[cossatot]

I'd love to hear a bit more about the differences.

I've spent my adult life in research environments (academic, nonprofit and industrial R&D) and while much of the activity seems entrepreneurial (particularly grant writing), the overarching structural differences between building something for profit vs. for the public good makes a lot of aspects of building a business a bit mysterious to me.

[Frost1x]

As much time as I've also spent time in R&D through industries, over the years it's moved from R&d to R&D to r&D... approaching D. The two, IMO, are converging.

There's awfully skinny budgets for most research these days and so much focus on 'success' (short term ROI) and '[financial] sustainability' (translating research into products/services in business form).

This is growing ever more true even in basic research, which is IMHO absurd. It's growing to the point it might as well just be 'D' with higher risks, less flexibility, and lower rewards which is making entrepreneurship more alluring.

I don't know who is going to fund long term research if the federal government doesn't. I suppose we can rely on the international market to produce research and hope it's useful. Businesses tend to be highly risk averse anymore.

[cossatot]

Yeah I am with you on this. In my current role, I can do R in as much as it links with D. But really I spend a lot of time building that ampersand rather than R or D specifically: constructing a framework to translate research results into a product, testing that product and then being able to guide the research based on the performance of the product.

That is in and of itself interesting, and the work (making earthquake forecasts and seismic hazard/risk models) is generally fun and has a lot more positive human impact than studying earthquakes because they are simply fascinating geophysical phenomena. But there are regularly a lot of great research ideas that go unexplored because we don't have the resources or immediate incentive to investigate them.

[m-ee]

I joined a small startup headed by a former professor, financed by a mix of SBIR grants and seed funding, and he was really poorly suited to running a hardware company. The biggest gap was the ability to push for schedule and manufacturability vs perfecting one of prototypes. Sometimes you have to say “this solution may be better, but the tooling costs and schedule impacts are untenable. Run with what we have” In his mind as long as we had money to keep making prototypes that was what we should do until it was absolutely perfect, it made for a great demo product that had no chance of seeing the light of day at scale. He didn’t really understand what it took to get from proto to EVT, investors did and they slowly faded from the picture.

[paultopia]

It seems to me that a big part of the difference in some fields at least is a desire to build relatively solo vs in a group. In the social sciences/humanities researchers don't have to deal with any other people very often; in the lab sciences there's a very small organization to work with. And 2/3 of the things all academics hate the most are the things that involve having to work closely with others and bureaucratic organizations (faculty meetings/service and grant writing. The third, incidentally, is grading.)

I get the sense that the work of almost all founders involves having to get stuff from other people lots more pervasively, from funding to hiring to organization building.

(Different attitudes to risk might also be a part of the difference.)

[cossatot]

> And 2/3 of the things all academics hate the most are the things that involve having to work closely with others and bureaucratic organizations (faculty meetings/service and grant writing. The third, incidentally, is grading.)

"This job would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers" --Randal, Clerks

[paultopia]

Hah, funny, but not quite fair---if by customers we mean students, most academics quite like the students and teaching them---and many (myself included) think that the grading part actually harms the students.

[toomuchtodo]

> the overarching structural differences between building something for profit vs. for the public good makes a lot of aspects of building a business a bit mysterious to me.

Lack of respect for traditional authority, entrenched interests, and boundaries would be my take. Forgiveness > permission mindset, with a healthy risk tolerance above baseline.

Founders take their research and drive towards profitable exploitation of that knowledge relentlessly.

[cossatot]

> Lack of respect for traditional authority, entrenched interests, and boundaries would be my take. Forgiveness > permission mindset, with a healthy risk tolerance above baseline.

This is an interesting take. A lot of researchers are pretty anti-authoritarian, at least initially, and the scientific process involves a lot of tearing down existing knowledge and rebuilding. We all really, deep down want to prove everyone else wrong.

However, when the funding comes from institutional sources, there are certainly limits on how rebellious one can actually be.

Furthermore the peer review process encourages a kind of camaraderie and politics where you compete with each other, and are actively tasked with finding fault in everyone else's work, but you are also stuck with them for decades, so you don't want to screw anyone over too hard, because their turn to review your grant proposal will come around soon.

> Founders take their research and drive towards profitable exploitation of that knowledge relentlessly.

Yeah, this latter part is what I've never really gotten. My goal is always to take my research and drive relentlessly towards... more research. Ideally while freely disseminating the products and tools used so that others can do the same, thereby letting everyone share in the fruits of the labor.