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Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13)
- niels_olson 11y agoI didn't realize Cindy was the driving force behind this. I just need to re-do my video and my project should be ready to launch...
- cindywu123 11y ago👌🏻
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rory096 11y agoA 3-minute speech... at YC Demo Day.
- tonydiv 11y agoTo tie a funding round to nothing more than a "spirited 3-minute speech" is silly. If I had to guess, Cindy is a fearless founder who has been working hard for a long time to achieve her vision. This article's title makes it sound like it's as easy as skipping your Starbucks run to found a company and raise $1M+.
- PieSquared 11y agoThe SF Bay Area community bio labs (BioCurious and Counter Culture Labs [0]) are considering using this platform to try and fund their iGEM team, researching inducing UV resistance in E. Coli and then optimizing it with directed evolution. Community labs have effectively no funding to operate with, so these types of platforms (Experiment, Kickstarter, etc) are incredibly important for them. If you'd like to support the SF Bay Area community labs and hobbyist biologists trying to do real research without academic and commercial funding, watch the Experiment.com biology section [1] over the next week or two! [0] http://biocurious.org/ http://biocurious.org/ and https://counterculturelabs.org/ https://counterculturelabs.org/ [1] https://experiment.com/discover https://experiment.com/discover
- cindywu123 11y agoandrew, come by our office next week!
- PieSquared 11y agoSadly I'm not in the Bay Area for the next 3-4 weeks and missed the original message :) Also I'm not really the one organizing the BioCurious funding, so maybe not the right person to speak to on that matter... Nonetheless I'd be delighted to meet you at some point, Experiment.com sounds like a pretty great organization :)
- ambicapter 11y agoScanning through the website (Experiment.com) I am both surprised and elated at how many projects seem to be 100% funded.
- technotony 11y agoSadly the stats aren't that good. From the article "Two years on and with a smart name change, “Experiment” has launched 5,058 projects and funded 336 of them" so still a long way to go - Kickstarter's success rate I think is around 40%. That's still 336 research projects that wouldn't have been funded otherwise! Go Cindy!
- dluan 11y agoThe 5,058 projects figure are people who've signed up and started projects. There've actually only been 836 launched projects, with 336 funded and 395 failed. Not sure why that number got reported, perhaps an attempt at "there are 5000+ researchers who've signed up". https://experiment.com/stats https://experiment.com/stats
- plutoshe 11y agoEvery one has themselves philosophy, they only denotes the project they think worthwhile. Some projects don't funded only due to the lack of ones with same belief. But it is really exhilarating that 336 projects are funded
- cindywu123 11y agoSuccess rates in the last 3 months are north of 60%. You can expect this to continue.
- cindywu123 11y agoEvery research project has an existing community that wants to support it. The challenge is connecting the two. In a truly efficient world all projects would be 100% funded.
- throwawayhs 11y agoHah, I went to high school with her. I saw the early Microryza stuff, didn't think much of it. I'm glad it seems to be going well.
- desdiv 11y agoI shudder to imagine how much the experiment.com domain must have cost.
- trevyn 11y ago$54k :) http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-experimentcom/ http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-ex...
- bloaf 11y agoMeanwhile, GivingTo.Science is sitting at $75 Is there a reason people would want to avoid newer domains like .science?
- jonathankoren 11y agoBranding. .com is the top-domain. It's synonymous with Internet companies. Without a traditional TLD, your domain doesn't even look like a domain. Instead it look s like a bunch of random.words.smashed.into.one. (Which coincidentally, is a valid domain.)
- hayksaakian 11y agothere's a story behind it, but the tl:dr is far less than you would think -- a generous scientist basically donated it.
- cindywu123 11y agogood thing we were born lucky 🍀
- ridruejo 11y agoNot as much as you think. There's an interesting story behind it: http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-experimentcom/ http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-ex...
- shanev 11y agoWhat a great idea. Maybe this is what will keep corporate interests out of scientific research, as there's more transparency and diversity in funding sources. I'm willing to bet the reproducibility rate for these studies will be much higher than the ~30% average.
- cindywu123 11y agoIn my opinion reproducibility is a technical problem. Once research is published and peer reviewed in real time, all studies should be reproducible. If they are not reproducible, we should have insight into exactly why they are not and propose a solution.
