YC Research
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups.
I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade.
Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created breakthrough science in self-healing materials for the "benefit of the world"
10 years of grant fights, personnel struggles, under-served licensing resources, conflicting lab-vs-student priorities, etc has put him out the other end hopeless and disenfranchised.
The world will probably lose one of their best "public" researchers to the bowels of commercial science as a result.
Go for it Sam, good luck and excited to see what your first projects are.
The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge.
Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change.
I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I've seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the 'erratum' was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge.
I'm super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division!
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/...
Academia is but one fruitful track for a smart grad student.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academ...
A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly prevalent in both the student and faculty bodies despite abundant evidence of arithmetic skills. Faculty are often quite unaware of what happens outside their building, and students are, well, students and absorb a lot of the mindset of their role models. So there becomes a glut of post-post-docs applying for a scant few professorship, which makes getting hired and then getting tenure ultracompetitive and stressful--so many people want the jobs that the administration can ask just about anything out of them, including pretty unrealistic expectations, bad working conditions (80 hr/weeks for 75 k/yr in the sciences at many good schools) and so forth. The conditions of tenure-track professorships (when professors are still young enough to be most creative and energetic, and are still skeptical of their fields' dogma) are poorly suited to creativity and focus, so their grad students are tasked with the actual science while the professors become managers.
This isn't to say that academia is actually 'broken'. If my coffeemaker is broken, it doesn't make coffee. Academia is still making the things it is supposed to, but never in the amounts or quantities or prices that everybody wants (as it turns out everybody's wants are wildly divergent). So for this and other off-topic reasons, it's not exactly broken but definitely not optimal.
I'm of the opinion that a more optimal academy would do more to prepare grad students to find their own path, be it in academia, industry, or elsewhere. Sort of like what the US liberal arts education is supposed to be, but at a higher level and with the requisite specialization as is fitting a PhD. The critical, analytical, creative, scholarly, and technical skills that grad school can (and often does) bestow or hone are a great fit for a variety of pursuits, including entrepreneurial ones. But there is little guidance here, in part because the faculty themselves have little idea how to go about doing anything but what they do 80 hours a week.
I left the academic track after a post-doc to become an independent researcher (doing funded and unfunded research as well as R&D consulting) and it's been really surprising to see how many professors think it's an unworkable idea. Not an idea that many people try and flame out, but one so unthinkably scary that no one has seen anybody try. Which smelled like an opportunity to me, and still does...
Kudos on trying to make it as an independent researcher though. That's a really cool idea. How has it been applying for grants without a university affiliation? What's the breakdown of your time spent on funded research, unfunded research, and consulting?
I spend about half my time or a little less on consulting, but it's been very research-oriented consulting so far, with few restrictions on publishing results. There are and will be ups and downs (most of my consulting is in energy) but I bill a lot more than I pay myself so that smooths it out a bit.
So far most of the non-consulting research has been unpaid but I try as much as is practical to get funding for it at some point--make a minimum viable product to write a grant upon and if it doesn't work out then make it publishable and iterate or move on. I like strategy, it combines well with dreaming. I have some moonshot ideas too, but most things can be broken down into units digestible for peer /grant review.
I'm finding that there are a lot of theoretical problems that are also practical problems. I also feel like I am doing research all the time, but a lot of time is spent building tools and skills to do new things, and less of my time is spent actually learning new things about the earth than I would like. But I guess that's research...
[0] In my profile.
The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.
The thing is that macro-scale works pretty well. As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently. The measures we use are correlated with research quality even if they don't measure it perfectly.
It's only at the detailed scale where it looks badly flawed.
edit: and of course whenever I spend a long time writing a thoughtful comment I get the "you're submitting too fast, please slow down" message. Time to leave this comment to sit for an hour before pressing reply again...
In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.
In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or content farms) and papers that cite other articles just for the increase in rankings (similar to link farms) so the analogy to SEO (in its various hats) seems to fit.
This would suggest that the only way to fix the 'broken' citation ranking system is the same as Google, and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank, and black-list or penalise certain journals or types of citation?
The impact of Google doing this is, in financial terms, probably much larger than if the same type of approach would be applied in the academic situation. So if Google is allowed to do this, why can't we allow the same approach for research? Apparently, the system works quite well.
Compare this to the situation in rating of academic research, where the papers are rated by the community of authors itself and the ranking is essentially a weighted counting of references. Of course it leads to lots of self-serving spam.
If the idea of independent raters (and possibly machine learning on top of it) could be implemented for academic papers as well, that would be a big improvement, I think. Academia has got a lot to learn from search engines.
