Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups.
I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade.
Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created breakthrough science in self-healing materials for the "benefit of the world"
10 years of grant fights, personnel struggles, under-served licensing resources, conflicting lab-vs-student priorities, etc has put him out the other end hopeless and disenfranchised.
The world will probably lose one of their best "public" researchers to the bowels of commercial science as a result.
Go for it Sam, good luck and excited to see what your first projects are.
Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system.
The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge.
Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change.
I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I've seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the 'erratum' was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge.
I'm super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division!
Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).
In fairness, all systems are broken, academia isn't much more broken than anything else involving large numbers of mortals.
The basic problem is that we need to rank one researcher's merit against everyone else's, and there's no perfect way to do this because nobody can familiarise themselves with every individual's research. Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.
The thing is that macro-scale works pretty well. As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently. The measures we use are correlated with research quality even if they don't measure it perfectly.
It's only at the detailed scale where it looks badly flawed.
edit: and of course whenever I spend a long time writing a thoughtful comment I get the "you're submitting too fast, please slow down" message. Time to leave this comment to sit for an hour before pressing reply again...
>As an overall system, academic science produces new knowledge at an astounding rate, and in terms of dollars in to research produced I'd say it works pretty efficiently.
I wouldn't call throwing out your trained experts and starting with fresh trainees in a five-to-seven year cycle all that efficient.
> Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality.
In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.
Don't citation indexes work pretty much exactly like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking is gameable.
In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or content farms) and papers that cite other articles just for the increase in rankings (similar to link farms) so the analogy to SEO (in its various hats) seems to fit.
This would suggest that the only way to fix the 'broken' citation ranking system is the same as Google, and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank, and black-list or penalise certain journals or types of citation?
> and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank
The impact of Google doing this is, in financial terms, probably much larger than if the same type of approach would be applied in the academic situation. So if Google is allowed to do this, why can't we allow the same approach for research? Apparently, the system works quite well.
Honestly, funding a research team to develop a science ranking engine that was both being continually developed to thwart gaming and effectively independent of university and science-funding politics would be a truly excellent use of YCombinator's money.
Indeed. Simple link counting based search algorithms got gamed a lot in the past, by regular website operators and most heavily by spammers. That's partially why the current search algorithms are much more clever and secret than just using the Page rank. Human raters and machine learning off the data they generate are used as well. This helps to make the rules more uncertain and nasty SEO tricks much harder to discover and use.
Compare this to the situation in rating of academic research, where the papers are rated by the community of authors itself and the ranking is essentially a weighted counting of references. Of course it leads to lots of self-serving spam.
If the idea of independent raters (and possibly machine learning on top of it) could be implemented for academic papers as well, that would be a big improvement, I think. Academia has got a lot to learn from search engines.
The problem is not that it is gameable or not. Even if it is, most researchers won't try to game it. The problem is that they will focus on optimizing these counters by necessity (they have no choices, it is that or goodbye), rather than doing what they want to do: great research.
I wouldn't call prioritizing quantity over quality gaming the ranking system, it is merely playing by its rules. I would call gaming it if there was some cheat (like you cite me and I cite you even if really we shouldn't), which may happen but I believe is rare.
It seems you have reduced my argument to the last part only. Google's system is pretty good even if you don't focus on gaming. By the way, even when it comes to websites, most users (admins) don't try to game the system.
Academics isn't really that bad. It's full of many of the smartest people in the world trying to do things which are fundamental but aren't seen by the market as important and can't be funded any other way besides charity. Sometimes it doesn't go that smoothly and there's some bureaucracy like in any organization (people are constantly fighting very hard to cut what little funding there is so academics have to fight over it) but it's really not all doom and gloom like some people make it out to be.
Graduate students tend to love to complain as much as possible about things that aren't that bad (I know I was one) and people leaving something idealistic often have a compelling need to try and put it down in any way they can to justify their decision to give up on the idealistic goals and try to make some money -- which is why you see so many "goodbye academia, you are broken" posts and blog entries. And some people have genuinely bad experiences like at any job -- bad manager, particularly low funding, bad co-workers, you're going to have a bad time.
