Hard Tech is Back

http://blog.samaltman.com/hard-tech-is-back

by firloop • 10 years ago

453 285 10 years ago

blog.samaltman.com

falcolas• 10 years ago

So, was the Cruise acquisition for the talent or the tech? How many other "Hard Tech" startups have had successful exits, when compared to how many have failed? How does this ratio compare to software startups?

BinaryIdiot3• 10 years ago

So, was the Cruise acquisition for the talent or the tech?

It has to be the tech or tech + talent. Are there enough people worth $1 billion or more to do only a talent acquisition?

taneq• 10 years ago

Yes. That's the thing about acqui-hiring. As much as we like to pretend that with enough dollars you can buy the talent required to own a product-space, the fact is that in certain spaces, individual mortals can create billions of dollars of value. You just have to pick the right space and the right individual.

shoyer• 10 years ago

I'm sure the tech was part of it, but my guess is that they were mostly buying it for the ready made team.

I think this is pretty similar to the Monsanto acquisition of Climate Corporation (where I worked) several years ago.

If you're a big traditional company, building an innovative technology team from scratch is really hard, even if you're willing to spend a lot of money on it. It takes a lot of time and effort, and you probably don't have the internal leaders or culture to attract top talent.

Buying a promising startup and continuing to operate it as an independent organization is a straightforward (if expensive) way to solve this bootstrapping problem. From a strategic perspective, it can make complete sense if the opportunity cost of getting a product to market a year or two late can be measured in billions of dollars. There are a lot of advantages to being first to market.

emcq2• 10 years ago

It's both. They still have a long way to go for autonomous driving, but they have a young ambitious team and their leadership seems very strong.

Relative to a company like Google, their weakness may be on the hardware side, but GM likely has access to very strong mechanical engineers, and they certainly now have the funds to go out and hire more folks.

minimaxir• 10 years ago

I'm all for taking Medium thought pieces on the fundraising environment down a peg, but the problem with Hard Tech is that it requires a nontrivial amount of venture capital. You can't be ramen-profitable when your startup requires purchasing cars for testing or renting giant computing clusters for training AI models.

In relative contrast, it is trivial and risk-free to make a lean MVP for a generic Uber-for-X and send in a YC application.

Retric• 10 years ago

You can go pretty far with AI using just a few GPU's.

10's of Teraflops is cheap.

hyperbovine2• 10 years ago

Take it away, Koons Crooks.

hobofan4• 10 years ago

Purchasing a Titan X for 1k is still quite painful if you do a startup with virtually no funding.

Source: I just did that.

ethbro4• 10 years ago

Curious what YC could do from their perspective to leverage their semi-unique position here as well.

The big cloud vendors are probably more geared towards the infrastructure side, but given problems (a) that "hard tech" requires non-trivial capex, (b) that many startups fail (nature of the space), & (c) that YC sees a lot of startups, then maybe there are opportunities to more efficiently handle "hard tech" needs by time-sharing common resources.

There are always going to be bespoke needs, but things like shared vehicle fleets with standardized interfaces, etc seem plausible when you've got a stable of 5 startups, with each being perfectly fine only testing their autonomous UAV / vehicle platform Tuesdays and Thursdays (or once a month) and letting someone else use it the rest of the time.

nailer7• 10 years ago

There's a company in my e.f. cohort who do most of their work on a box with 48GB of video memory. Another regularly spins up clusters to do machine learning on large video datasets to identify theft.

Most accelerators have partners that can get this stuff for cheap or free - including physical boxes.

rattray• 10 years ago

e.f. cohort?

waterlesscloud2• 10 years ago

That's a good point. Don't YC companies get some crazy amount of AWS credit?

bliti7• 10 years ago

Exactly. I've worked on autonomous vehicles by myself to the point of acquiring a vehicle for development. But the vehicle's conditions were less than ideal and it became too expensive to repair. I am using parts from it to mock up some prototypes. Acquiring a reliable vehicle for development is too expensive. Mind you, I'm an individual working on this as a hobby project. A startup will have a harder time due to overhead costs.

If anyone wants to talk autonomous vehicles feel free to email me. I enjoy it. :)

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

Did you try using simulations? I built a rigid body car driving simulation in college using OpenGL. Now I get a lot of inbound interest from the self driving car geeks.

mmcclure2• 10 years ago

I catch your drift, but I don't think it's necessarily true for all "hard tech" problems. For example, putting together a proof of concept or even an MVP for a robotics product (maybe not drivable cars) is totally feasible, but taking that kind of product to market absolutely does require a huge amount of capital. The latter part of that equation is where something like YC is going to provide an immense amount of value.

vonmoltke• 10 years ago

The main issue with brassboard prototypes done on a shoestring budget is that they don't show well. On top of that, they carry the risk of not being able to go from brassboard to finished product. This was probably implied by Sam's comment that fundraising will still be harder for such a company.

forgottenpass2• 10 years ago

I'm all for taking Medium thought pieces on the fundraising environment down a peg, but the problem with Hard Tech is that it requires a nontrivial amount of venture capital.

I don't begrudge the fact profitability isn't tied to how much work went into building something, how novel the product is, or whatever. Those bloggers are great because they point out startups like to use the cachet of "solving hard problems" to try and impress me with their less-impressive products.

This blog post makes me laugh because why does it matter to a venture fund if they're "hard tech" or not? It shouldn't, should it? It's about business potential, right? If "hard tech" does that, wouldn't you just invest in it without bragging on it and hope the competition doesn't notice? Maybe Sam is making this post because kids are starting to wise up to the fact "hacker" isn't anything more than something they let you call yourself to feel cool when don't go home after 40 hours. Now the tech is "hard," so nobody asks "why am I wasting my life on this piece of shit?"

nailer7• 10 years ago

My understanding is that deep tech (or hard tech) is more defensible than otherwise.

tlogan• 10 years ago

One problem is finding VC capital: majority of VCs in SV don't know that hard-tech so they don't want to invest into something they are not familiar with.

On the other hand, the problem might be also that founders which base their startup on technology gave up too easily when looking for funding. So they gave up and get cozy and well paid job at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

And YC application process does not help here: if something is "hard tech", then YC is probably not going to fund it. Why? There are so many application and people who are very very good at hard tech are not type of founders YC would like to invest in since they do not have great communication skills. So their YC application is probably confusing, there is no clear pitch, etc. They cannot explain their start up as "Uber for X" - since it is.... complicated.

In other words, if we get few founders who got rich and get into VC business because they did some hard-tech then we will have more hard tech companies. As of now, majority VCs did some social network / uber-for-X and that is how they got into VC business.

nabeel• 10 years ago

This is generally true, most VCs are afraid of things that have strong technical risk. But the point of the post is that starting a few years ago some VCs are finally catching up to founders on this. YC, Lux Capital, AH, Khosla, and of course our firm are trying to increase funding in the space and will continue to.

cbhl• 10 years ago

At the University of Waterloo Waterloo, the Velocity Venture Fund (http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/funding/velocity-fund/) awards an additional $10k prize to a hardware team every term to help offset the additional cost, so they could end up walking away with $35k (as opposed to $25k for a software company).

Naritai2• 10 years ago

Sure, but that only serves to emphasize the difficulties faced by companies that need to do true R&D. Your typical HW startup has way more than 10k more costs than a typical SW startup.

(Yes, I know the issue is apps vs. tech, not SW vs. HW, but there are parallels)

argonaut3• 10 years ago

AI is cheaper than you think. A ridiculous deep learning cluster can probably be had for < $30k.

scottlocklin• 10 years ago

Can anyone actually identify a profitable business area which DL has solved? I haven't seen one yet.

te_chris• 10 years ago

This is the rationale of EF (said as someone who was in it). They've recognised that IP is VERY valuable again and are capitalising on it in a massive way.

tclmeelmo4• 10 years ago

What is meant by "Hard Tech"? Hardware technology, nontrivial problems, or something else?

nmrm23• 10 years ago

Hard Tech means nontrivial problems in all varieties, but Altman is particularly "excited about AI (both general AI and narrow AI applied to specific industries, which seems like the most obvious win in all of startups right now), biotech, and energy."

