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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 fo

by 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.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I'm not really defending the "Lean Startup" approach; I don't think it's very socially useful or interesting, but I do think it's probably profitable on average (hence why VCs like it). The approach of doing a university spinoff using your own tech is a model I do like, and I agree it's a way to develop new tech and also bring it out of the lab. But I think the academic part there is key: you get some R&D runway up front before you start the startup and need to make money, rather than doing a startup up-front. You can then "afford" to start the startup once at least some of the high-risk work has been done and you're reasonably close to a product. Since you mention Wolfram, that's probably an even better example of that than Google, given Wolfram's rather lengthy prologue to his startup: he spent 8 years at Caltech (1979-1987, first as PhD student, then as professor) developing the Symbolic Manipulation Program, a precursor to Mathematica. Then he spun off a company in 1987 and launched Mathematica in 1988. I don't think he would've been able to do the same kind of initial R&D in a startup as he was able to do at Caltech.
blumkvist 13y ago
YES... changing the world. Everyone go and do it! NOOOOW!
laureny 13y ago
> Look at the greatest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley over the last several decades, Facebook started on PHP and Google on C++. The software innovations that these companies brought to the world didn't happen in the start up phase but years later, once they had grown sufficiently big that they had resources to devote to R&D in an effort to streamline and optimize their existing infrastructure. I talk to a lot of startups on a daily basis, most of them are either built on Java or Ruby on Rails. I don't see any of them building their v1 with Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon, Idris or Ermine or any technology created in the past five years.
- gfodor 13y ago
  Using a fancy programming language is orthogonal to if you are doing R&D.

by gfodor 13y ago

_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.
- _delirium 13y ago
  I'm not really defending the "Lean Startup" approach; I don't think it's very socially useful or interesting, but I do think it's probably profitable on average (hence why VCs like it). The approach of doing a university spinoff using your own tech is a model I do like, and I agree it's a way to develop new tech and also bring it out of the lab. But I think the academic part there is key: you get some R&D runway up front before you start the startup and need to make money, rather than doing a startup up-front. You can then "afford" to start the startup once at least some of the high-risk work has been done and you're reasonably close to a product. Since you mention Wolfram, that's probably an even better example of that than Google, given Wolfram's rather lengthy prologue to his startup: he spent 8 years at Caltech (1979-1987, first as PhD student, then as professor) developing the Symbolic Manipulation Program, a precursor to Mathematica. Then he spun off a company in 1987 and launched Mathematica in 1988. I don't think he would've been able to do the same kind of initial R&D in a startup as he was able to do at Caltech.

blumkvist 13y ago

YES... changing the world. Everyone go and do it! NOOOOW!

laureny 13y ago

> Look at the greatest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley over the last several decades, Facebook started on PHP and Google on C++. The software innovations that these companies brought to the world didn't happen in the start up phase but years later, once they had grown sufficiently big that they had resources to devote to R&D in an effort to streamline and optimize their existing infrastructure. I talk to a lot of startups on a daily basis, most of them are either built on Java or Ruby on Rails. I don't see any of them building their v1 with Clojure, Kotlin, Ceylon, Idris or Ermine or any technology created in the past five years.

gfodor 13y ago
Using a fancy programming language is orthogonal to if you are doing R&D.