That being said YC research sounds amazing. Basic research was funded by charity from the superwealthy (or only carried out by the independently wealthy) for most of human history, the model works. Researchers tend not to look into areas or find results which are bad for their backers. It's good to have some public and some private sector; we need to balance out the conflict of interest a bit.
Graduate school was one of my best experiences, and I wouldn't trade my years here for anything. My co-workers were fantastic, and my advisor is golden.
My complaint is with those inefficient bureaucratic systems that you mention in passing. Life's much easier without them. :)
I think there is a big disconnect between industry and academy. When I was a grad student (got a masters in CS) there was a huge lack of problems to solve at school. I went to Sun and after about a year I had 9 fantastic PhD problems.
Be nice if we could fix that. School is great, industry is great, somehow connect them.
Many fields of work don't pay much, but tell you you've got a Mission. Many fields of work make you work very long hours. Many fields of work require extensive training and skills.
Academia doesn't pay very much, makes you work very long hours, and requires extensive training and skills, justifies it all by reference to Mission, and then inevitably fires you and tells you getting fired was your fault for not being in the top 8% of the entire profession.
Top research universities have more money, and smarter/harder working students. Neither of those are necessarily solutions to the problem of university research.
Don't get me wrong: our lab makes awe-inspiring machines that can see individual atoms held in vacuum by lattices of laser light. Our research leads to incredible discoveries, but we're held back by inefficiencies. It's a rusty system, but to any mechanic, rusty = broken.
Also, leaving to build a startup is rather uncommon at MIT physics, and most students (including me) absolutely love research. The academic career is just not attractive enough to spend another 4-12 years in a lab becoming increasingly good at doing exactly one thing.
Every time I explain my experience in academia to VCs or those in business, they don't believe me. "It can't be that bad!" It is. I've worked at 3 of the top schools in the world and it's a total mess as the OP mentioned. It's also a mess that hurts everyone, so I'm happy to see this type of initiative.
It's not necessarily the 'brokenness' of the system that forces people out but the consequence of producing PhDs faster than new positions are being created. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here". No one expects that all high school students will become high school teachers. Why should it be the same for PhDs?
A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly prevalent in both the student and faculty bodies despite abundant evidence of arithmetic skills. Faculty are often quite unaware of what happens outside their building, and students are, well, students and absorb a lot of the mindset of their role models. So there becomes a glut of post-post-docs applying for a scant few professorship, which makes getting hired and then getting tenure ultracompetitive and stressful--so many people want the jobs that the administration can ask just about anything out of them, including pretty unrealistic expectations, bad working conditions (80 hr/weeks for 75 k/yr in the sciences at many good schools) and so forth. The conditions of tenure-track professorships (when professors are still young enough to be most creative and energetic, and are still skeptical of their fields' dogma) are poorly suited to creativity and focus, so their grad students are tasked with the actual science while the professors become managers.
This isn't to say that academia is actually 'broken'. If my coffeemaker is broken, it doesn't make coffee. Academia is still making the things it is supposed to, but never in the amounts or quantities or prices that everybody wants (as it turns out everybody's wants are wildly divergent). So for this and other off-topic reasons, it's not exactly broken but definitely not optimal.
I'm of the opinion that a more optimal academy would do more to prepare grad students to find their own path, be it in academia, industry, or elsewhere. Sort of like what the US liberal arts education is supposed to be, but at a higher level and with the requisite specialization as is fitting a PhD. The critical, analytical, creative, scholarly, and technical skills that grad school can (and often does) bestow or hone are a great fit for a variety of pursuits, including entrepreneurial ones. But there is little guidance here, in part because the faculty themselves have little idea how to go about doing anything but what they do 80 hours a week.
I left the academic track after a post-doc to become an independent researcher (doing funded and unfunded research as well as R&D consulting) and it's been really surprising to see how many professors think it's an unworkable idea. Not an idea that many people try and flame out, but one so unthinkably scary that no one has seen anybody try. Which smelled like an opportunity to me, and still does...
