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Comment by billme | Hacker News Reader

R&D is not dead.

R&D has been rising globally for over 70 years with no major declines. Globally, $1.7 trillion USD a year is currently spent on RD; roughly 2% of the global GDP. There is more research going on right now than at any point in history at any scale.

R&D, similar to startups, is full of broken dreams, surviver bias, etc. — those complaining their source of funding dried up, they never got lucky, etc.

There is no magic recipe for success in R&D — and anyone that tells you they are able to outperform the market at scale as it relates to R&D outcomes is lying.

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> There is no magic recipe for success in R&D — and anyone that tells you they are able to outperform the market at scale as it relates to R&D outcomes is lying.

This is complete nonsense. This logic applies well to stock and bond valuation, where you have armies of traders optimizing from public information. It's a pretty frictionless market

It's like telling a parent their kids can't outperform the market at scale in science. Of course they can. They just can't outperform the market at scale in math, athletics, leadership, foreign languages, science, and everything else all at the same time.

In virtually all other domains, you have better organizations and worse organizations. I've been in organizations that do R&D brilliantly, and ones that do it horribly. Did the ones that do it horribly die because of market forces? No. They did other things better.

An organization has many pieces: R&D, marketing, branding, advertising, legal, engineering, sales, strategy, finance, logistics, etc. Most organizations I've worked at were really good at maybe one or two of those, in most areas, followed industry best-practices, and were pretty bad in a few.

I can promise you that MANY people can outperform the market at scale in relationship to R&D outcomes. We just can't outperform the market at scale in ALL of those areas at the same time. Organizations and individuals have areas of focus.

What is the recipe? — (You have written a lot of words, no recipe.)

Honestly, love research, would be happy to be wrong, but all I hear you saying is someone did it so it must be possible— that’s called survivor bias, it’s not a recipe and it would not double the global output of R&D for the next 10-1000 years.

There isn't a simple recipe someone can follow. A recipe is what brings you up to "industry best practices," and about where a typical business might perform.

Excellence requires focus, dedication, thinking things through from first principles, having the right people in place, etc.

The closest I can offer to a recipe is to hire a CEO / President / co-founder early on who has a track record of having R&D successes in former positions, who has a great depth of knowledge, who thinks deeply, and have them focus the organization on R&D, and to do this before the culture is set.

Of course, that's not always a winning strategy. If you do that, that same person is unlikely to have that same depth in, for example, customer engagement, negotiations, or legal.

Most hard things don't have recipes ("What's the recipe for an effective fighter jet?"). If they did have simple recipes, they usually wouldn't be hard. But that doesn't make them impossible (we have a whole fleet of effective fighter jets).

To be direct: you literally failed to acknowledge my core point in response to your prior comment, that is what you’re describing is “survivor bias” — then went on in the comment I am currently responding to say a recipe is to fund, hire, cofounder, etc - the survivors. Recipe you provided was still based on survivor bias, at best an optimization based strategy — and would never double the output globally of R&D for any meaningful amount of time.

To be direct: You made a nonsense statement, and now your changing your claims. Your statement was: "anyone that tells you they are able to outperform the market at scale as it relates to R&D outcomes is lying." This is a false statement.

Your question was never about doubling global output of R&D. That's not a point one can even argue meaningfully; there's no way to offer more than an opinion there.

Your question was about being "able to outperform the market at scale." It was nonsense. Plenty of people and organizations can and do outperform the market, consistently, over many decades. That's not a survivorship bias, any more than weightlifters beating the general population at lifting weights is survivorship bias, or that Stanford CS majors have stronger technical skills than the general market is survivorship bias. It's a counterexample. Survivorship bias would be there if these were one-offs (company or individual makes ONE breakthrough, at random).

I'm signing off this thread. This is dumb.

One could even argue that a lot of startups are VC backed R&D. Only VC does not care for the scientific, not-directly monetizable outcomes.

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