I wouldn't call prioritizing quantity over quality gaming the ranking system, it is merely playing by its rules. I would call gaming it if there was some cheat (like you cite me and I cite you even if really we shouldn't), which may happen but I believe is rare.
Maybe. But I can't really imagine how you'd measure that, or what you'd compare it to.
Even if the current system is pretty great, it can only get better with competition from alternative systems, like what's being announced here.
I wouldn't call throwing out your trained experts and starting with fresh trainees in a five-to-seven year cycle all that efficient.
Academia doesn't pay very much, makes you work very long hours, and requires extensive training and skills, justifies it all by reference to Mission, and then inevitably fires you and tells you getting fired was your fault for not being in the top 8% of the entire profession.
Don't get me wrong: our lab makes awe-inspiring machines that can see individual atoms held in vacuum by lattices of laser light. Our research leads to incredible discoveries, but we're held back by inefficiencies. It's a rusty system, but to any mechanic, rusty = broken.
Also, leaving to build a startup is rather uncommon at MIT physics, and most students (including me) absolutely love research. The academic career is just not attractive enough to spend another 4-12 years in a lab becoming increasingly good at doing exactly one thing.
Peter Thiel's lecture in sama's Startup Class is relevant: http://bit.ly/1ZdOwHQ
Graduate students tend to love to complain as much as possible about things that aren't that bad (I know I was one) and people leaving something idealistic often have a compelling need to try and put it down in any way they can to justify their decision to give up on the idealistic goals and try to make some money -- which is why you see so many "goodbye academia, you are broken" posts and blog entries. And some people have genuinely bad experiences like at any job -- bad manager, particularly low funding, bad co-workers, you're going to have a bad time.
That being said YC research sounds amazing. Basic research was funded by charity from the superwealthy (or only carried out by the independently wealthy) for most of human history, the model works. Researchers tend not to look into areas or find results which are bad for their backers. It's good to have some public and some private sector; we need to balance out the conflict of interest a bit.
My complaint is with those inefficient bureaucratic systems that you mention in passing. Life's much easier without them. :)
Be nice if we could fix that. School is great, industry is great, somehow connect them.
YCR is a great idea because there are issues in academia that need resolving. It's certainly not completely broken.
https://www.facebook.com/jfgariepyneuro/posts/46644277686075....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177775
It really is nice to see an organization like YC take an interest in research. I applaud Sam for making that considerable donation and hope the outcome is better than expected.
e: Here's some hard facts - http://universityprobe.org
It conforms with my experience.
That said, the skills required to write great grants and schmooze with grant-givers are quite different from that needed to do quality research in science or engineering. So the academic researcher community in science and technology is whittled down to the small set of {those good at research}∩ {those good at writing grants} + ⊂{those good at writing grants} + geniuses
I'm going to do an AMA on HN later this week (mostly to answer questions about applying to YC) and would be happy to answer more questions about YCR then.
EDIT: Why am getting down votes for this comment? You must know that in this world not everyone is willing to part with their money and are not that giving. So relax before you down vote me promptly:)
Don't interrupt the real discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
> Paul Graham (@pg) — Markets are usually quite clever but one place they break is in encouraging treatments rather than vaccines. Subscription revenue.
Unfortunately, we switched from that a while ago (my understanding is that we used to do "pay while healthy" around the 1900s) and now the current way seems "normal".
Beyond that, vaccines are a "Pay $X per month while healthy" treatment - you have to treat everyone whether they're sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication.
The problem is that modern vaccine targets are hard. Multiple strains, dangerous responses from partial immunity (Dengue), very rapid viral evolution (HIV, flu), etc.
(like Lyme disease, which had a vaccine pulled, I'm under the impression that it was not pulled for great reasons)
I think Google managed to recreate something similar with their 20% projects
Other companies have had the 15% / 20% culture, etc. long before Google. Example, http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1998/01/9858
Sam, when I met you at Startup School last year, I wanted to be brief. The most important thing I wanted to communicate to you was my gratitude, and I thanked you for sharing your startup class. I'm blown away by and so grateful for the stuff you've been doing since. I'm very excited to see how these new projects work out. Thank you again man.
Anyway, this is very cool. Exactly the sort of thing that needs to happen to push the world forward in deeper ways. I'll be very curious to see what sort of teams they put together and just how fundamental and long term and heretical they go with their research.
We all realize founders maintain "a lot more" equity than employees, but it's almost like our brains aren't wired to recognize, remember, or rationalize how some people get really really rewarded more than others. With Sam being grand poobah of YC, he's on a life track to being a liquid-capable multibillionaire within 5-10 years after the current unicornpalooza goes through a few rounds of lofty exits.