When I was in grad school I think most people were aware of how tough it is to get a tenure track faculty position. Many students had no aspiration of going into academia and planned to go directly to industry. This was in mechanical engineering, an inherently practical subject, so maybe the field makes a difference.
Kudos on trying to make it as an independent researcher though. That's a really cool idea. How has it been applying for grants without a university affiliation? What's the breakdown of your time spent on funded research, unfunded research, and consulting?
I've registered with SAM (System of Award Management) so I can get grants directly. I still collaborate sometimes with academics, writing papers and grants, and minor consulting for them. I'm also still an affiliate of my post-doc school so I have an email address and journal access, but I think you can basically buy library access from a school for a decent price.
I spend about half my time or a little less on consulting, but it's been very research-oriented consulting so far, with few restrictions on publishing results. There are and will be ups and downs (most of my consulting is in energy) but I bill a lot more than I pay myself so that smooths it out a bit.
So far most of the non-consulting research has been unpaid but I try as much as is practical to get funding for it at some point--make a minimum viable product to write a grant upon and if it doesn't work out then make it publishable and iterate or move on. I like strategy, it combines well with dreaming. I have some moonshot ideas too, but most things can be broken down into units digestible for peer /grant review.
I'm finding that there are a lot of theoretical problems that are also practical problems. I also feel like I am doing research all the time, but a lot of time is spent building tools and skills to do new things, and less of my time is spent actually learning new things about the earth than I would like. But I guess that's research...
You've said it better: it's not completely non-functioning, but just far from optimum. I've learnt so much from grad school: I wouldn't exchange my years here for anything.
I'm in a similar situation and I don't know a single person who doesn't think academia is horribly broken. Internet rants from people leaving academia are practically a monthly occurrence these days, and nobody ever disagrees with them.
I was reading the article, and it made my blood simmer, as articles like this do. Then, I looked at the comments which referred to Sean Carroll, and I couldn't believe it. The fact he claims his textbook, a fantastic intro to GR and now a standard accessible text, was a mistake with regards to his life in academe is so disheartening, it makes you wonder how science actually continues in the present, hideous environment.
I've been wondering if academia is really fundamentally broken, or whether it's just horribly distorted due to some combination of underfunding and overpopulation, resulting in way too much competition for scarce resources.
Totally agree. Just wanted to stress how the grant funding systems is totally nonsensical. While as a PhD you could get funding for your entire 3/4 year program (at least here in the UK), if you decide to go for a post-doc things get dramatically complicated as your employment is (usually) tied to a particular grant. When the grant expires, you're out if there isn't another source of money. Is that a decorous situation for a highly skilled person who devoted much of his life to studies? Not sure about that.
The amount of financial and administrative skullduggery within the UC system 2009 (after the financial crisis)-present (I was at UCSB as a grad student 2009-2011) is almost uncommunicable to people who weren't there. People simply refuse to believe some of the stories I tell them.
The best story I heard about this was from a math grad student / instructor about how you had to jump through multiple hoops to even re-up on chalk for the blackboard.
When I was at Michigan, if someone brought cookies for a seminar and wanted reimbursement then anyone who wanted a cookie had to sign a sheet and the cookie bringer had to enter it all into Concur.
They are losing me. Almost 15 years and twice as many grant submissions. I'm writing a grant atm (a fucking good one), and I hope not to be around to be turned down for it. I'm literally pitching investors between experiments.
It really is nice to see an organization like YC take an interest in research. I applaud Sam for making that considerable donation and hope the outcome is better than expected.
I think there is a bit of exaggeration on the non-availability of grant money for research in applied science/technology. @sama acknowledges the adequacy of funds for applied research explicitly, "[1] Funding for technological development is actually relatively high, but funding for fundamental research keeps getting cut. Investors want to fund incremental progress—and the world has gotten very good at delivering that. This is more valuable than it sounds; incremental progress compounds quickly." This is true of industrial research and to an extent, academia.
It conforms with my experience.