(edit: okay, okay, maybe the article isn't clear.)

tclmeelmo4• 10 years ago

I didn't find it to be clear, otherwise I wouldn't have asked.

SV has its own jargon, and not being from SV, I think it's fair to want to clarify what is meant by a capitalized phrase like "Hard Tech" in case there is a deeper meaning known to those inside SV.

mod• 10 years ago

If the article was clear, it would have replaced "hard" with "difficult." Hard is ambiguous, especially when talking about technology.

3pt14159• 10 years ago

Lasers, satellites, really accurate rifles, decade-long life extensions, industrial meat production without a nervous system, advanced optics, cheaper / better sensors, swarm AI.

In contrast Facebook is largely just a couple of web forms and some Big O problems at scale.

TheBiv• 10 years ago

> In contrast Facebook is largely just a couple of web forms and some Big O problems at scale.

Yes, and Steph Curry is just a guy shooting a ball in a basket.

hyperbovine2• 10 years ago

You must find it puzzling that FB is arguably the world leader in AI research right now.

jsprogrammer2• 10 years ago

In contrast Facebook is largely just a couple of web forms and some Big O problems at scale.

Facebook is doing more than that. Mark recently claimed that they are working on "a world-class News Feed, and a world-class messaging product, and a world-class search product, and a world-class ad system, and invent[ing] virtual reality, and build[ing] drones".

mozumder• 10 years ago

To me, "Hard Tech" is more science oriented, like the Space Shuttle material that you can hand hold at 1500 degrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9Yax8UNoM

Stuff that's non-obvious but amazing and makes you think sci-fi... DARPA does a lot of this kind of stuff.

Definitely non-trivial problems, most likely hardware, maybe materials science or something in the other science fields. Maybe new math, or solvers that take days to run on thousands of CPUs. Stuff that might take thousands of man-hours to develop.

Not sure how YC would be involved here, as this is expensive to develop, but DARPA has a funding model.

gist3• 10 years ago

A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves

Why can or should criticism only come from [1] people that are building things themselves? What about the press (as only one example) or people who write books? What about people teaching in colleges? What about people leaving comments on HN or any other forum?

Criticism only valid if coming from someone building something themselves? Don't agree with that. [2]

[1] Which to me by the choice of words is what is meant by this statement.

[2] If that is the case companies should never solicit any feedback from their customers about their product or their business model.

steffan• 10 years ago

> A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves
Why can or should criticism only come from [1] people that are building things themselves? What about the press (as only one example) or people who write books? What about people teaching in colleges? What about people leaving comments on HN or any other forum?

Another interpretation is that while criticism can come from any source, those who are not building things themselves necessarily have a different perspective than those who do, and therefore their arguments should be heard in that context.

gist3• 10 years ago

those who are not building things themselves

Also there are people not currently building but that have built something in the past (or assisted others who have done so). Such as sama or pg.

have a different perspective than those who do, and therefore their arguments should be heard in that context.

That perspective could also be more valuable in some cases. Keep in mind that many of today's "disrupters" are people outside a traditional industry who actually do great things exactly because they have little experience and are not jaded. Fresh outlook not restrained by traditional thinking.

The problem that I had (if you want to call it that) was not that sama made that statement. It's the fact that I feel he implied a negative which was not warranted. Plus the use of "usually" when the truth is nobody is in a position to know the exact experience or background of someone offering criticism particularly what they have done in the past. [1] [2]

[1] There could be people even here on HN who have extremely significant backgrounds in building things that prefer to remain anonymous.

[2] I am now thinking maybe this is why PG has others read his essays. So he could simply change a sentence or insert a word and avoid criticism and excessive footnotes.

forgottenpass2• 10 years ago

Why can or should criticism only come from people that are building things themselves?

Because the people who associate themselves with their products will bite their tongues for business reasons. If Sam pretends like the only people who worth hearing criticize from are exactly the group that won't voice their criticism, he can act like there isn't valuable criticism coming in.

Am I building something? Who knows, I use this account anonymously so I can call bullshit, not be a kissass because I'm worrying about my reputation and the reputation of my products (if they exist).

gist3• 10 years ago

Am I building something? Who knows, I use this account anonymously

Hah! Exactly. Look at my footnote [1] to my comment in this thread.

lmm5• 10 years ago

I think "the thing you are building is too trivial", as a criticism, implicitly expands to "you should be building something more important than the thing you're building". And it's correct to be skeptical of any "you should x" claim from someone who is not xing.

_delirium2• 10 years ago

I just read it as a bit of defensiveness that slipped in to the opening. "People claim we're not doing real stuff but where's THEIR real stuff huh?" Agree the essay would've been better without it, but at least for me it's easy to skip over.

kornork2• 10 years ago

Is there a list somewhere of these kind of companies?

nailer7• 10 years ago

Not sure, but biggest one so far is probably Deepmind, from the UK.

Magic Pony (machine learning for reverse-compressing video data, re-adding data that was removed during the compression process) is pretty cool.

kornork2• 10 years ago

I'm thinking from the perspective of "I'm sick of working at your standard SaaS. I'd like to see what else is out there for software developers."

lmm5• 10 years ago

Isn't that just a buzzword-heavy way of saying "better video compression"?

qaq3• 10 years ago

Any pointers on who might be a good VC outfit for SaaS type startup that actually needs to run their own clusters as opposed to throwing everything onto AWS?

n00b1014• 10 years ago

Any pointers on who might be a good VC outfit for SaaS type startup that actually needs to run their own clusters as opposed to throwing everything onto AWS?

Very curious, why do you think you need to run your own clusters, to the point where you think you need to seek unusually risk prone capital?

If your justification is that you are are optimizing for cost (e.g. maximizing your performance per dollar), then you must think the capex dramatically lowers opex at scale if you move from AWS to specialized hardware (say, an FPGA bare metal cluster instead of a GPU or CPU cluster in AWS). In such a case I would argue that you should just get enough paying customers first using AWS, to build up enough cash-flow that would then clearly justify the capex for scaling up and going colo. And at that point, you would not need to shop around for wild risk taking capital, the CBA could easily be explained to any VC and in fact you could probably even just get a bank loan to finance the capex if it is a clear winner in reducing costs.

The only scenario I can see where you really need to run your own hardware from day 1 is if you need to terminate some dedicated circuits for specialized data feeds (e.g. real-time market data)... In that scenario, I would recommend looking into co-locating the data appliance in a third-party data center that is physically nearby to US-EAST and can run a Direct Connection into AWS for you.

Otherwise, you may want to consider the possibility that your desire to own your own cluster may be a case of premature optimization and scaling up too early/too fast. It's a very expensive thing to do and an easy way to accidentally run out of money if you don't have client contracts signed beforehand.

qaq3• 10 years ago

We connect storage nodes via infiniband for lower latency and higher throughput. Think RDS type service where you can have significantly larger instances like say up 40TB DB running on 4 way box (soon 8 way) box.

davidw• 10 years ago

It was always kind of frustrating to see the amount of brain power and tech going into the place I worked in Italy, www.CenterVue.com compared with typical 'web' startups. Those guys have computer vision, mechanical and electriconic engineering, and lots of software of various kinds. They're doing pretty well, but not nearly as well as plenty of way more "trivial" startups. I put trivial in quotes because it's never easy, but... you'd like to hope there's some correlation between effort and reward.

davidivadavid• 10 years ago

There is a correlation, but effort is a vector more than a magnitude. Lots of effort in the wrong direction gets you nowhere. Meanwhile small effort surfing on a trend can work quite well.

balls1872• 10 years ago

A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”.