My propositions for SF to require all equity-exited techies to tattoo their net worth on their foreheads keeps getting shot down by anonymous "concerned citizens."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman#Pre-YC_angel_invest...
What's the process for an outsider to get involved? This sounds like a really cool and much needed movement. Will more information be coming soon on how to apply/join/contribute?
1. Where will the research be based? Is YC providing space to setup lab?
2. One of the problems I see with this is lack of fellow researches present on site making casual collaboration harder (compared to a research university campus). Have you thought of that?
3. Are you planning on funding researches with track records or people with high risk/high reward ideas that are relatively new?
2. Yes, eventually we'd like to have multiple groups in the same space just for this reason--I always think the interdisciplinary stuff is underrated.
3. Some of both, probably, but mostly we want to support people that the existing system does not support (e.g. people that are not yet famous)
1. Try set up a lab in Cambridge at some point down the road.
2. Pay particular attention to CS theory: it's (arguably) high-impact and very cost effective --you can practically fund an entire generation of researchers in a subfield for a fraction of the cost of, say, a major interdisciplinary initiative. See for instance what the Simons foundation is doing at Berkeley[1].
Best of luck with what you're doing. You can end up actually changing the world in this way.
A lot of the stuff in TCS is theory for the sake of theory, and one would want to avoid too much of this.
I'm particularly interested in any arguments that complexity theory is high-impact (beyond the very useful insight that there are some problems for which no polynomial time algorithm is known). I have a pretty good idea of the impact of cryptography and randomized linear algebra (sometimes considered CS theory), but am also interested in hearing about other fields considered CS theory with useful applications.
MA or UK, though? Both would be awesome, I think, but I don't believe YC has any offices outside the US at the moment...?
What happens when some of the research that is done paints some of the activities of YC or their companies in a less-than-positive light?
Peer review has long been the traditional validation mechanism in science. I don't see why it wouldn't be applicable here.
@sama - since you mention that startups aren't good at solving certain types of problems, is this something you've always believed, or is it a realisation through your work at YC?
Also was it inspired by the Shuttleworh Fundation in any way?
Holy cow. That's real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.
>Széchenyi gained a wider reputation in 1825, by supporting the proposal of the prime minister, Nagy, to establish the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Széchenyi donated the full annual income of his estates that year, 60,000 florins, towards it.
Florins appear to be pretty steady with the dollar...
$10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam is hedging so YCR can do its first round in about a year and get a bigger ask by pointing to the starting groups achievements.
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops.
Thanks again for the link!
Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)
Sure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median/average grant size at $300k/$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.
$10 million is a lot of money. Science can be expensive but that $10 million can last a long time.
But:
> An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.
Well, that 'overhead' is paying for things like lab space, electricity, health insurance (at least for the faculty, good luck grad students), liability insurance, etc. Not to mention the actual salary of the PI and/or other researchers -- which universities in STEM schools increasingly expect to be covered by grants too. The academic institutions would argue all the 'overhead' they take is legit funding of things necessary for the research to take place, but even if you think they are spending it inefficiently or 'stealing' money for unrelated things...
I think as a rough napkin calculation, the $500K is probably still closer to that same $500K when YC Research spends it too, not twice as much.
For starters, I'm prejudiced to think any smaller org will run more efficiently than a larger one (even though I realize this is literally the opposite of conventional/mainstream assumptions!).
But TWICE as efficient?
Also, I think all those administrator salaries are probably being funded by tuition (that is, by government subsidized student loans that the students will be paying back for most of the rest of their lives), rather than research grants. :)
Or actually you didn't even suggest twice as efficient, you suggested virtually ZERO costs other than direct research costs -- would we call that INFINITELY more efficient with a zero in the denominator? :) (Not even including salaries? Aren't those also funded in part by the 'overhead'?)
And no, researcher's salaries (postdocs, tech, grad students, etc.) are not included. The indirect costs go to the university to pay for department/college-level utilities, facilities, infrastructure, and administrator salaries (which, admittedly, the lab does benefit from).
But I understand that research faculty in science and biomed are increasingly expected to bring in grant funding as a condition of employment/tenure. It sounds to me like the institution expects to help pay their salaries with it.
And with institutions hiring faculty _to_ do research, not caring about teaching really, evaluated solely on research, they are basically there to do research... it actually doesn't sound that unreasonable to consider a portion of their salary overhead. The research couldn't get done if they weren't getting the salary, after all.
But anyway, yeah, like I said, I do agree with your original point that this is real money that is enough to fund real research.