That said, the skills required to write great grants and schmooze with grant-givers are quite different from that needed to do quality research in science or engineering. So the academic researcher community in science and technology is whittled down to the small set of {those good at research}∩ {those good at writing grants} + ⊂{those good at writing grants} + geniuses
I was hoping to answer questions here for awhile but I'm getting pulled into a crisis so I have to go.
I'm going to do an AMA on HN later this week (mostly to answer questions about applying to YC) and would be happy to answer more questions about YCR then.
You know, normally I'm one of those jerks constantly criticizing the Silicon Valley Way of things. But this was a very good idea, I wish you the best of luck with it, and if, God forbid, my current employer went pear-shaped, it's the kind of place I'd love to work.
Thanks! Was wondering if YC would eventually do something like this, given the path it seems to be taking wrt nonprofits... It was a huge pain setting up an independent nonprofit to do the research I wanted to do, then fundraising was hard again, and then I didn't raise enough money to pay myself... So good luck to everyone who applies to this.
It takes a special person to donate $10 million to a new project. You don't get enough credit Sam Altman. Good job and a very good idea.
EDIT: Why am getting down votes for this comment? You must know that in this world not everyone is willing to part with their money and are not that giving. So relax before you down vote me promptly:)
We are not discussing the scoring system if you pay close attention. I made an initial comment and if it is misunderstood hence the edit of the original comment. Clarifying my comment does not take from the original discussion. Does it?
Reminds me in some way of this tweet from PG last year:
> Paul Graham (@pg) — Markets are usually quite clever but one place they break is in encouraging treatments rather than vaccines. Subscription revenue.
As someone else already replied, that's an incentive problem. If you change the incentives to "pay $X a month while healthy, pay nothing when sick" then the profit would be in the cure.
Unfortunately, we switched from that a while ago (my understanding is that we used to do "pay while healthy" around the 1900s) and now the current way seems "normal".
Except that tweet isn't really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money.
Beyond that, vaccines are a "Pay $X per month while healthy" treatment - you have to treat everyone whether they're sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication.
The problem is that modern vaccine targets are hard. Multiple strains, dangerous responses from partial immunity (Dengue), very rapid viral evolution (HIV, flu), etc.
One of my examples, dengue, is vector born, like Lyme. That's no promise the vaccine will be easy to develop. In the case of Lyme, I'd assert there's very few drug development paradigms that are robust to anti-scientific hysterics (says the person at a conference that regularly gets chronic Lyme picketers).
That's essentially just the divide between fee for service and capitation, both common models. HMOs work the way you describe. ACOs have been around not as long (at least, by that name) but became big with Obamacare and essentially do the same thing.
While what US has now is bad, your solution is not complete: One can imagine that in your scenario a doctor can claim you're not really sick, or lie that you have been cured. So what actually becomes profitable is not treating people.
We talked to Alan at great lengths in the process of putting this together. He is the most insightful person I've ever met on how to structure an organization for great research.
In the article, he suggests finding Michelangelos. I imagine there are many who are clearly the right type, but many more non-obvious Michelangelos. Do you have (or intend to discover) a reliable way to foresee the best people even while circumstances influencing their lives have diverted them from the traditional outlets to look for such individuals? I assume there will be enough obviously great candidates wanting to "work" at YCR that you won't need to dig for hidden gems. I was just curious to know if it was something you'd considered.
Sam, when I met you at Startup School last year, I wanted to be brief. The most important thing I wanted to communicate to you was my gratitude, and I thanked you for sharing your startup class. I'm blown away by and so grateful for the stuff you've been doing since. I'm very excited to see how these new projects work out. Thank you again man.
At first I thought about that too, but as I got further I was reminded about an article about the person to first theorize the Higgs Boson, and how he had only published a few articles in his entire career.
TIL that Sam Altman has considerably more personal wealth than I would have guessed, if I'd ever been inclined to guess.
Anyway, this is very cool. Exactly the sort of thing that needs to happen to push the world forward in deeper ways. I'll be very curious to see what sort of teams they put together and just how fundamental and long term and heretical they go with their research.
If every poster here had their net worth attached to their username, you'd probably cry.