Lost all interest in saltman's point when I read this line.

It's a valid criticism, regardless if the people who are making it are "builders" or not.

It was a turn off, because it makes the author seem bitter about (what I think is) a valid criticism.

untog• 10 years ago

Agreed. The notion that you can't criticise something unless you've tried to do it yourself is nonsense.

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

The notion is actually that criticizing something you don't understand is valid but not necessarily useful.

jsprogrammer2• 10 years ago

Does that mean saltman spams alarmist Medium thought pieces?

furyofantares• 10 years ago

I don't understand -- you had a bad reaction to a single line in the introductory paragraph and knowingly let this turn you off to the entire post? Is that a valuable type of filter for you?

balls1872• 10 years ago

Seems like you understand just fine.

Time is valuable. When writing an essay, the introductory paragraph is how the author gets the reader involved in it.

That line reads to me like bitterness, so I concluded that it wasn't worth my time to read any further.

And this being the internet, I felt it was worth my time to post a comment saying how I feel.

It wasn't my intent to post a comment about the other points in the article (which I obviously did not read).

freyr4• 10 years ago

It's a bad way to respond to an argument, because it subtly undermines everyone who is critical of Silicon Valley. They either don't build things (and they're unqualified to have an opinion) or they do build things (but they're being brushed aside because they're a minority).

FussyZeus2• 10 years ago

A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves,

I have to take issue here. I don't need to be a "builder" to see that what a given startup is building is either worthless or an attempt at solving a non-problem.

I'm not a helicopter pilot, but if I see a helicopter stuck in a tree, I don't need to be one to know that the guy screwed up.

lmm5• 10 years ago

Sure, but a lot of people like to complain that snapchat/tinder/etc. are wastes of time or poor uses of talent when really they make a lot of people's lives a lot better.

FussyZeus2• 10 years ago

It's far from an objective observation, I'm merely pointing out that the idea that you need to be doing a thing in order to criticize someone else's thing is hogwash.

jacalata• 10 years ago

Is a positive opinion worth anything if it comes from someone not building the product? If so, why is it different for a negative opinion?

msoad• 10 years ago

ZOOX[1] is another self driving car startup that is up for acquisition.

[1] http://zoox.co/

jackcosgrove4• 10 years ago

I worked in industrial automation for a few years and most of the software there is terribly outdated. It's definitely ripe for disruption. There are "firm tech" business ideas that involve building better sensing and control software for hard tech industries. Given the low cost of sensors and networking these days it's not prohibitively expensive.

I think making a hard tech product for consumers is still very hard, and those who succeed should be commended. People wanting to dip their toes in the water might consider things like building a factory management portal like Splunk that aggregates sensor data, or something that involves sensing and reporting rather than actuation. Actuation can be dangerous and therefore legally risky.

caseysoftware2• 10 years ago

I think the reason these systems haven't been challenged yet is lack of knowledge. People tend to attack areas and industries that they know a lot about. This is why college hackathons have tons of dating, what to do, and delivery apps. It's their world.

If you don't have people coming out of the industrial automation space with a good understanding, it's hard to walk back in with a useful product.

jackcosgrove4• 10 years ago

Exactly. Industrial automation also isn't sexy and manufacturing margins are small so the big dogs in the industry have limited R&D resources.

The upside is a lack of competition and a B2B environment. No need for a marketing department when you just have to attend a few industry trade shows a year.

ethbro4• 10 years ago

To expand on that, lack of awareness of the problem space and lack of knowledge of the specifics involved. And I think the latter is a huge barrier.

From what I've seen (relatively minimal), industrial automation tends to be incredibly bespoke. E.g. we had consultant X from Y integrator (sometimes now defunct) come in Z years ago (where Z is always > 10) and set up this system: we've been using it as a black box without change since.

In short the "Linux on the desktop" problem - the burden of having to support 1,000+ unique configurations, each with their own edge case behaviors (or outright bugs). And from what I've seen, the ideal startup growth pattern doesn't fit with a services "send one engineer out to an account to custom fix it" way of doing things.

ogreveins• 10 years ago

That helps but you have to understand that most industrial and utilities sites hate new tech. They like proven tech that's been used in three other places before they adopt anything. And once they settle on something they want to stick with it for 15-30 years and have support for longer because everyone knows that it's going to take another 3 years to get approval for purchase of new components because the old stuff has been giving faulty readings the past year and a half which requires hard reboots, the firmware is no longer being upgraded and the guys who first used the stuff are starting to retire. Even then they just want something that fits into the same slot.

Sorry for the runon but this is a major gripe of mine. Most managers just want it to work and unless it doubles your profit, cuts failures and makes you coffee for when other stuff breaks and you're working overtime to fix it they don't want to change anything.

Sven7• 10 years ago

Agree and also Investors have a bias towards the student crowd as they are much easier to impress and deal with, than an experienced Academic or Engineer.

mooreds• 10 years ago

I think the reason these systems haven't been challenged yet is lack of knowledge.

As a software engineer, I always thought that the best way to have a great business (not a blow out VC style business, but a good business) is to be a decent-to-good software developer and have deep domain knowledge of some other industry. I thought the best way to get that would be to apprentice in that industry, but the opportunity cost is high (esp as you get older), so the second best way may be to take a job as a dev in that industry and learn as much as you can from the domain experts.

The combo of software development + domain expertise means you see problems to automate away all around you and you can actually execute on what you see.

brandmeyer• 10 years ago

I think the reason these systems haven't been challenged yet is lack of knowledge

As a software engineer that works in this space, I disagree. The thing that keeps us using things like MODBUS and CAN are because the problems we are solving are themselves are very simple. So we tend to use simple solutions to address them. The latest dynamic languages and protocols (XML, JSON, YAML, etc) don't solve our existing problems any better.

Quite frankly, the extreme level of complexity in deploying something like Android to control a basic IoT device is beyond appalling. 640k may not be enough for everyone, but it is more than plenty to control IoT devices.

eldavido• 10 years ago

I've actually wanted to do this for a while. I worked in large-scale analytics (Crittercism) and have a friend who does robotics work in Chicago.

I see two big problems here.

The first is, what's the business case for the buyer? What tangible improvement in their business is possible with all this new technology? Maybe less downtime? Predictive failure models? I feel like the tech is so disruptive, you'd be better off building a completely new factory from scratch rather than convincing an existing one to adopt such a radical process/ops change.

Second, there is a profound skepticism for large-scale software projects in true "industry". My father worked for a long time at Andrew, a maker of coaxial cable in Illinois, which was later acquired by Commscope; their view of software projects was a lot like war in 1984: a constant, ongoing struggle, with no end in sight, of huge promises and lack of good delivery. I'm not sure whether that means the barrier to entry is huge, or once you make great software you'll have a massive differentiated advantage -- probably both -- but just understand, these guys have spent their career dealing with vendors selling overpriced junk from Oracle, SAP, etc. and just expect things will fail from the getgo.

jackcosgrove4• 10 years ago

To respond to your points:

1) I assume you're referring to "Splunk for factories". You could make the same claim about plain-old Splunk. One business case is better real-time response to failure and later, better forensics. I agree, there are many factories where the process is perfected and the operators can read the tea leaves when something goes wrong. Another business case, and probably a better one, might be report generation for managers - people hate making the same reports over and over again.

2) Industrial software largely sucks now. But software in general sucked 20 years ago, and has improved much since then. True industry is behind the software curve by 10-20 years, so they are using old, bad (by today's standards) software. The thing is we've already improved that old, bad software - they just haven't adopted it yet. Once industry begins adopting "newer" software (think Java, .NET, web services) and they see the falling development costs and better features, they get behind it.