For example, at many institutions it takes ~$250k to support a single researcher (Salary, health/personal insurance, institutional insurance) .
This is awesome to see, maybe YCR could be the next Bell Labs or something (although Google probably has a hold on that now).
(As often times the quality of research output is hard to gauge immediately without the greater context of time passing)
But of course this is just my useless speculation :)
[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
[2] https://intelligence.org/donate/
Two words: baseband processor.
The world really, really needs a fully open baseband processor.
My feeling is that the software to accomplish this is already largely there, but the hard part of getting a design to the fab and actually getting anyone to adopt it isn't.
I think there would also be a number of regulatory hurdles to cross, since this would end up being essentially an SDR, and the FCC (for example) already seems to fear wide public availability for those.
But yes, an open processor could help with a lot of open networking problems, even though it seems more like an engineering matter than research per se.
If someone wants to apply with an open baseband processor startup, applications are due Oct 13!
We have OsmocomBB, but it's limited to the 2G standard and comes with a ton of usage caveats pertaining to regulatory compliance and legality.
(Source: I work at MSR)
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/innova...
[2] https://thmatters.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/letter-re-closing...
Eh. That a pretty huge jump. Look, most new "tech" companies research is mostly PR, internal and external. If you're doing something you have little experience in and therefor can't evaluate, which success you aren't dependent on or necessarily benefit from and everyone will say how cool it is regardless then it's extremely hard to not cut corners and achieve real success.
Still exciting, but I wouldn't underestimate the challenge.
All my life I had wanted to go into industry, follow that classic Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel dream that many CS High Schoolers go into.
But recently, I got into research. The CollegeBoard opened up a class called AP Research I am now in, and I spent my last summer researching Machine Learning at my local private university. I was surprised by how much I loved it, the math behind it fascinates me (context: am currently taking Adv. Diff Eq and Linear Algebra my Senior Year.)
I am now trying my own Deep Learning algorithms and working on my paper. I have always been conflicted between industry and academia, since all of my fellow HS CS friends just want to found companies in industry. Things such as YCR make research a bigger dream for youth, whom I would currently argue are too under-exposed to it. It just doesn't seem as glamorous to them.
Thank you for YCR, it reminds me of the cool things research can do. I can't wait to hopefully apply one day.
Just go the best university you can and take as many ML and AI courses possible, there really isn't much you can do wrong.
Good luck.
I hope you'll expand on this. Is there something that YCR can do that academic research can't do? You might have more impact if you use that money to influence US and EU gov't to invest more in basic research. A 1% increase in annual gov't funding will be vastly larger than YCR's total budget.
The Gates Foundation is tackling difficult health issues that aren't profitable for companies and neglected by poor governments. They've found an underserved gap. What's the gap that YCR is uniquely suited to tackle?
It takes someone/something with some ability to make something happen. Are they going to change how all academic science is done? Probably not, but could they have an impact and begin a process in which academic science begins to respond/change? Yes, that is probable. Between YC and Google life science, things are happening...and it's going to take us (I'm assuming you are a scientist) to support this change.
Similarly, although I wouldn't guess is what YCR is thinking because it doesn't have the same cachet (though I really don't know what YCR thinks) is building tools for science. In my field (geoscience) there are boundless slopes of fresh, trackless powder in the mountains of computational geoscience just waiting to get skied. Building tools to do, say, probabilistic graphical modeling of stratigraphic systems requires approaching a traditionally intuitive and descriptive science with a much more formal and precise mindset and re-casting a lot of ideas and methods, while at the same time keeping everything accessible for those without the requisite background in probability or graphs... To me this gets closer to the real roots of science than a lot of what gets funded or makes headlines, but won't by itself get funded or make headlines (until you build it and sell it).
I need to steal that quote from you...
[1] http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-b...
As an astrophysicist in the thick of applications for jobs in both industry and academia, I strongly identify with the points raised in the article. While I consider my research slightly heretical with the potential to solve many big problems in astrophysics, I don't have any illusions that it will really lead to any practical developments. So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we're working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?
From this statement and, more generally, YC's focus on creating high-growth businesses, I'm guessing they'll be focused on long-term research with potential to disrupt markets and have practical impact.
> So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we're working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?
Are these the only options? You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on solving practical problems.
I don't mean to be dismissive of those working on solving practical problems! There's a good chance that will be me in the near future! I suppose my concern is more that people working on those sorts of things already have many more options and resources available to them. I just mean to state that if one grants that research without immediate practical application has some (perhaps qualitative) value for society, then the relative impact could be larger if it were focused more towards that kind of research. But of course the downside to that is that the resulting research...has no immediate practical application.
