| That's pretty harsh, maybe because the expectations are unfairly high for Sam. It's just someone writing on their blog some thoughts they had, so maybe we should treat it like that. But for some constructive criticism, there are some actual topics I'd be interested in hearing discussion about, on researchers vs founders. I've been a bit of both, and I'd say the more practical similarities are: - "unlimited" freedom to work on what you think is important, usually in something you think is different, but with a existential constraint. For founders, it's the business model -- your pitch deck needs a convincing business model to survive regardless of the product (which is what a lot of founders really care about). Whereas in research, you need a long-term vision that is attracting to funding to survive, which can be a deep expertise in something societally-relevant, or evidence of success in doing something novel - the game: there's sort of a game to play for both. With startups, there's the optimization of MAUs and acting like a startup and growing fast; there's the established ways of getting funding from angel investment to series of investments, attorneys and payments, and then different ways to exit. For research, there's the game of publishing, annual cycles of recruiting great students and advising, reputation and finding your niche, and the academic system in general. - management: on both cases you're managing a small team, usually under 50 people, so small enough that you know everyone and can be a bit involved in what they're doing, but big enough that you need a bit of hierarchy. There's also some major differences: - Equity vs reputation. Early startup employees work for less pay (moreso in the past) for the chance their equity will be highly valuable. Early stage researchers (PhD students or Postdocs) work for less pay for the chance to discover/invent something amazing to become a tenured professor or leading scientist. - Formal mentorship credit: researchers get credit for being mentors for people that leave and do well later. PhD students are partly known for who their advisor is. When a student does well at an institution and goes to another one, the first institution is acknowledged indefinitely. Papers credit the authors as well as the institution before a single line of text. In startups, when someone amazing leaves it's a major negative thing. When someone says "GreatProgrammer was previously at Foo startup with HappyCTO" there isn't that same admiration for Foo startup or HappyCTO as if you say "GreatResearcher did their PhD at Foo University in Professor Happy's lab." |
I don’t disagree, we should all be kind.
That said, this post gets voted to the top because it has (samaltman.com) next to it. If it had (jonnybeeble.blogspot.com), it’d get maybe a few upvotes and comments and that’d be that. But here it immediately gets upvoted to the front page, therefore receiving intensive scrutiny, and here we are at 80+ comments all kind of saying the same thing.