There is also a talent shortage in industrial software, because there are higher wages and better working conditions in the desktop, web, and mobile industries. However what has happened is we are now in diminishing returns in those latter three industries because they are saturated with talent, while all the cool things we've built to service those industries can now be repurposed by hard tech. It's the reverse of what happened after the Cold War ended and defense industry veterans fled for greener pastures in Silicon Valley.

ArkyBeagle2• 10 years ago

I am with you - I'd love to do this, but it's a daunting prospect. Seems like the RasPi kids get better toys than the adults these days.

profeta2• 10 years ago

the problem with those industries is that the software is closed because of the hardware. while on one hand it is ready for disruption, on the other it is locked down by ever changing hardware interfaces outside of your control.

You would also have a hard time convincing the buyers to not use the manufacturer software and instead use yours.

petra3• 10 years ago

> building a factory management portal like Splunk that aggregates sensor data, or something that involves sensing and reporting rather than actuation

Haven't ThingWorx solved this problem very well already ?

ArkyBeagle2• 10 years ago

Yes. Industrial automation is very ready to be disrupted.

I'd like to see better support for actuation in terms of being able to audit things and feed that back to design decisions, which ties very much back to aggregation.

I'm biased to think there may not be much difference between the two domains. And it should be pretty clear that machine learning is going to be increasingly important.

This being said, the customers may not be all that ready for it.

amelius• 10 years ago

Now if we all just stop focusing on how to make better CSS, we might actually create some new hard tech.

AlwaysBCoding• 10 years ago

Flexbox is life-altering though.

jkyle3• 10 years ago

Considering I write exactly 0 lines of any sort of web based code on my median day it hasn't altered my life at all.

ryanSrich• 10 years ago

No need to devalue the work of others. It's likely many of these new hard tech problems will require software. Software that runs on the web. Software that is styled via CSS.

collyw2• 10 years ago

CSS styles fine, it could be a lot better in terms of ease of use for the developer.

It often feels like black magic getting something to style the way I want it, and its not something that I can sit down and work out with a pen and paper, instead it seems to rely on knowing lots of tricks and obscure features.

n00b1014• 10 years ago

Building hard core technology products is very risky and challenging for entrepreneurs. Complicating matters further, recent financial market volatility and sentiments being expressed in "Medium thought pieces about when the stock market is going to crash" are amping up the fear and uncertainty faced by newcomers.

It is therefore extremely encouraging and important to hear this message clearly and directly from Sam, that this is indeed a lucrative area worth pursuing and that there are investors who have the risk appetite to continue to fund such ventures.

samstave3• 10 years ago

If I dont know anything about developing AI specifically - but have an idea of how AI can help an industry, how could I go about making that hard idea something with merit/velocity/validity?

rorykoehler5• 10 years ago

Learn AI?

samstave3• 10 years ago

Sure - but I'd rather bounce off someone who already knows it and can tell me if I am nuts, first. I know its a hard problem, the idea - I just dont know if its worth doing...

vegabook• 10 years ago

Sounds like a desperate scramble to rebalance the portfolio which, reputationally, is far too long of last decade's, now-stalling, strategies. Problem is the brand is not 'hard tech', it's irredeemably soft tech. The brand is consumer biz disruption and social. YC is a short (if only it were listed) just like the rest of the web stack, for reasons of acute oversupply. It is woefully ill positioned on hard technologies. Kudos for trying, though! Heroic effort.

graycat2• 10 years ago

"Hard tech"? Okay. I have such a project.

Big ass problem: Found one, where a the first good solution is a must have for nearly everyone in the world with Internet access.

"Hard tech" solution: A bunch of applied math, with advanced prerequisites, some original, for a unique, really good, fun to use, interactive and addictive, by far the best in the world solution -- Did that.

"Hard"? Silicon Valley has more hen's teeth than entrepreneurs who could understand the theorems and proofs of my math even if I explained it to them. Why? They didn't take the prerequisite pure/applied math courses in grad school. Neither did more than a tiny fraction of computer science profs.

Code: 80,000 lines of typing, running, in alpha test -- did that.

"We hope to hear from you."

You did, and you ignored it.

Using my HN UID, look up my submission in your records. If you are interested now, then let me know.

nailer7• 10 years ago

If someone else wanted to contact you how would they do that?

amit_m• 10 years ago

What is the problem you are solving?

graycat2• 10 years ago

My post is for Sam. Do you represent Sam and YC?

I invited Sam to contact me, and from my HN UID his records will give him my e-mail address so that he can contact me.

Sam requested that anyone with "hard tech" contact him. Here I'm taking "hard" as difficult, challenging, or technically advanced and not necessarily 'hard' as in 'hardware'.

I do intend to announce, say, my beta test on HN, but for the current alpha test that seems a bit early.

Sam asked people to contact him, and here I did and reminded him of my earlier submission that he might be interested in now.

At least for now, the next step is up to Sam.

cryoshon3• 10 years ago

Here's a several billion dollar hard tech idea that would benefit many, many, many people: cheap/fast/efficient water desalination and purification. It's a hard problem. Current solutions aren't cutting it.

Unlock water from the oceans, and a lot of people can be helped. I'm ready to start this company, just need a few dozen engineers/chemists and a boatload of funding.

chejazi• 10 years ago

Do you have a scientific breakthrough in cheap/fast/efficient water desalination and purification?

cryoshon3• 10 years ago

No, that needs to be invented.

That's why it's hard.

pbreit• 10 years ago

I'm not convinced that's a better approach than making sure we capture all the rain water.

6stringmerc3• 10 years ago

As an amateur inventor with a serious backlog of "hard tech" type inventions (e.g. actual products, not software or 'platforms') I've done my best to inquire and reach out to several different potential funding sources, all of which have been extremely quick to pass. The basic reasoning is "this doesn't fit with our preferred verticals" and I'm left to figure out what that meant other than We only speak app as a self-imagined consolation.

This article is not exactly re-assuring because the noted interests - AI, biotech, and energy - are all extremely crowded fields more than likely competing with large institutions, research organizations, and let's be honest, probably a TON of regulatory hurdles to consider if planning to do business in the US.

For context, one of my primary inventions is a mobility / utility device that would have residential, commerical, and industrial applications. By design it can be applied to a variety of uses. I've done basic patent research and the pathway looks extremely good, quite tempting for me to just go ahead and file ASAP. It's hard tech. It's not glamorous, but it's a huge market opportunity on prima face.

I've got a co-worker pal who finally got his beverage and branding invention patented and now he's in the marketing to local schools, catalogs, and if early indications are correct, he may have an genuinely lucrative future with it. In my view, he's a more likely investor target than anybody out on the West Coast or in a VC room. I simply base this perspective on personal experience and how this post sounds promising yet concludes with a short list of massive goals. Might as well wrap it up with "We just want to invest in a better mousetrap" considering the scope. Cottage industry isn't runaway freight train profit creation, I get that, but I'd also counter that if one wants to get into the next frothy bubble of biotech then good luck with that.

clarkmoody• 10 years ago

isn't runaway freight train profit creation

But YC is in the business of hopping aboard every rocket ship it can find. Sam & Co do not want to invest in small business. They want massive payouts. It's the only way the VC game works.

If you're dedicated to getting funding, you have to keep knocking on tons of doors until you find an investor that matches your particular payout goals.

The West Coast / SV venture capital scene makes a ton of noise about massive successes to entice many otherwise-profitable small business ideas to try and become huge. When they don't reach a hyperbolic trajectory, it's a VC failure, but the same business could have easily done well for the founders and early employees as a lifestyle business. A stable orbit if you will, but not going to the Moon.

Find investors who want reasonable returns from your business at your scale. Don't think that the SV VC approach is the only way to get your business idea funded.

6stringmerc3• 10 years ago

Oh I understand, but in this case making such a public post about "come on, join us, we can do it" and then targeting essentially stud 'just graduated, have other backing' type teams in massive fields is conflicting to me. I'm basically under the assumption that any serious venture in AI, biotech, or energy can actually compete for investments outside of the YC sphere. As in, YC actually has more competition than these teams have to sacrifice to get started. It is common knowledge capital is sloshing around everywhere looking for yield and returns.