None of this should be taken as criticism exactly since both strategies have their advantages (and it's not my money anyway), it's just not quite clear from the post what sort of research is going to be funded.
If you're wondering about the criticism of IAS, see this quote:
"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"
Strong language. Especially coming from an organization that generally touts "ideas as useless." Well here's a model based exponentially upon the promise of "ideas." I sincerely hope you disrupt the current models, which have been severely hijacked by interest groups, short-term thinking, and governance.
So yes Sam, you have some bold ideas (you're not yet sharing). Put $10m down to validate them and bring them to the world. You've earned the chance. And if you succeed, you'll create a new model that touts the power of ideas, takes responsibility for them, but does not own them.
Whatever we can do to help.
Perhaps you're thinking of this [PG, 2005]: Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
This is specific to startup business ideas, not scientific ideas. And worthless != useless. Worthless (in the narrow sense) means you can't sell it for a lot of money.
It's pretty important that YCR groups have strong ties with the existing research communities — research collaborations tend to have a multiplicative effect.
So I'd expect to see papers coming out of YCR. However, I'd also expect to see many other forms of communication (e.g. blog posts, code releases, etc). In general, we'll tune our efforts to achieve the best research results and impact, rather than to fit the existing incentive systems.
The market is still the market. Not sure we should look this gift horse in the mouth. George R. Price figured out altruism can be reduced a math equation decades ago, it doesn't mean we can't embrace the good that comes out of decisions like this. :)
That comment was just me trying to apply my meager knowledge of startup economics here :)
That's equivalent to saying "won't paying in U.S. dollars to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits the U.S. Federal Reserve directly and hence increases the value of the U.S. dollars held?"
Obviously not the same scale, but you get where I'm going with this. Indirect incentives don't quite work that way.
For instance, trying to increase the value of USD with your work when billions of people on the planet are doing the same is basically impossible and unpredictable even if you're a great researcher / business leader / whatever, to say the least. The same is not the case with YC equity, where you can expect, with a fairly high probability, a significant increase in your equity if your research contributes hundreds of millions of dollars worth to a YC startup.
I'm not trying to be poke holes in the idea or anything like that, just genuinely wondering -- and the analogy to USD doesn't seem like the right answer.
"We plan to do this for a long time. If some of these projects take 25 years, that’s perfectly fine with us. "
Building an institution that supports this kind of long-term commitment is going to be a challenge. While there are plenty of organisations that work over those timescales, very long-term projects seem to me to be unusual - and not just because results are increasingly expected in the short-term, but because 25 years is about half of a long career and few people (imo) have the commitment and self-belief to embark on such a project. I can think of some, like SETI [1] and Mass Observation [2], but they tend to be highly distributed. The danger might be that you end-up with something like the Institute for Advanced Study [3] with its debatable productivity record.
Nevertheless, this is a massively positive announcement from YC. We need more stuff like this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_in...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study#C...
I'm not saying that such long-term projects are impossible, just that they are rare due to institutional and human reasons. And because they are rare, we don't have much experience with how to design successful support institutions.
This also feels like cheating because we're targeting extremely successful research. If we knew ahead of time which research would be successful it would be a lot cheaper to do.
- Will the researchers need to be based in the Bay Area - AFAIK: not the best place to raise a family?
- In the short term, how many researchers do you plan to hire?
We're starting relatively small (on the order of 10) and grow from there at a reasonable rate.
What does this phrase mean in English?
Theoretical breakthroughs are often inspired by real problems. For instance, information theory arose from practical problems of wartime communications. YCR will be in close proximity (geographic, organization, and intellectual) to lots of startups with interesting and worthwhile problems to solve.
Honestly I'd like to see Kickstarter take a stab at this too, providing the general populace with an outlet to support research projects.
YCR is a non-profit. Any IP developed will be made available freely to everyone.
We’re not doing this with the goal of helping YC’s startups succeed or
adding to our bottom line.These people will actually be part of the YC organization.
Is the reverse Zuckerberg a thing now? Can you share perhaps one example?
I have seen some difficult divorces between founders (with various combinations of technical and non-technical), and although some might suggest that YC should arbitrate those disputes more proactively, I think their policy of being willing to talk things through but not vote their shares is the right balance for their relationship with the companies.
But YC's success at fostering a positive, supportive culture between companies makes me quite optimistic that they can create a great environment when it's their responsibility.
A lot of "how do we fix academia" discussions might be (kind of) asking the wrong questions. Academia is a very wide cover over a lot of varied things. That cover is an institution. It has values, rules and ways of doing things. There might not be anything wrong with the institution per se, rather its success has brought to many things under its cover. For people, idea or pursuits that don't really belong there, it seems broken.