We all realize founders maintain "a lot more" equity than employees, but it's almost like our brains aren't wired to recognize, remember, or rationalize how some people get really really rewarded more than others. With Sam being grand poobah of YC, he's on a life track to being a liquid-capable multibillionaire within 5-10 years after the current unicornpalooza goes through a few rounds of lofty exits.
My propositions for SF to require all equity-exited techies to tattoo their net worth on their foreheads keeps getting shot down by anonymous "concerned citizens."
HAHA - I thought the same thing. I ACTUALLY scrolled back up to the top of the article to see if it was truly posted by him after reading that line....
> We’ll especially welcome outsiders working on slightly heretical ideas (just like we do for the startups we fund) and we’ll try to keep things small—we believe small groups can do far more than most people think.
What's the process for an outsider to get involved? This sounds like a really cool and much needed movement. Will more information be coming soon on how to apply/join/contribute?
I like the idea of YC funding research. Bias free and politics free research can go a long way. A couple of questions though for @sama:
1. Where will the research be based? Is YC providing space to setup lab?
2. One of the problems I see with this is lack of fellow researches present on site making casual collaboration harder (compared to a research university campus). Have you thought of that?
3. Are you planning on funding researches with track records or people with high risk/high reward ideas that are relatively new?
1. Try set up a lab in Cambridge at some point down the road.
2. Pay particular attention to CS theory: it's (arguably) high-impact and very cost effective --you can practically fund an entire generation of researchers in a subfield for a fraction of the cost of, say, a major interdisciplinary initiative. See for instance what the Simons foundation is doing at Berkeley[1].
Best of luck with what you're doing. You can end up actually changing the world in this way.
Serious question: In what ways is CS theory high-impact?
I'm particularly interested in any arguments that complexity theory is high-impact (beyond the very useful insight that there are some problems for which no polynomial time algorithm is known). I have a pretty good idea of the impact of cryptography and randomized linear algebra (sometimes considered CS theory), but am also interested in hearing about other fields considered CS theory with useful applications.
Graph theory is a good example of this - the asymptotically fastest minimum spanning tree algorithm was made possible by Hopcroft and Karp just drawing weird data structures on a chalkboard until union-find popped out, which gives you near-linear time MST.
type theory has broad applicability, since it serves as the basis for all modern programming languages design and research. another nice example is kripke logical relations, which can be used to give a model for a programming language in which you can prove certain safety lemmas for critical code.
Can't stress this enough, but a lot of TCS research only becomes valuable once you put it into the wild, and that takes a lot of interdisciplinary work.
A lot of the stuff in TCS is theory for the sake of theory, and one would want to avoid too much of this.
Interdisciplinary work is incredibly hard to pull off in academia due to tribal affiliations. I think the MSR NYC lab (where I work), which consists of computer scientists, economists, and other social scientists, is one of the few places I've seen it actually flourish.
I don't think interdisciplinary work has to be between fields that disparate to begin with either. From personal experience, I think there are definite benefits from just having different fields of engineering collaborate and share ideas.
It's not really that different from work in another corporate research division (IBM, PARC, MSR, Bell Labs..). Even in academia you are still getting paid, and your work is influenced by funding frameworks, citation index and faculty interests.
Peer review has long been the traditional validation mechanism in science. I don't see why it wouldn't be applicable here.
Because as much as it is true that funding influences how some projects get started in academia, professors do get tenure. And they can and do things which would be totally offensive to a corporate parent. There is a totally different kind of publication coming out of even the old research labs and an academic institution, much less a modern corporation. A typical research lab does not need to worry about a bottom line - which a company (like YC) is obligated to care about.
This is fantastic. Addresses the completely broken aspects of doing research in academia, gives researchers access to top developers through the YC network, gives you a much better environment stress and pay-wise than if you're a researcher, and focuses on meaningful innovation. And the research will be free to use. Nailed it in so many aspects.
@sama - since you mention that startups aren't good at solving certain types of problems, is this something you've always believed, or is it a realisation through your work at YC?
Also was it inspired by the Shuttleworh Fundation in any way?