I do understand VC might not be the proper target in the purest sense but it's a similar story for most small businesses if I'm not mistaken. Like in hard bench science research - funding goes to those already being successful. Is it really practical to "boot strap" a hard tech company? I draw a lot of inspiration from the Wright Brothers, but I'm still pragmatic.

If there's a 'ground floor' arena where cottage industry would be best served, I'm all ears and would love links, guidance and direction to make progress. Not kidding, it's already been a few years and I've got another half a lifetime to keep plodding away.

dbbolton• 10 years ago

AI, biotech, and energy

The problems you described with these fields are known as "barriers to entry". They are bad for competition and foster lower-order market structures and/or price distortion in virtually any industry, not just those in the tech sector. Thus they're generally frowned upon by all but the most extreme laissez faire capitalists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry

bliti7• 10 years ago

I'm in sort of the same train and am getting slow but steady progress. If you want to talk about things (without giving away anything) feel free to email me.

cossatot• 10 years ago

Have you looked into SBIR[1] grants for developing your product? You might have to do a little leg work to set yourself up to receive Federal funding but if you'd like to commercialize any technology you'll probably have to do that anyway...

[1] https://www.sbir.gov/about/about-sbir

saosebastiao• 10 years ago

Well written and mostly agreeable but I've got a lowbrow dismissal incoming: I disagree that Cruise could be considered hard tech. The hard tech in that space was done by universities competing for DARPA awards, and Google after that. Cruise took inaccessible hard tech and made it more accessible.

And that isn't an insult to Cruise. The problem space is still difficult, and they created more value tackling that than the vast majority of startups do on much easier problems. I happen to think that the opportunities for making the cutting edge more accessible vastly outweigh the opportunities for cutting new edges, and nobody should be discouraged from doing it because it isn't as glamorous as the research on the ground floor.

jmcannon• 10 years ago

Interestingly, Kyle (founder of Cruise) was intimately involved with the DARPA Grand Challenge at MIT when the goal was to engineer a self-driving car.

6stringmerc3• 10 years ago

I don't think you're being dismissive at all - if anything I think you've added some much relevant context to the discussion. I appreciate you mentioning this relationship between development and monetization.

billmalarky• 10 years ago

"Cruise took inaccessible hard tech and made it more accessible."

This seems to be a standard path for businesses in the tech space. The value many of these companies bring is not the tech itself but the ability to get that tech to the masses (which is no small feat).

It's why the classic techie response to a tech product is "who cares I can already do that with {insert X inaccessible technologies glued together with shell scripts}." The original dropbox thread on HN is a great example of this.

seibelj• 10 years ago

For those interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

I'm wondering how much of that is due to how "hard" the tech is (the research had been done by Sebastian Thrun/Carnegie Mellon in the 90s) vs. the maker renaissance spurred by the drastically falling cost of hardware?

Though I suppose "true" fully autonomous self-driving cars that can handle things like rain, human driver non-verbal communication (like eye contact and the finger), and left turns onto oncoming traffic are still at least a decade away, at least according to MIT's John Leonard, the Cruise founder's likely protégé. [1]

It goes without saying that California with its perfect weather and perfect highways is a rather unfair testing ground for autonomous vehicles, as unfortunate as it is the hotspot for a lot of the autonomous driving research. (Maybe that's why the researchers more grounded in reality are the ones in Pittsburgh and MIT/Boston?)

I remember when a LIDAR unit was a $30,000 SICK laser unit, but now you have the same kind of sensor in your $100 Kinect.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs

snowwrestler• 10 years ago

In his book Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard makes a distinction between invention and innovation. Innovation is the application of an invention to solve a problem and create a marketable product.

Chouinard is one of the most innovative folks in the history of the climbing industry, having introduced a lot of now-standard technologies like curved ice axe picks, polyester long underwear, and polyester fleece for warmth. I highly recommend the book.

pilingual• 10 years ago

Congratulations to Cruise!

Cruise Kyle Vogt's third acquired company. It's still ambiguous as to whether your first startup should be "hard tech" or not. I think in the case of self-driving cars it makes sense because automobiles are a trillion dollar market and the anxiety to stay competitive with the rapidly changing landscape is intense.

Plenty of room in this market yet. What is the biggest competitive advantage and who has it? Data & Tesla. Tesla is the only company with the appropriate data to make self-driving a reality faster than anyone else (tell me when Google starts collecting data in Norway). Data collection equipment is relatively inexpensive. Maybe figure out how to get people to attach sonar or lidar or tap into their car's computer to access that data. What else is a problem, even for Tesla? How about predicting pedestrian behavior and making eye contact -- or identifying if a pedestrian is disabled and sending a signal to those pedestrians that it is OK to walk.

At the end of the day the market being targeted has huge weight to the likelihood of a successful outcome.

Incidentally, if you want to get into YC: https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/708304772055441408

tgb29• 10 years ago

Good post. Congrats to Cruise for the acquisition and to YC for generating a return on their investment. There are definitely opportunities in AI-narrow applications using machine learning-and biotechnology right now.

emcq2• 10 years ago

This acquisition fits exactly with GM's plans outlined by investing $500 million in Lyft to create self-driving car infrastructure [0].

It seems like companies who build products that have clear and significant business value with excellent market timing are successful. Perhaps you can extrapolate to saying hard tech is now a hot field but this is the first successful exit that comes to mind recently, rather than private investors putting more money on the table.

[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-lyft-investment-idUSKBN...

mathattack• 10 years ago

My impression on Appification vs Hard Tech is the length of the development cycle.

The combination of a few trends (Predominately smart phones, social networks & data analytics) enabled a whole new wave of technical possibilities. It was relatively quick to monetize this via App development, so that was the first wave to take advantage. Hard Tech can take longer (though from Cruise's point of view, not always that much longer) so these companies are only coming to fruition now.

When I look at AlphaGo's success, I think we are a new dawn of amazing things from Hard Tech.

tardo99• 10 years ago

Really, really bad deal for GM.

mhb_eng• 10 years ago

As a mechanical engineer, I am excited to see more of a focus on hard tech content here! Unfortunately, there isn't really a HackerNews for EE's or ME's (though if someone wants to build it, I'd be grateful). So it can be tough to find startups working on these sorts of hard problems that are looking for all flavors of engineer (except civil, they stink and nothing they make moves /s). Personally, I work in ocean robotics and defense, which is I think is very cool, but mostly handled by large defense contractors and military research departments.

noobiemcfoob• 10 years ago

As a CE/EE myself, I feel your pain. This area of engineering seems to have such a high barrier to entry. I imagine that is mostly because of the production cost and most necessary software tools still being heavily license based with their physical counterparts being prohibitively expensive as well.

It's just easier to play around with software until you find something novel.

ashwinl• 10 years ago

If you live in the SF Bay Area, Detroit, Austin, DC, Pittsburg or Chandler, I disagree. Try the TechShop and its host of classes.

http://www.techshop.ws/take_classes.html?storeId=4

lemiant• 10 years ago

My mechanical co-founder swears by Hackaday. It's somewhat different, but a great place to see mechanical projects.

hodwik• 10 years ago

Is that a community? I thought that was just a blog.

david9275• 10 years ago

A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”.

Don't pretend that Silicon Valley is not superficial in many regards. Yes, some of those silly, fluff apps have gone on to make money and that's your metric so you defend it.

But for many people, Silicon Valley embodies a different principle, like the one found at Xerox PARC, of people trying to make the future better and not just drive a nicer car.

nxzero2• 10 years ago

On the flip side, there's some that are willing to sell their soul to play with the tech of the future. Honestly wish it was easier to find people that aren't into tech for the money or somehow forgot the meaning of what it is to be evil.

adrianbd• 10 years ago

I had actually never checked out any YC demo day presentations, so this post pushed me to do so. I watched about a dozen of them from the latest batches and I must say I did feel that they were very underwhelming.