Take publishing. Publishing is a great practice and a lot of the conventions around it are really useful. But, it's not the only way to make information available, accessible, trustworthy, etc. There are other ways that might make more sense for some other project.
Here's hoping this effort has similarly transformative results!
Where would YC Research fit in this landscape? Would it be seeking government funds, and just offer a different institutional model than universities for hosting the research? Or would it be primarily based in private funding somehow (and how?)
Now, there are flaws to the use of electronic voting systems and the level of transparency required, but that is not what I mean.
What I mean is that every time I have run a large community the social structure that naturally emerges is not the one that we all allow ourselves to be governed by.
I'd like to research how tech could be used to empower lay citizens to shape their society in the way that they imagine it should be.
For example; I was interested in Google's internal experiment with voting transparency and delegation, and how it allows for a different kind of inclusive democratic process that isn't reflected in our existing systems.
One of the moonshot goals of the forum/community startup I created was to start to provide tools to support communities that shaped their own political and social structures, with an express goal of training them in the possibilities of being engaged in their society and then letting them use the tools to shape the real world in the same way that they shaped online societies.
Simply, I'd love to see research and later innovation into how societies and democratic functions could be.
When we talk about changing the world, I really mean it.
I always considered getting a PhD and becoming a researcher, but decided to remain an engineer for the time being because I've heard so much about how the academic research system is broken, both with politics and low pay.
If this model works, it might not only help existing researchers be more productive, but it might motivate other people considering this career to actually do it instead of other careers.
Are you going to require qualifications, or just sufficiently intriguing proposals?
Helping YC startups succeed might not be the primary goal, but it's silly to say the project isn't also aimed to help YC startups. Having access to a top quality research team can absolutely help startups succeed, so this is either disingenuous or surprisingly unimaginative.
I remember when I was in school people would often say that to get money, you have to find something you love doing and the money would come by itself. I don't know if that used to be true, but that is certainly no longer the case.
In general, doing good is at odds with earning money.
sama has written multiple times about the 'distractions' that pull founders away from building beautiful products. Things like attending conferences, networking, fundraising, etc...
Conservatively, the academic equivalent of those things takes up at least 80%+ of the time of a professor's time - and the more successful you become, the less time you actually dedicate to research. In the life sciences, it's not uncommon to have PIs with 30+ people in their groups, and they might be barely aware of the kind of research that's being done in their lab.
I cannot emphasize enough how thrilled I am by this. One tiny concern: it's currently much easier to get H1B visas for researchers working in educational institutions than it is for people working in private for profit companies. Is there any way YC can spin this research into a legal status that would allow it to recruit researchers through the 'easier' academic H1B pipeline?
We want to get the best people in the world, and I think YC equity is a pretty compelling thing to get. We're competing against e.g. Google, and Google stock is also a pretty compelling thing to get!
I assume that by getting google stock, someone can sell them easily in the public market. But how does it work with YC equity?
An idea for future research may be to do almost like a round of start-ups where a bunch of groups come to SF for 3 months but unlike start-ups you find the promising ones and keep them all and drop any that do not look promising. Basically thinking of ways to not put all your eggs in one basic. Naturally this becomes quite problematic if you're researching something highly complex that won't show signs of promise for a decade!
Are there plans to provide laboratory space for areas that require it? Would researchers be housed in some space in MV, or would they work out of their own space like YC startups?
Our government has historically underfunded research, and even more often one side funds it then the other gets into power and cuts it again. As a result, there are lots of ex-academics looking for more interesting ways of earning a living!
I decided not to go into academia many, many years ago, because a short look revealed that it seems to destroy the love of the subject matter more quickly than just about anything.
Now that I am partly back working on my PhD, I am still glad I didn't make it my main source of income, because now I have the freedom to do real research, rather than gaming the system of academia with minimal viable papers and incremental research re-gurgitating old insights. ("Doing X in Smalltalk" 10 years later: "Doing X in Java" 10 years after that: "Doing X in JavaScript" Sigh).
True fundamental innovation takes 15+years... stable ecosystems (govt policies, strong economies etc) are needed to foster this type innovation. YC is definitely a stable environment to foster fundamental inno.
Fundamental innovation also creates new methodologies in two or three areas, whether it be technology, market or implementation. Everything else is incremental innovation (new tech enhancing products in a known market), this can be achieved in 1 to 3 years. Kudos YC!
Your log files should be able to unmask me but for additional reasons I'd rather not publicly associate my claims above with my identity.