I don't want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year.
$10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam is hedging so YCR can do its first round in about a year and get a bigger ask by pointing to the starting groups achievements.
>$10m isn't really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research
Sure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median/average grant size at $300k/$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.
$10 million is a lot of money. Science can be expensive but that $10 million can last a long time.
I agree it's real money, enough to do some real stuff.
But:
> An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you're looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.
Well, that 'overhead' is paying for things like lab space, electricity, health insurance (at least for the faculty, good luck grad students), liability insurance, etc. Not to mention the actual salary of the PI and/or other researchers -- which universities in STEM schools increasingly expect to be covered by grants too. The academic institutions would argue all the 'overhead' they take is legit funding of things necessary for the research to take place, but even if you think they are spending it inefficiently or 'stealing' money for unrelated things...
I think as a rough napkin calculation, the $500K is probably still closer to that same $500K when YC Research spends it too, not twice as much.
Maybe, maybe not. I debated bringing it up, and honestly YCR is likely to have a large, up-front facilities cost (regulations, certifications, etc.). It would make sense to start easy - don't start off with infectious diseases of humans - and build from there. But still, I'd wager that YCR will run far more efficiently than your average university. Someone above brought up the UC system: management-level positions have grown over 200% the last few decades (http://universityprobe.org/2011/03/new-data-on-management-gr...). Even if we limit the scope to department administrators and staff, YCR won't need nearly the same sort of personnel infrastructure.
For starters, I'm prejudiced to think any smaller org will run more efficiently than a larger one (even though I realize this is literally the opposite of conventional/mainstream assumptions!).
But TWICE as efficient?
Also, I think all those administrator salaries are probably being funded by tuition (that is, by government subsidized student loans that the students will be paying back for most of the rest of their lives), rather than research grants. :)
Or actually you didn't even suggest twice as efficient, you suggested virtually ZERO costs other than direct research costs -- would we call that INFINITELY more efficient with a zero in the denominator? :) (Not even including salaries? Aren't those also funded in part by the 'overhead'?)
It was a point of comparison. The NIH pool is large but spread very thin and, we can both agree, less efficiently than YCR is likely to be. Twice? Infinite? No of course note, but it's a point of interest in the "$10 million isn't so much" discussion.
And no, researcher's salaries (postdocs, tech, grad students, etc.) are not included. The indirect costs go to the university to pay for department/college-level utilities, facilities, infrastructure, and administrator salaries (which, admittedly, the lab does benefit from).
Well, salaries obviously WOULD have to be included in the YC case, there's no other pool of money for them to come from! So that would actually be a significant cost that the NIH grants _don't_ have to include (if it's not included in the overhead), but the YC Research seed money WOULD have to.
But I understand that research faculty in science and biomed are increasingly expected to bring in grant funding as a condition of employment/tenure. It sounds to me like the institution expects to help pay their salaries with it.
And with institutions hiring faculty _to_ do research, not caring about teaching really, evaluated solely on research, they are basically there to do research... it actually doesn't sound that unreasonable to consider a portion of their salary overhead. The research couldn't get done if they weren't getting the salary, after all.
But anyway, yeah, like I said, I do agree with your original point that this is real money that is enough to fund real research.
Point of clarification: Researcher salaries aren't included in the indirect costs aka overhead, they come out of the lab's funding. So 50% indirect costs of a $300k project means $100k to overhead/indirect costs, and $200k to research; researcher salaries, grad student stipends, healthcare, etc. all come out of that $200k. Then what's left of that $200k funds the lab.
$10m is a lot of money for some fields, but in the scheme of high tech and high reward biological/chemical/physical research it really isn't. Personnel overhead alone for a reasonably sized group (10-20) can range from $2m on the low end, up to 5 or 6 million on the high end.
For example, at many institutions it takes ~$250k to support a single researcher (Salary, health/personal insurance, institutional insurance) .
Alan Kay's group got $5M from NSF to "reinvent computing". The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called "Frank") of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.