- reasonattlm 11y agoExperiment.com falls into an awkward area for my fundraising efforts for longevity science projects. The community I raise from has been funding a few n*$10k scientific projects every year or so for a decade now, and the yearly fundraiser I cheerlead brought in $150k last year, and will hopefully do as well this year (halfway there). We're growing slowly in reach, but would greatly benefit from a Kickstarter-like thing that helps us pull in a larger audience and new faces. That doesn't seem to be experiment.com yet, or indeed any of the organizations trying to crack the same nut of how you make crowdfunding work for research projects. We wouldn't do any better with them than we do with our own hacked-together infrastructure and communication channels. We need the existence of a large successful science crowdfunding community before it is worth our trying to surf on that science crowdfunding community, and I'm sure we're not the only people with that chicken and egg situation. Some folk in the community have had luck with indiegogo.com for scientific research projects, such as mouse gene therapy or immune transfer treatments in European labs at a few tens of thousands of dollars, but even there I think it is a case that you are buying infrastructure for the audience you bring to the table, not buying fresh faces and new listeners to persuade to your point of view. I'm vaguely hopeful that among the competitors in this space someone will come up with something that works and scales and pulls in the crowds, the halo of attention. There are some quite different styles of approach floating around, such as labcures.com that implements a "back a team" strategy, or lifespan.io that'll be launching sometime soon. Perhaps one of them will gain more traction. Experimentation is key.
- dluan 11y agoEh, I guess I don't mind. Our lever on the chicken-egg problem is that we'll always go out to find the best and most impactful science, and this type of science will always be funded because this type of science is always growing. We'd rather have 1000 $1k projects than 1 $1M project. The halo of small groups is what will bring meaningful scientific results. Caveat to all of this is that there is one project right now that's so far raised $1.55M (http://experiment.com/curebatten http://experiment.com/curebatten) for orphan disease research. Researchers who use Indiegogo are only using it because 1) they are locked-in by their institutions (a small number of universities coerce their faculty like this) or 2) they can't yet use Experiment because they are outside of the US.
- danieltillett 11y agoWhat we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. At the moment all scientists have to live from grant to grant which makes it near impossible to go after the really risky projects. If you try a difficult project and fail then you are out of a job. We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give grants to old established researchers with long track records. These scientists are great at running mini-empires, but not so good at coming up with the really novel ideas that we so need.
- mistermann 11y ago> These scientists are great at running mini-empires, but not so good at coming up with the really novel ideas that we so need. Sounds like some IT departments I know.
- jacques_chester 11y ago> What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. Fellowships typically fill the roll of paying for long-term, high risk research. If it needs to be weighted away from established researchers, make it a lottery. Current funding models are optimised for convergence on leading hypotheses. A lottery would increase coverage.
- danieltillett 11y agoHaving a lottery is a good idea and one I support for grants in general. The grant review process should be simply "is this idea viable and worthy of funding - yes or no”. If yes put it into the lottery and fund as many good grants as you have resources. Peer review works well for this type of sorting, but it is terrible for trying to pick a top 10% idea from a top 15% idea. It just isn’t possible for even the best scientists to be able to do this consistently. The problem with fellowships is that the longest I know of only go for 5 years and most of the junior ones are only for 3 years. This is just not long enough to take the chance on failure. If you want to encourage young talented people to tackle really hard and high risk problems you need to provide funding for at least 10 years. I would go as far as adding a restriction that recipients of these high risk fellowships can’t publish in anything but the absolutely top tier journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc) for the first 7 years so they don’t get distracted from the high risk work that other scientists can’t afford to do.
- joshu 11y agoSilly summary; the talk isn't the thing that raised the money. (I am an investor in Experiment.com)
- teej 11y agoThe world wants to belive that YC works like Shark Tank.
- someear 11y agoSaying that a 3 min speech inspired 1.2m in investments is almost always silly, even if it was at demo day. It undermines all the work behind that speech, which is sometimes years of work.
- cindywu123 11y ago👋🏻, joshua! There is no such thing as a talk that raises money.
- devanti 11y agoIt seems they used to have more employees and 2 other co-founders. Wonder what happened
- cindywu123 11y agoone day we will write about the experiment story. one thing that is true for all startups is things never go the way you expect. 😏
- keso_77 11y agoI like this a lot. Kickstarter for scientists. It would be very welcome if scientists didn't have to come up with military applications of their research in order to get funding.