford grad students who developed PageRank, and then launched a company to take it to market. And Microsoft's big breakthrough was based on technology they didn't even develop! They got a contract to deliver an OS for IBM, but has no OS, so they bought 86-DOS, quickly made about 2 months of modifications to get it to fit the specs IBM demanded, renamed it to MS-DOS, and delivered it to IBM. Or take Sun: they shipped a computer architecture that Andy Bechtolsheim had largely developed while a grad student at Stanford, paired with a commercialization of UC Berkeley's 4.1BSD (rebranded SunOS 1.0). I think startups can indeed be a good way to take existing R&D and productize it, i.e. "make it out of the lab", but I don't think they develop a lot of it.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    The Google guys' PhD work was a prologue to their startup. They went into it with novel technology that they had developed themselves. There is a huge difference between this approach and saying "no more R&D, lets take what's out there and build a product with it." When they started Google they certainly did plenty of R&D to improve their algorithms and crawler, and it's been continuing ever since. For Microsoft the reference there was not their (extremely lucky) deal with MS-DOS but all of the other work they did: from the early BASIC days to the days of Windows where they did extensive R&D in order to leapfrog their competitors. You ignored my other examples but the fact is that the Lean Startup approach to startups is a relatively new thing, only really fits for web-oriented startups where up front development costs are low thanks to SAAS and open source, and even then the companies you might be able to point to as definitive success stories are YC companies and maybe companies that are the latest round of tech IPOs taking a Lean slant on how they found their product market fit. Eric Reis's startup failed! Find me a biotech startup, find me an energy startup, find me a robotics or hardware startup that doesn't do R&D on day zero. The YC model of developing a web application using open source software and launching on Heroku to get revenue for a B2B need is a very narrow slice both in time and space of the way innovation happens. Hell, look at any legendarily successful software companies that aren't in the web sphere of the last 10 years, like iD Software, Adobe, Pixar, Wolfram, and so on and you see R&D focused companies from their beginning.

gfodor 13y ago

I'm sorry to call you out, but this post is pretty depressing. You are speaking as if what you are saying is some known fact, that startups are not the place for R&D. Startups are the best hope for R&D to make it out of the lab. You have been brainwashed by the Lean Startup movement. It's a good strategy but it is not the only way to skin the cat, and if you are looking to change the world it's probably a bad way to do it. Look at the greatest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley over the last several decades, and you will see companies which started out with products that took a lot of time, capital, and R&D to launch. The two largest market cap companies in the world, Google and Apple, were not created through the Lean Startup approach of throwing together existing technology and pivoting around trying to find a local optimum, but came about from the hope that if you spend your time up front, get investment, do the R&D and hard work, and build something with an eye towards the future, you will be rewarded. Intel. HP. Microsoft. Should I keep listing companies that did big R&D up front? Who do you think is more likely to change the world, the latest startup that throws together some B2B app on AWS with no vision and just is trying to find product market fit, get their Google acquisition, and live happily ever after, or companies like Oculus, Meta, MakerBot, hell even Soylent, who have put in serious big-bet, R&D, and say lets shoot for the moon or lose everything trying? I'm not saying that the lean startup approach shouldn't be done ever, but to get up and claim that startups are not the place for R&D basically goes against everything that makes Silicon Valley an amazing place. If this is the mentality that comes out of the pop-culture-ization of startup life I don't want to be a part of it.

_delirium 13y ago
Google's founders did the up-front R&D in academia: they were Stanford grad students who developed PageRank, and then launched a company to take it to market. And Microsoft's big breakthrough was based on technology they didn't even develop! They got a contract to deliver an OS for IBM, but has no OS, so they bought 86-DOS, quickly made about 2 months of modifications to get it to fit the specs IBM demanded, renamed it to MS-DOS, and delivered it to IBM. Or take Sun: they shipped a computer architecture that Andy Bechtolsheim had largely developed while a grad student at Stanford, paired with a commercialization of UC Berkeley's 4.1BSD (rebranded SunOS 1.0). I think startups can indeed be a good way to take existing R&D and productize it, i.e. "make it out of the lab", but I don't think they develop a lot of it.
- gfodor 13y ago
  The Google guys' PhD work was a prologue to their startup. They went into it with novel technology that they had developed themselves. There is a huge difference between this approach and saying "no more R&D, lets take what's out there and build a product with it." When they started Google they certainly did plenty of R&D to improve their algorithms and crawler, and it's been continuing ever since. For Microsoft the reference there was not their (extremely lucky) deal with MS-DOS but all of the other work they did: from the early BASIC days to the days of Windows where they did extensive R&D in order to leapfrog their competitors. You ignored my other examples but the fact is that the Lean Startup approach to startups is a relatively new thing, only really fits for web-oriented startups where up front development costs are low thanks to SAAS and open source, and even then the companies you might be able to point to as definitive success stories are YC companies and maybe companies that are the latest round of tech IPOs taking a Lean slant on how they found their product market fit. Eric Reis's startup failed! Find me a biotech startup, find me an energy startup, find me a robotics or hardware startup that doesn't do R&D on day zero. The YC model of developing a web application using open source software and launching on Heroku to get revenue for a B2B need is a very narrow slice both in time and space of the way innovation happens. Hell, look at any legendarily successful software companies that aren't in the web sphere of the last 10 years, like iD Software, Adobe, Pixar, Wolfram, and so on and you see R&D focused companies from their beginning.