Holy crap, that was some kind of read! Thanks for telling me about this as I had never heard of it. My proposal, similar to what Racket and REBOL/RED attempt, was to combine simple DSL's on top of a LISP and low-level 3GL (eg high-level assembler) with optimization, safety, etc built into translation process. Seems like Kay already did most of that with way more clever abstractions and techniques. Gives me hope my smaller proposal might go somewhere esp as I wanted to build components & servers not desktops.
If you watch any presentation from Alan Kay from the past few years, it looks like he's using PowerPoint or something similar. But, occasionally he does something PP can't do, like run a physic simulation or have all the letters in the text do a swarm animation. He's using Frank.
Thanks for the tip. I'll try to watch for that. Confirms it's already practical for at least graphic presentations. Meanwhile, I wonder what the odds are of getting a hold of Frank to play with it or build on it. Might have to try to contact him.
Note: I thought about doing something similar in first secure desktop I construct where I do my presentation on it, let people counter the methods probably won't work, and then tell them after that. Always priceless faces when that happens. Also helps tell the contrarian bullshitters apart from those who think hard on your claims. Saves time in future. ;)
Money in theoretical CS research goes pretty much entirely to overhead, not much goes to reagents / processes. Paying a little under a million a year in expenses isn't surprising there.
It may not be a lot in terms of research, but it's certainly a lot in terms of a voluntary personal donation to anything, however much money someone has.
Reminds me of a great historical figure of Hungary, István Széchenyi.
>Széchenyi gained a wider reputation in 1825, by supporting the proposal of the prime minister, Nagy, to establish the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Széchenyi donated the full annual income of his estates that year, 60,000 florins, towards it.
>The height of the bubble was reached in the winter of 1636-37. Tulip traders were making (and losing) fortunes regularly. A good trader could earn up to 60,000 florins in a month— approximately $61,710 adjusted to current U.S. dollars. With profits like those to be had, nothing local governments could do stopped the frenzy of trading. Then one day in Haarlem a buyer failed to show up and pay for his bulb purchase. The ensuing panic spread across Holland, and within days tulip bulbs were worth only a hundredth of their former prices. The tulip bubble had burst.
Florins appear to be pretty steady with the dollar...
As a researcher, I've run the numbers on what it would take to start a new nonprofit research institute. Assuming some other sources of revenue (e.g. grants), 10M was actually the sweet spot to get a minimum sustainable group off the ground (about 5 PIs, with postdocs and grad students). This is for math/cs/physics theory, where there are no experimental costs. The IP stance is surprising -- for an independent group, it is tough to give up on a potential source of revenue. Seems like YC itself provides a way to monetize the ideas, though, since some of them will likely feed into the VC side and help the companies.
For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we'll do in the future.
"For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we'll do in the future."
Two words: baseband processor.
The world really, really needs a fully open baseband processor.
It really does. But that seems like a mission for a startup, not a research organization. The challenges are more engineering and business than science.
If someone wants to apply with an open baseband processor startup, applications are due Oct 13!
It's true that we need an open baseband processor, but I wonder if this qualifies as the sort of blue-sky research that I'm guessing they'll want to focus on?
My feeling is that the software to accomplish this is already largely there, but the hard part of getting a design to the fab and actually getting anyone to adopt it isn't.
I think there would also be a number of regulatory hurdles to cross, since this would end up being essentially an SDR, and the FCC (for example) already seems to fear wide public availability for those.
They only care if you can make it work on channels it shouldn't, they don't care whether the code that controls it is open or not.
But yes, an open processor could help with a lot of open networking problems, even though it seems more like an engineering matter than research per se.
25 years is a reasonable number for how long it took deep learning research to begin getting traction. I would think AI would be a strange choice since it seems like there are a lot of research opportunities in academia and industry for this topic, but for the same reason I would say AI research is ripe for disruption.
My bet is on renewable energy/sustainability, agriculture or biotech, with energy being my first choice. Sam has expressed serious concern about powering the future. His first(only?) deviations from the "No Board Seat" policy were two energy companies.