I'm curious what areas of research will be chosen, and how. I wonder if there is any room for a voting style 'the community would like to see resources put behind this idea' decision making process. (On the other hand, its not the community's money, so do what you will :)).
I'm guessing all of this will be in the Bay Area?
It'd be great if there was a way for regular folks to help out with this. It seems to be something genuinely intended to help people and I'd love to contribute in some way.
Congrats Y team! I'm can't wait to see what you come up for next announcement!
I really hope that we see some development of new types of programming languages. We seem to be stuck in a rut with procedural/OO/mostly-functional languages. Some research around flow based programming, especially related to machine learning. I can't help thinking we're missing something here...
The modern concept and frameworks of Responsible Research and Innovation might be a helpful starting point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsible_Research_and_Innov...
And what kind of ideas/research will be given priority? Will it be bench/desktop based research projects or applied to people lives directly?
I have some ideas on technologies that are harder to create and takes time, but actually want to own the IP at the end.
I suspect that one of these "YCs" is supposed to be someone other than YC, but its not clear which one.
@sama -is this only for severely resource intense research projects? And do you envision this turning into an alternative to graduate school too?
BTW the "Read more" at https://ycr.org/ point to the Y Combinator blog not to the post permalink. It will became confusing once you write a new post.
Yep, I'm planning on swapping in the permalink in a day or two, but just want to avoid making changes during this launch.
I got an applied math Ph.D., just to improve the good career I already had going in applied math and computing, had no intention of being a professor, but for a while, having to do with my wife in her long illness, I was a professor.
The biggest problem I had in research was just getting the mathematical word processing done. The typing was much more difficult than the research! I published some papers in some good journals and never had a paper rejected or needing significant revision. I could have done a lot more in research, but I was really interested just in making money.
For research in academics, that is, the STEM fields, I have long had a suggestion: Borrow from research in medicine!
Why, how, in what respects? Sure: Research in medicine also has a clinical side, and a lot of the research, applied research intended to connect with applications, very much needs the clinical side.
E.g., instead of all the seminars being professors and students presenting solutions still looking for applications, have about half the seminars with people from the real world outside academics present problems looking for solutions. Have professors with their students attack such problems. That way could get some problems to work on, simple, medium, and really difficult and important, e.g., P versus NP just from applications of optimization to, say, vehicle scheduling or communications network design. E.g., I was working on something applied and rediscovered k-D trees -- a few years earlier and I would have been the inventor of k-D trees. And there are other examples of starting with a real problem from the real world and getting good results for that problem, getting a good research problem, and getting some good research progress.
Besides, such research already has one application and, thus, is much more likely to have two or many more than two.
Have an expectation that a professor pursuing applications is a professional and needs to practice their profession. And the students need to be there also as apprentices.
Also, have codes of ethics, standards on how revenue is to be distributed, and professional peer review of the clinical practice.
For more, it would help if the venture capital community were ready, willing, and able to evaluate original research intended as the crucial core of startups.
I am not applicable for any visa in so-called "developed" countries - too old and without higher education (lack of which does not imply much in some cases, as one might see).
Hopefully YCR busts some of the myths perpetuated by industry.
Best of luck!
Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.
Not to sound contemptuous, but are there really people out there who consider the folks running YC "normal people?"
"the day-to-day experience of most people in this country" is nothing like any of the things Altman, PG, Livingston etc... experience on a daily basis.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-th...
The buckets aren't well sized there.
Sam's startup --like for many here-- was not a roaring success. Few of the entrepreneurs and engineers here on HN have an extra $10m in the bank after an experience like that.
I still think that this is a great (fantastic and maybe even unprecedented, depending on how serious he is about the duration) move by YC, though. I really hope that they nail the concept of research being different from shipping products, though-- the mentality that research is a product that has to be shipped out has largely killed the scientific research community of academia, warping it into a horrendous paper-churn for survival.
It'd be more to the point to say that it's a reminder than YC is part of an institution where a small class of people (investors and founders) routinely take home millions, while rank and file employees (even with employee #1, 2, 3...) get to only watch as the CEO and investors play with their Maclarens and spend their millions on whatever they're passionate about.
I still hope to find ways to put out useful information that will benefit people who are more "normal" than I am and I do have my concerns about the world being designed and run by so many people who absolutely cannot relate to the day-to-day experiences of most of their target audience/customers. But I don't know that hoping for "normal" people to do the design work is in any way useful.
I don't know what the answer is, but it seems like a lost cause to want people to do brilliant design work and also be normal. If you are that brilliant, you simply are not normal. Period.