Sure, I understand that my expectations of how a company looks so early on might be skewed and they have only about 3 minutes, but all the speeches were so templated (stressing ridiculously overhyped market values etc.) that I thought they were really uninspiring. Might be the fault of the VCs who are just looking to randomly jump on the next potentially successful ship endorsed by YC, but I honestly got tired of hearing about the next app that will change the world of X within 10 minutes.

As you mentioned, some of these products have been genuinely amazing and winning lottery tickets that on average bring huge profits to YC, so we should probably look at it more pragmatically rather than expecting them to make the future better.

bpchaps9• 10 years ago

Entirely agreed. This whole thing is frustrating. I just went to apply to YC but ended up closing the tab. A significant portion of the process seemed geared towards "We want highly visible projects with highly charismatic individuals."

For example, I'm required to post a video of myself/group talking about the project. I'm not posting a damn video. Fine - I get that you want to be able to see the product/s up close with the passion of the founders, etc. But, hell - the project I'm working on is dirty, "hard", far from glamorous and isn't very presentable - especially on camera where my strong anxieties come out. Though, because of my personality I'm effectively disqualified, despite all else.

If I'm missing something I'd very much like to me corrected.

Strom• 10 years ago

The reality is that in most cases in order to be successful you need to constantly talk to customers, both to sell and to get feedback. Having social anxiety is a pretty strong negative signal.

grillvogel2• 10 years ago

if you can't convey why your project is interesting or important why would anyone care? even here in text form you aren't doing a good job of selling it

jaz46• 10 years ago

The video isn't to see the product up close, its to see the founders. YC isn't selecting for charisma. Most founders (myself included) who submitted videos fumbled over our words and are completely awkward on camera. We also had no product to show at the time. What YC is looking for is that you're passionate about your project/company and that will come through regardless.

They're also looking for you be willing to step outside your comfort zone. As a founder you'll constantly have to do things that don't come naturally to you -- talking to investors or customers, interviewing employees, and even firing employees. The fact that you're not willing to make a 1-min video of yourself is a negative signal that you won't be able to step up and do those hard tasks that make you uncomfortable. Being a founder takes more than just being able to build the best technology.

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

Right, there are enough "builders" out there (some of the most brilliant implementers I know even) that take that stance about SV that I'm not sure you can use hypocrisy/cognitive dissonance as an argument.

nxzero2• 10 years ago

Congrats on the exit, but the idea that GM will be around for the next wave of innovation is what it is. To me hard tech is about building the future, not finding an off ramp. In fact, this maybe one of the many factors killing real change, the desire to make for the hills when a giant offers to take you.

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

GM has been doing great stuff. The Tesla Model 3 is already here; it's the Chevy Volt.

al2o3cr• 10 years ago

"Leave the Medium thought pieces about when the stock market is going to crash and the effect it’s going to have on the fundraising environment to other people—it’s boring, and history will forget those people anyway."

Sam channels Baghdad Bob for a minute there - "there are no American tanks in Baghdad. Especially not the one that just rolled by on-camera"

omegaham• 10 years ago

I don't think that Sam is Baghdad Bob, but Medium is the exact opposite - it's "American tanks are going to roll through Baghdad tomorrow! Run for the hills!"

Doomsaying is only interesting when you get it right.

I think that Sam is saying, "If you have a good idea, you'll succeed regardless of whether the economy is good or shitty." If you have a bad idea, you'll fail regardless.

The ones who really benefit from the strong economy are the marginal ideas - ideas that normally would not get funded, but people have the spare money to throw at lottery tickets on the off-chance that they're missing something. Cue Pets.com and other 90s Internet startups.

profeta2• 10 years ago

press release at the top of the front page?

i thought Ycombinator self-posts were not "votable".

this is hardly hard-tech since the same thing is being done in a garage with off the shelf parts http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...

dlrush2• 10 years ago

Every company doing hard tech should be considering federal funding for early stage R&D. The US gov't has been consistently providing more early stage capital than VC for several decades through the SBIR program. (About $2.5B each year). Capital through the program is NON-DILUTIVE, Phase 1 grants can be $225K, Phase 2 grants to $1.5MM, and you likely have government and private sector customers at the end of Phase 2.

Steve Blank's Innovation Corp initiative is now working with the NIH, NSF and Defense to help companies development product-market-fit once basic funding has been achieved as well.

Disclaimer: My company GrantIQ.com helps companies find federal funding opportunities & helps large companies identify breakthrough technologies being developed through these programs.

bliti7• 10 years ago

Can you share more info? Or maybe an email address?

esmi• 10 years ago

https://sbir.nih.gov

mattzito• 10 years ago

The last time I looked into these types of grants was admittedly years ago, but from what I recall, there's extensive reporting and research requirements that you have to fulfill. It seemed like an overly onerous burden compared to the resources available to an early stage startup. Is that accurate? Have things changed?

jseliger• 10 years ago

This is generally good advice, but I'm a grant writer (see http://www.seliger.com if you're curious) and have worked on many SBIRs and STTRs. I'll add that there are downsides as well. One is simple timing: if the appropriate SBIR or STTR funding cycle just concluded for that year, you may have to wait another year to apply. Then another 1 – 3 months for a decision. Then longer for final authorization of the budget. The other day I talked to a guy whose best potential SBIR source had had a deadline the month prior.

Second, Phase 1 grants can just be too small for the amount of effort that goes into them.

Third, they don't come with the advice / community / expertise of good VCs.

Fourth, they take a lot of effort to prepare, and for first-time grant writers they can be quite hard. The alternative is to hire someone like my firm. While I'm biased towards doing that for obvious reasons, we also cost money.

While I don't want to talk anyone out of applying, I do want to note that the downsides are considerable too.

As a side note, I used to submit some SBIR and STTR RFPs to Hacker News (search for "seliger" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nsf.gov), but I stopped after a while because no one upvotes the submissions.

mjn• 10 years ago

Third, they don't come with the advice / community / expertise of good VCs.

Definitely not business advice/community, but if a startup is doing significant R&D, it can be useful for the scientific and technical advice and community. Not guaranteed by any means, but I've seen it work out well, mainly in the case where a company submits an STTR jointly with a university research group. If the arrangement ends up working, the most valuable thing to the company in that case is sometimes not even the actual NSF grant money, but the connection to the research group it opens up. Having a joint STTR provides an excuse to get a company sort of attached to the research group as an external partner, with a forcing factor ensuring you end up on their schedule with regular project meetings, access to grad students, etc. Can also end up useless, of course, but when it works out well, it can provide value equivalent to something you'd have to pay a lot for if you were hiring technical consultants (especially in areas like machine learning).

iammaxus• 10 years ago

These are some good warnings. The way I like to think about it is that the actual free cash available to spend from the grant is on the order of 1/3 of the sticker price when you fully account for the costs of getting the grant, administering it, and fulfilling the requirements which inevitablly do not line up exactly with your business goals.

Many companies get stuck in a kind of grant hamster wheel where they end up only producing enough from a grant to be able to get another grant, and not advance in commercializing their technology. I think there are few companies that make the transition from being primarily grant funded for a period into a high growth success.

Sometimes it's your only option for funding, but ideally, it makes up 0 to a fraction of your R&D funding so that it doesn't dilute your focus.

This advice is specific to companies that have a path to be VC-fundable, high growth, commercial success. There are many other (most) companies that can be funded by grants and build their technology incrementally over time.

dlrush2• 10 years ago

https://grantiq.com

rebootthesystem2• 10 years ago

I attended the SBIR conference about twenty years ago with a genuine interest in getting involved. I left the conference with an image embedded in my head:

"SBIR = The PhD Club of America".

