EleVR leaving Y Combinator Research

We're not a startup and not looking to reach a broad audience, get investors, or create a product. We even wrote a thing a while back regarding our not being a startup, because it is an unfamiliar concept to many people: http://elevr.com/were-not-a-startup/

The HARC group at Y Combinator Research has/had an ambitious vision of bringing back the basic research model that led to many fundamental innovations in the 60s, including a handful of groups in addition to ours. The kind of research that creates enormous value that cannot be captured by individual investors or companies, but that lifts the industry/people as a whole.

I think if world events had been different, the timing would have worked out well for a resurgence of this kind of research.

Ok nice chat, HN. You're a weird place.

Vi

There is no real non-profit research (unless you really want to go back to become a university research lab); peoole want the results and commericalizd them.

I would be surprised if none have reached out througout the years.

I know what you mean about irrelevance. Maybe I can be less so.

No surprise that most of your new technology is not within reach of attracting commercial interest since that was not the idea to begin with.

>Unfortunately, a combination of forces in the world make nonprofit long-term research a tough sell right now. It doesn’t matter how good we are at what we do. Everyone is overextended trying to solve all the world’s problems at once, and we’re in the unpopular space of being neither for-profit nor directly and immediately philanthropic.

So true, but I actually feel like it was a much more rare combination of events which made it possible to do what you have done. It's almost never going to be an easy sell. You were so fortunate and wise to have jumped at the opportunity to research in a way that few will ever experience. Even if you did not have very much chance of making it your life's work without appropriate funding over such a term in advance, you seem to have immediately utilized what you did have by devoting the maximum amount toward as much technical progress as possible. From experience I say that carrying on as if you had funding for longer term open-ended projects is the best way to make technical progress without distraction. It can still take many years to get good enough to make even an exponential increase in the breakthrough rate become tangible or useful though.

I'm an extreme alternative researcher where my life's work has been to independently out-research some of the most well-funded petrochemical giants without a PhD myself using the same equipment on my own analytical benches. So I guess that is ambitious too. Took a while to get good here and people didn't think it could be done but experimentation & discovery always was one of my strengths. Paying for it as I go by operating at an insignificant fraction of their cost, and when the opportunity is there, prioritizing commercial projects where money can be made relative to the rate at which it would cost them to do it themself. Having a commercial component in service to such high rollers in their regular operation was the path of least resistance for the young me to gamble on the likelihood of my ships continuing to come in.

I like clean environments, would prefer less toxicity and have always been an extreme energy saver so otherwise I don't need more tankers on my own behalf, but it's our local industry, and the most promising thing for survival when I was young was to get into alternative fuels and additives, so it is what it is. Even though I've been a small-time operator, the environment is a hell of a lot better off than it would be with anyone who would have otherwise replaced me. Battery research seems more promising than ever now, and I feel so bad for having done almost nothing in that field but it would probably take a couple years to get up to speed. Not having actual prosperity I could never start that without giving up my current life's work, but it does seem like an area where butt could be kicked to widespread advantage.

As long as you need to devote excessive effort toward survival activities, you never get to really do what you prefer to do or are best at for enough of the time to accomplish but a fraction of your technical potential.

Anyway, in a situation where a good year still yields only 1% of breakthroughs that could be made profitable over the near term on the commercial side, it was essential to keep the nose to the grindstone maximizing the amount of experimentation. So you end up finding an abundance of excess stuff which would be good for other kinds of businesses or could become the foundation for entirely new businesses, most of which would require capital so that would be out of the question. Without capital having been available to get rolling doing this, there has never been anything like a network in place. When you're making unprecedented progress on technical breakthroughs that can be exploited for survival using the resources you already have, one of the least rewarding gambles you can make is to divert attention to pusuit of elusive new sources of backing rife with dead ends and unfavorable terms to boot when there is interest.

Any way you look at it there's an incredible balance where you can't depend too much on continued good fortune and you can't justify dramatically slowing technical progress by diverting the amout of resources it takes to avoid the ravages of all possible bad fortune with absolute certainty.

You'll get better at this.

You are going to do extremely well, already experienced at getting up on the tightrope without a net not knowing what lies at the other end, tripping up, falling off, badly injured and now very near death in this incarnation.

Even if the Grim Reaper completes the call, you are still willing to try again in the same type situation where a single mistake or miscalculation can be devastating.

Ambitious people you are.

If you want to continue to try it the same way all you are going to need is a better network. You've accomplished a huge milestone with only a single obstacle remaining, not like when you were first getting started any more.

And I'm here to remind you that there are unexplored alternatives however unlikely, with the best option probably not thought of yet.

I would get to work heavily researching both of these possibilities thoroughly. You all need to talk to the maximum people everyday anyway in various network directions and during the hard sell maybe you already have a product or service that could be offered for a fee when you run into someone who could not provide you with financial help otherwise. Salvage from what you have accomplished if possible. Whenever someone doesn't respond positively get two names & numbers from them and you will eventually never be able to call them all.

Seems like the best opportunity would be expected when you find someone who is benevolent and directly has a close relationship with a highly suitable potential partner, and you have their trust to the degree that they will actually make the introduction for you. You would be surprised too when a contact does the opposite and gives you the number of someone they dislike who they want you to bug instead of them. If you expect the unexpected this may also have some potential itself. Benevolence seems to be what you need for mere survival now rather than the overall strength which could give a bigger impact in the long run.

YCR sounded like an interesting concept to me since nonprofits are one of the alternatives I have always considered experimenting with. Extreme money-making under that umbrella can be done where it's perfectly legitimate to optimize for producing new or providing low-cost already-baked technology and licensing it or providing a service around it for much more money since you're just going to use the income no differently than donations for continued operations anyway, with no greedy shareholders to get in the way. With the impression I get of the YC network it just seems like butt could be kicked through YCR somehow unforseen.

It's almost always going to be impossible for most to survive financially as a byproduct of what you do without diverting extreme effort away from what you actually do at least occasionally.

You wouldn't have done this if you weren't going to someday be comfortable enabling other companies to bring in more income or solve more problems leveraging and commercializing your breakthroughs than you would ever expect for yourself to begin with. That's the business model that exists which you can not help finding yourself in without trying.

Not too dissimilar to me who has had no choice but to operate in a capitalist market when I have not been a capitalist, merely an entrepreneur focusing on research overwhelmingly more so than development, according to my resources.

The last time I can think of when the tech landscape looked like this was the early 90s, when everybody was hung up on artificial intelligence, pocket computing, handwriting recognition, voice recognition, WebTV, 3D graphics, and virtual reality. We ended up getting many of those, 15 years later, but the real huge story of the decade was the WWW, which was really unimpressive when it first came out (I remember comparing it unfavorably to Gopher in 1993; Gopher at least was semi-organized).

The WWW overshadowed everything else because the problem it was solving - which many people didn't know they had - was more universal than the problems solved by any other technologies that had just entered the market, and its solution was just barely viable enough to solve that problem. Meanwhile, the tech for many of the other much hotter problems of the time was 15-20 years out; they couldn't actually be solved by the processing power available in 1992. I wonder if there's a similar overlooked-but-universal problem that someone in a garage is working on now, that'll spark a new wave similar to the dot-com boom.