He dropped out of Stanford, founded Loopt (which raised $30 million and then acqui-sold for $43 -- and I'm sure Sequoia got the bulk of it), was then made a YC partner and finally appointed president. His Wikipedia page says he's made some angel investments in successful companies like AirBNB, but my question is: "With what money?" Maybe he sold some private shares of these companies at some point. There's nothing wrong with that. But again where did the original money come from? Family?
I just don't get it. Please explain to me how dropping out of college and having your only startup fail leads to (a) being handed one of the most prestigious and influential positions in SV and (b) having so much money you can donate $10 million dollars like it's chump change. How does that make any sense in this universe?
pg started YC and deserves all the credit for basically inventing the accelerator archetype. He can do whatever he wants and I guess he thought sama was the best guy for the job. Maybe he is. Heck, I'll even admit that I think he's done a good job so far, although I also think plenty of people would be equally adept at watching a golden goose lay eggs.
I think SV -- and YC especially -- perpetrate a few huge myths which cause people to have unrealistic expectations of their lives and ventures. ("There aren't enough engineers!", for example. Just last week, sama was saying how easy it is to live in SV if you work at Facebook, make a $150k+ salary and got a $75k signing bonus... a situation he was pawning off as "average" but is actually highly above average.) These lofty, then unfulfilled expectations then cause depression in vast amounts of people, both inside the Valley and out.
To me, sama is a colossal SV myth, incarnate. "Look! If you're smart enough, you can rocket to the moon! Even if you drop out of school and your only startup fails!"
I don't understand the full story, apparently, but I just hope people aren't fooled. There is more than meets the eye, here.
I made single-digit millions from the Loopt acquisition. Almost all the money I've made has been as an investor. I got lucky in that the first few investments I made in 2009 (very small dollar amounts) were really good, so I was able to raise capital to keep investing at a much larger scale with other peoples' money. I didn't have much liquidity until last year.
Takeaway 1: the easiest, lowest-risk way in the world to make a lot of money is to get fees for investing other peoples' money.
Takeaway 2: if you make money that way I think you should give a lot of it away.
Takeaway 3: FWIW this is a lot of money for me, but it's what I most want to support.
As a side note, I was pointing out that living in SV is becoming possible only if you get a job like that one, and that that's really a problem.
But hot damn! If you've been so successful people are literally having a hard time believing it's true... that's... that's... I don't even know.
But the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that life is about opportunities. If you want them, you have to put yourself in the position to get them (as sama did). More importantly, you have to make the best of them (as sama has). But many, many people who don't deserve opportunities get them (inheritance, for example) and many, many people who do deserve them, don't get them. They did all the right things... they simply were never given a shot by bosses, would-be cofounders, investors, etc. (Cue "Lose Yourself".)
A question I've been pondering a lot recently is the power of talent and whether or not it'll eventually rise to the top. How efficient is our society at finding "the best"? I tend to believe that someone as ridiculously talented as, say, Elton John, will always emerge. But then you hear the story of how someone like Matthew McConaughey was discovered (director of Dazed and Confused found him in a bar at 2am and said come to the set tomorrow -- zero acting experience) and you want to slap yourself.
And if you get into the genetic and familial lotteries (how smart you are, how good looking you are, are you black?, etc), then you'll just go completely crazy when you realize how unfair the world is.
In any case, from his answer, it looks like sama is a talented guy who put himself in the right position to succeed and is now an outlier on the normal curve. Good for him. It's gotta be somebody, might as well be him.
http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part1.html
Anyway, if you would like any more than baseline success (where baseline success = working really hard to get into a profession with barriers to entry, like lawyer or doctor), you will have to deal with risk and uncertainty. You can't account for life without accounting for luck.
But life is long, and over the long-term, luck has a way of averaging out. And then the big question is how well did you capitalize on the luck you were given? A lot of people put themselves in positions where they have no chance of getting lucky, because they don't like the vulnerability and uncertainty that comes with realizing just how much of their life comes down to luck. That pretty much guarantees that they'll only be exposed to the unlucky events.
1) I had some strong publications early on in my grad career (first 2 years) so it made it much easier to get to the eventual finish line without much hassle.
2) I'm not a US citizen, and graduating means that the immigration pathway gets a lot easier (EB-1 green card application instead of EB-2, for instance, and since I'm from India that's a huge difference).
3) My advisor let me study/work on what the hell I wanted in my final 2 years (essentially some macroecon + finance research at the Wharton school, and spending a bunch of time reading up and working on large scale graph computation) so the opportunity cost was low to "finish up" the main line of thesis work, with the understanding that any future academic career was out of the question.