Perhaps things have changed. My impression leaving the conference was that it was a complete waste of time if you did not have a PhD in your team who had some connection with the PhD at SBIR in charge of reviewing applications.

In other words: Not a single Silicon Valley college dropout or "college-interruptus" need apply as the process seemed to exhibit favoritism towards members of the aforementioned club.

tclmeelmo4• 10 years ago

My impression leaving the conference was that it was a complete waste of time if you did not have a PhD in your team who had some connection with the PhD at SBIR in charge of reviewing applications.

For the second part, it is standard advice from the granting organizations themselves to contact whomever is overseeing the solicitation (for DoD, they're the "topic author") to establish a good working relationship. Does someone who has a previous history have an advantage? Yes, in the same way that a SV startup founder with prior experience has an advantage seeking funding for a new venture.

For the first part, SBIR/STTR emphasize research, and a PhD (or equivalent degree) is the standard academic research qualification. Teams having technical members without PhDs but with significant domain experience are funded all the time. You're right that having research credentials is necessary, but it's not in itself sufficient. If I put together an application for an area in which I have no prior research experience and no preliminary data, I would expect my application to not be scored.

In other words: Not a single Silicon Valley college dropout or "college-interruptus" need apply as the process seemed to exhibit favoritism towards members of the aforementioned club.

I don't see it as favoritism, I see it as a mismatch in experience and expectations. My "research currency" (PhD, publication record, patents, grantsmanship experience) isn't worth much if I were wanting to work at a SV startup because I don't have a GitHub account (or so I am led to believe). The kind of currency that an SBIR/STTR values naturally tends to be held by people with PhDs (or equivalent).

It's also important to remember that SBIR/STTRs are highly competitive. A few years ago, I applied to an SBIR from the NCI that ended up funding 1% of applicants that cycle!

kposehn• 10 years ago

Leave the Medium thought pieces about when the stock market is going to crash and the effect it’s going to have on the fundraising environment to other people—it’s boring, and history will forget those people anyway.

Blunt. True, but blunt.

Hats off to Sam.

throwaway21212• 10 years ago

Sure, but history will also forget Sam and Ycombinator (Dropbox, AirBnB, give me a break).

rwallace• 10 years ago

Not if they end up funding the next Ford, IBM or Intel. Hence, I suppose, the point of this post.

lowglow• 10 years ago

We're working on "Hard Tech" over at Playa. If you're interested in AI/Cybernetics/ML/Ambient Intelligence come check out the platform we're building out. Http://getplaya.com/

tonylemesmer2• 10 years ago

Hardware is difficult. Investors are wary of difficult problems. They will invest if the problem is difficult and they think they are speaking to a team of people who can deliver the technology to market no matter what. Lots of good inventors are terrible implementers.

If the invention is good but the team seems incapable that would be a reason for non-investment.

Also - "hard tech" seems like the wrong thing to be aiming for. There are lots of hard problems to solve with simple tech and disrupting markets. Are these not valuable targets?

Naritai2• 10 years ago

The article, along with the zeitgeist that it refers to, is that all SV has been thinking about for the last ~5 years has been "simple tech and disrupting markets", at the expense of developing real technology.

tonylemesmer2• 10 years ago

Simple tech and simple problems are not the same thing. SV has been going after simple (or non existent) problems.

p4wnc64• 10 years ago

" popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”."

Wow. Passive aggressive much?

elliotec• 10 years ago

Seriously. Sam Altman has an interesting view of the world, which goes exactly as far as the boundaries of the SV bubble (bubble as in insularity as well as market inflation). He seems to be increasingly against anyone not exactly like him.

throw129381• 10 years ago

Yeah, I've contributed a lot to OSS (has Sam Altman done so?), and he comes across as a taker.

IMO OSS licences should exclude Silicon Valley parasites until they show a modicum of gratitude.

bobby_9x• 10 years ago

Gratitude?

OSS is supposed to be about donating your time, without asking for anything in return.

Othetwise, you are just as bad as your perception of silicon valley.

crpatino• 10 years ago

Let me take the opportunity to repeat myself.

We need a "professional-courtesy" license. Something like a GPL on steroids that can only ever be distributed as tarballs.

The minute to pass a binary around, the minute you try to deploy with any sort of devops, etc, you have just opted-in for a commercial license, which requires a (modest) yearly fee.

This way, your generosity will gain jobs for a fellow hackers somewhere. Takers still can pay for the benefit of convenience, though.

argonaut3• 10 years ago

Not really. Read the other top comments on this thread. Quite a few of them are basically along the lines of "Sam, don't kid yourself, Silicon Valley mostly works on trivial apps."

p4wnc64• 10 years ago

Those comments have merit. Brushing comments off because you look down your nose at the choices or priorities of others ought to be called out. Besides, the bit about "people not building anything at all themselves" is at best a non sequitur distraction that lowers the writing quality of the post. There's no defending it.

throwaway21212• 10 years ago

And? Ycombinator companies are using my non-trivial software for free and I happen to agree with some of those comments.

Same as many people who have built much more than Sam Altman ever will.

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

So yeah, Sam is trying to recruit people into starting these kinds of companies.

Hard tech has always been "back" (when did it go away, Elon Musk?), but it is quite the pivot from the YC of yesteryear that capitalized on things like better UX for AJAX calendars, web hosting, and drag-and-drop file storage.

The really hard tech though really evokes that initial visceral reaction of "too risky" for investors, especially if there's no real indicators in the form of traction or an MVP ("well just wait a sec there, professor, the problem is hard, so we haven't solved it yet").

As an investor, I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable shoveling stacks over to some guys who told me they were going to build true AI with a decade-long outlook. Yikes!

It's also a tougher proposition for founders. You're basically betting 5-10 years of your life on a problem that you don't even know you can solve with no revenue/exit strategy in sight. Meanwhile, that guaranteed salary at Google sure is looking more and more appealing.

I would almost recommend graduate school for these types of people looking to leave their mark on the world in solving a really hard problem where any real contribution only inches the world closer to solving it.

The struggle is real for all actors here.

For founders, the trick is finding that sweet spot where a problem sounds hard on paper (such as self-driving cars or VR headsets, wooo!), but actually is feasible using current technology (e.g. stick some lenses in a piece of cardboard), but due to timing or market forces or whatever, nobody is currently paying attention to it yet.

Then at least, you can execute just like an AJAX calendar app would and obtain the same outcome (to vastly understate the challenges involved!).

vannevar• 10 years ago

For founders, the trick is finding that sweet spot where a problem sounds hard on paper (such as self-driving cars or VR headsets, wooo!), but actually is feasible using current technology...

This is how true innovation happens. Like evolution, innovation is not a steady inching forward (though that kind of progress certainly operates continuously in the background), but a series of sudden leaps punctuated by relative stability. Those sudden leaps happen when the right brain is in the right place at the right time to make the right analogy or synthesis with existing ideas. You can't fund people to produce it on command, you can only hope to be among the first to recognize that it has happened and to invest in it at that early point, before the innovation is disseminated.

For an approach that does seek to produce innovation on command, see Ken Stanley's work on novelty search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI

nostrademons5• 10 years ago

AJAX calendar apps were themselves in that category when they came out. The conventional wisdom pre-2004 was that webapps could never replace the vast majority of desktop apps, because they required a hard page refresh and lots of clumsy session-management whenever the user performed an action. But a few technologies (XMLHttpRequest/IFRAMES, developed in the late 90s but not well publicized; faster computers & JS interpreters; and cross-browser JS libraries that abstracted away browser differences, developed in 2003-2006) had silently made it possible to build all your app logic in Javascript in the browser, and then just communicate with the server via a tether. This was not at all how people made websites in the early 2000s. I still remember seeing Outlook Web Access in 2001 and thinking "Wow, you can do this?"

