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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

> Startups are not a good place to do research

I saw Alan Kay give a talk on Squeak in NYC when I was a little Sega Genesis kid... he made me want to be a programmer because I hoped one day to work on the stuff he does the way he does it. That's like wanting to be an astronaut.

The tricky bit is that startups pretend that they're doing that kind of work to hire engineers (or get press/funding/etc).

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Often times they demand that you uphold the fiction in order to work for them, which makes for fun social experiments in deflating mass self-delusion.

Them: "We just really want to find people who are passionate about this work and these tools!"

Me: "Anybody who is telling you they're 'passionate' about making yet-another-dashboards-as-a-service product on top of a tired old Java Spring software stack is lying to you."

Them: "So you're not passionate about dashboards or Java?"

Me: "No. No I am not. What I am is capable of fixing your performance and scale problems so that you don't lose your reference customers and destroy any chance you have at acquisition or IPO. Look on the bright side. At least I'm not lying to you."

Them: "Oh. I see."

Me: "I'm passionate about making money."

You captured 18 months of personal depression in 7 lines :)

Sorry you've been dealing with depression. From experience I know that's a tough thing to grapple with.

Being compelled to maintain sustained cognitive dissonance is a form of low-grade chronic stress, and unfortunately depression is often a side-effect of chronic stress.

I'm always weary of places that are more interested in building a cult than a company for precisely these kinds of reasons.

Get well, mate.

A lot of us have been there. Hell, I'm there now, but in a far more mild way than I have been in the past, luckily for me. It got so bad at one point a few years ago that I wound up taking four whole months of medical leave due to severe depression and panic attacks, so I know how bad it can be, and you have my sympathy. If you think it would help, you might look into doing the same.

I know it can be super hard to motivate yourself to take the necessary steps when you're depressed, but hopefully the thought of some relief is enough of a motivator, if only barely. The first step is to see a psychiatrist if you haven't already.

If you need/want someone (not a mental health professional) to talk to, my e-mail address is in my profile. Either way, I hope things get better for you soon :)

Was this comment supposed to go in the "Non-passionate developer" [1] thread?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12207970

Bravo!

I think I agree with him at this point. Which is a bit sad. 12 years ago I went into academia because I wanted to do self-driven research, but then I realized academia isn't a good place to do research unless you are at the top of the hierarchy.

Then ~6 years ago I tried starting a startup, working for startups, but as Kay points out that's not a great place to do research either. Really, you need to be ruthlessly market- and production-focused.

So I guess my first two guesses for where I could do my own research were wrong. My new theory: The best place to do research is in your garage.

Let's see if I still feel the same way 6 years from now.

Aren't some BigCos a good place to do research? Have you tried that approach?

Hard to afford a garage in Silicon Valley unless you rent it.

Taleb has the right idea for how to do research, in my opinion.

First you get "fuck you money" (which is not necessarily millions and millions of dollars, just enough money so you don't have to be a wage slave anymore).

Second, you move to some place cheap with low upkeep costs and a nice garage/mad-science-laboratory on premises. That's where you do your research.

This is a really compelling vision but I've always wondered how one stays relevant in this scenario. Science is a conversation and it is really hard to avoid becoming an equivalent of a babbling madman standing on a soapbox when doing research on your own terms in your own garage.

well, I recommend you ask https://twitter.com/nntaleb about it directly then. he is not a hermit withdrawn from the world, but he doesn't work in academia, or for a private corporation, or for a government agency. he does research (in mathematics mostly, as well as finance, risk modeling, and interestingly enough ancient Levantine languages) and participates in those communities even though he is not employed by an institution.

Mr. Taleb is an outlier - a black swan if you will ;)

And he is a bit of a babbling madman - with his share of controversial ideas and vocal rejection of establishment.

You just need some form of reckoning. You can use markets. You can use advisors. You can use some metric you set for yourself. You don't need society to be sane, but you do need to replace it with something.

Pulling straight from my quotes file:

  "What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart
  people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and
  simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property
  quickly and easily, and move on to another
  conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can’t do that in
  industry. Can’t do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience,
  scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few
  mathematicians and social scientists do, too."

  -- Bill Tozier, [[http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2006/07/17/diverse-themes-observed-at-gecco-2006][Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006]]

Indeed. I'm an HCI researcher - I've been in academia, in startups, and now in R&D at a large successful company.

I'm much happier at the latter. None of the pressure to publish/write grant proposals all the time like in academia, and much more time to actually sit down and think thoroughly about problems than in startups.

There are of course downsides - you don't have much control over the product like you might have in a startup, and you can't pursue completely crazy blue sky stuff like you might be able to as a grad student; but it's worked out for me.

If anyone reading this is interested in HCI research and designing future hardware; if you're as comfortable programming as you are with a soldering iron as you are in Sketch as you are reading academic papers and reflecting deeply about the field; please send a resume/portfolio to the email in my bio.

I think that probably works well in larger enterprises that are intentionally separating their Research orgs from their Product orgs. So that the former isn't ultimately beholden to the same success criteria as the latter. Since the whole point of Research is that it informs future Product, not Product demanding Research.

Though I've noticed an unfortunate trend where large enterprises create a Research org that isn't any such thing and is instead just an incubator for the Product org. It seems to result in sadness for both sides.

Yes, startups are not a good place to do research. Since the redesign of YC, with less funding per startup, startups are intended to fail, not pivot, if the original design doesn't work. When you think about it, YC's process is waterfall development.

PayPal was a huge pivot. Their original business was hardware security tokens.

He also said: > Value judgements require a value system.

When he talks about research, he's valuing a certain kind of research: laboratory, explorative research that may or may not reach a market.

Startups are, from a certain point of view, research in that they try to discover ways to fulfill customer needs, whether customers know they have them or not.

A few examples just from YC: Airbnb, Twitch, Dropbox. In particular, Airbnb discovered a need that people really had. Is this not research? I think it is, depending on your value system.

I think startups can be considered research, but one has to characterize it fairly. It is not technology research, it is not physics research. Your description of trying "to discover ways to fulfill customer needs, whether customers know they have them or not" is a fair research topic description. Though I personally disagree with it, IMO startups are doing research on how to get rich quick; discovering customer needs is only tangential to the issue and is not usually the best way to reach IPO/exit. Sometimes you get good products that don't suck (e.g. Dropbox), most of the times you get scams that try to capture as much users as possible to enable a good exit (and then product shuts down). So in a way, a lot of startups can be considered experiments in persuading users and investors.

I think startups, as they have been fashioned by the current venture capital pipeline, aren't a good place to do research. We need to redefine how people/community/customers participate in supporting the research/prototyping phase of building.

Creating a community of makers building together in an open and discoverable fashion is the first step. It first allows you to combine marketing with building, and attract community earlier, thus finding more knowledge-share, and hopefully building better products quicker.

Next, by sharing what you're building, we're able to tap into that community making along side and following your journey by using crowdfunding. Specifically continuous crowdfunding during the prototyping and research phase.

Now that you're building a company/product with your community , you can find support all along the way. Your audience is happy in sharing and support in the successes and challenges you will face.

Next when you're ready to launch a real product (after the prototyping/research phase) you should be able to sell pre-orders and crowdfund bringing these products to a mass market.

Beyond this you should be able to continue selling those items, then repeat this entire process with the community momentum, trust, and social proof you've now built up.

We're working to build that future for startups/companies/products at Baqqer. https://baqqer.com/

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