People think of AJAX calendars as a joke startup idea now because the techniques for doing this have been well-publicized for a decade now. The trick to creating (what appears to be) a revolutionary startup is to find other techniques that are not well-publicized and then apply them in a new, surprising, and useful domain.

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

Then why make the distinction? Why are certain startups considered "hard"?

Certainly, the real legwork was done by the browser authors at the time who revolutionized the web by adding these features?

Is it more of a call-to-action? "Make startups!"

david9275• 10 years ago

Yes, and AJAX calendar apps would definitely be in that category in the 1950's also. That's not what he said. He said it's "quite the pivot from the YC of yesteryear that capitalized on things like better UX for AJAX calendars, web hosting, and drag-and-drop file storage."

YC was founded in 2005; these weren't especially hard problems in 2008.

ibejoeb• 10 years ago

The really hard tech though really evokes that initial visceral reaction of "too risky" for investors, especially if there's no real indicators in the form of traction or an MVP

I feel like there is probably near parity in the risk between these "hard tech" problems and things like social tech, etc., that many investors have gravitated toward. It's like "Can we build it?" vs "Will they use it if we build it?"

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

Unfortunately, the investment climate these days focuses more towards the latter. "Make something people want" is what they say.

I really do hope Sam's article raises attention more toward the former though. I suspect you'll see more startups coming out of that bucket in the impending winter while the latters' collective refrigerators all run out of Odwalla.

petra3• 10 years ago

> For founders, the trick is finding that sweet spot where a problem sounds hard on paper (such as self-driving cars or VR headsets, wooo!), but actually is feasible using current technology

Or create short-term intermediate technologies and make money of them and use that for r&d on the hard part.

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

It's pretty tough to do that though. You're essentially building O(n) businesses.

MicroBerto• 10 years ago

More technology for sending dick picks?

Jeez, can we please move on and do something that actually benefits this world with our talents?

freyr4• 10 years ago

A popular criticism of Silicon Valley, usually levied by people not building anything at all themselves, is that no one is working on or funding “hard technology”.

I'm not critical of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley includes many companies working on hard problems, or investing money into long-term moonshot programs.

The criticism is levied towards, for example, the social media giants that pull in top engineers to work on social media problems exclusively. The criticism is also directed at Silicon Valley VCs, who lure smart young people to work on semi-trivial problems because it's the quickest path to profit.

It's not necessarily fair criticism. VCs have an incentive, first and foremost, to fund successful businesses. If their surest path to success in today's economy involves building semi-trivial apps, that's what they'll pursue. The same can be said for the finance industry, where the most successful players are employing our nation's top mathematicians and scientists to extract money from public markets using high-frequency trading. We can't expect them to self-regulate. But how can we incentivize smart people to work on something less lucrative?

_delirium2• 10 years ago

Some of the criticism has just been that there's kind of a category error being made: not that these aren't good businesses, but that they aren't really tech companies, and calling them "tech companies" is more of a PR move. For example AirBnB is a successful business, but very little of its success has to do with technology it builds. It certainly operates in a field shaped by technology, and does need some amount of technology to operate the business (a website, some billing infrastructure, etc., roughly technology on par with any airline or hotel company). But, like Wal-mart a generation earlier, its success comes mainly from noticing that ongoing changes in technology and purchase habits open up new kinds of business opportunities as a specific kind of intermediary, and pushing hard to exploit that market opening.

Craigslist is perhaps an even more pure example of that, a "technology company" where having almost no actual technology, beyond the very basic level of "a webpage", is kind of their ethos.

golergka• 10 years ago

I think this criticism comes from not understanding how much of a positive effect social media has on a modern world. There have been a lot of discussion of the negative sides of twitter, facebook, instagram and others, but the positive effects are either so positive that they don't warrant a discussion or so hidden that no one really has patience to research them properly.

conanbatt• 10 years ago

I remember meeting one of the founders 2 years ago in a party and congratulating him for doing a startup with truly innovative goals.

Amazing to believe 2 years later they got bought for a billion dollars.

DrNuke• 10 years ago

It seems to me that nuclear (Gen IV), space (propulsion, moon bases) and AI (virtual prototyping) may speed up innovation in a combined manner. Elon Musk and Sam Altman in the US are at the top of the game here and may counter stiff competition from China. On the other hand, my team of middle-aged nuclear engineers & related network from Italy can't do that much but would gladly help, if needed.

jjtheblunt• 10 years ago

It comes across as a grotesque arrogance to assert, with no facts cited, that people expressing opinions are usually not building anything themselves. Citations if you please.

Animats• 10 years ago

But is it compatible with YC? "Hard tech" usually means years of work and millions of dollars up front. YC is oriented towards sub-$100K fundings and a few months to "demo day".

dkopi• 10 years ago

Demo day expectations would be different. The point of any accelerator is to push you forward as much as they can during those few months, so you can show a lot of progress and make the most out of a demo day.

$100K in funding can help you go a long way towards raising those millions of dollars.

tryitnow• 10 years ago

What does he mean by "hard tech"?

And would most engineers consider Cruise really hard tech? I don't know (I mean that honestly, not passive agressively).

tim3334• 10 years ago

If Cruise is hard depends on the end goal. If it's a fully autonomous vehicle, yes that's hard.

tim3334• 10 years ago

From the Summer 2014 batch, 3 of the 4 companies who have raised the most money since graduating YC are “hard tech” companies.

So I guess that's

Cruise $18.8m

Ginkgo Bioworks $54.12M (engineers new organisms) and

Helion Energy $12.11M (fusion) ?

tclmeelmo4• 10 years ago

I wonder how significant that 3 of 4 observation is, given that "hard tech" is requires more money all around to operate.

In context, those numbers don't feel that big to me.

rdlecler1• 10 years ago

I'm the founder of AgFunder. We've worked with a bunch of agtech/hard tech companies and it's been very very frustrating taking them to VCs because they don't fit in their box. We had one company called SWIIM which we called the AirBnb for water that was creating a market for water and in doing so helping to fix a major issue of properly valuing water--enormous market, great unit economics, but there was hardware and deployment and it didn't look anything like VCs normally invest in. Another company we have on now called Autonomous Tractor Company (ATC) which is basically Cruise Automatic for tractors... There are 500,000 used tractors out that they can turn into true driverless tractors (not just GPS assist). VCs can't get their heads around the fact that they don't actually have to build tractors and that this is actually very capital efficient. Kudos to YC which gives great signalling to many misunderstood companies.

Hydraulix98917• 10 years ago

A lot of this stuff takes the form of government grants and university collaborations. Check out CMU's National Robotics Engineering Center. If I remember right, they were at one time partnering with John Deere to build autonomous tractors.

http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_project_detail.html?project_i...

Good luck with your funding. I can certainly commiserate.

manx2• 10 years ago

Hard Problem: Current internet discussion technology does not allow millions of users to participate in a discussion without loosing overview. In other words: Current discussion protocols do not scale.

A technology providing that could help make our politics more democratic. It could also lower the need for communication hierarchies like in big companies.

I'm doing research in this area and built several prototypes. I strongly believe we can achieve the goal, but doing it with only one teammate researcher makes the process very slow. We are two master degree computer scientists and need a bigger team.

Contact me if you are interested.

mathgenius• 10 years ago

It's not just the discussion protocols, it's the topology upon which those protocols run.

manx2• 10 years ago

Exactly. Was that not clear from my description?

untilHellbanned• 10 years ago

Cruise is an N=1, ironic to make this proclamation. And Cruise founder had massively successful exiting history. I wouldn't say this validates YC's recent bets on hard tech. People who do hard tech for a living (myself included) are more measured.

Sama sounds like Donald Trump with the "I told you so". Unlike real estate, science can't be bullied to success. This makes me increasingly bearish on YC's future.

ecesena• 10 years ago

Can someone expand on the definition of hard tech? With possibly examples of what is or isn't considered hard tech?

Hard Tech is Back

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