He's also chairman of the board for two nuclear power companies. And YC itself has been branching into biotech and hardware and other science-y companies. Anything seems possible to me.
My money's on nuclear. Advanced nuclear designs regularly claim 25 year timeframes for design, qualification testing, licensing activities, supply chain development, and construction. Transatomic is proposing concepts that require long qualification and licensing developments, many of which could make meaningful progress in a small lab with a $10M initial budget. You have to produce your salt fuel and do materials testing with surrogate fission products (e.g. stable isotopes) over long periods of time. They also have to do hydride transport experiments which can be done on a pretty small scale.
A 25-year estimate for how long it will take them to develop an AI that will be able to create biological organisms that utilize nuclear power directly? Sounds reasonable.
Nuclear makes sense. The fluid-fueled nuclear company he's the chairman of (Transatomic) is considered at least slightly heretical by the nuclear industry, which is used to its solid fuel water-cooled reactors. They also use used nuclear fuel (i.e. transuranics in nuclear waste) as fuel, which could be called heretical because recycling nuclear waste was once outlawed in the US by Jimmy Carter (but it no longer is illegal).
I think $10M can go pretty far in basic feasibility studies needed for the Transatomic reactor. You need a bunch of diffusion couple experiments and hydride stability studies. Lots of furnaces, fume hoods, and surrogate fission products. But you're right that when you get to major component qualification then yeah, $10M is nothing.
Safe AI [1], on the other hand, has [2] running on < $1M and [3] running on $10M (!) from Musk. Throw in Yudkowsky's recently expressed interest in startups [4] and you can guess what I am guessing.
I think "we’ll have a process in place to address technology that could be dangerous" is a pretty strong hint, but it would apply about equally well to AI or nuclear, which are already the top guesses in this thread.
@sama - Interesting, I definitely think the toss up between meaningful research and high paying engineering work is very broken. You mentioned how compensation will not be determined based on conferences and papers, do you have any specifics on how you would measure "quality of output"? Will researchers be compensated differently based on said quality?
(As often times the quality of research output is hard to gauge immediately without the greater context of time passing)
ARPA-E (The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, http://arpa-e.energy.gov/) has some interesting models on how to encourage meaningful innovation tied to continued funding. Might be worth a look. Same with DARPA.
Hand-selecting a bunch of famous folks results in IAS Princeton effect which has the criticism of producing nothing significant. Usually the approach of hiring a towering/inspiring figure with an emerging research view works well (like FB did). They bring along a bunch of rookies and experts, and set up research groups quickly and rather smoothly.
MSR has published lots of great papers but it has not yet replicated the success of PARC or Bell Labs by any means. I am not sure why this has happened, but it has been pretty obvious to everyone in the research community. Google, which came in with a research agenda pretty late, has more or less single handedly pushed the boundaries of industrial research in the last decade.
FWIW, as a researcher at a university, it is only my decision whether I apply for a patent or not. In contrast, patenting inventions is an inherent part of the research workflow at research labs such as MSR, Yahoo Research, etc.
Eh. That a pretty huge jump. Look, most new "tech" companies research is mostly PR, internal and external. If you're doing something you have little experience in and therefor can't evaluate, which success you aren't dependent on or necessarily benefit from and everyone will say how cool it is regardless then it's extremely hard to not cut corners and achieve real success.
Still exciting, but I wouldn't underestimate the challenge.
MSR has been around for a while, with quite a bit of freedom, and still is a far cry from the accomplishments of Bell Labs (maybe time will tell, though.)
Hi. Seventeen-year old high schooler here, I love this idea.
(@sama, anyone else behind YCR):
All my life I had wanted to go into industry, follow that classic Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel dream that many CS High Schoolers go into.
But recently, I got into research. The CollegeBoard opened up a class called AP Research I am now in, and I spent my last summer researching Machine Learning at my local private university. I was surprised by how much I loved it, the math behind it fascinates me (context: am currently taking Adv. Diff Eq and Linear Algebra my Senior Year.)
I am now trying my own Deep Learning algorithms and working on my paper. I have always been conflicted between industry and academia, since all of my fellow HS CS friends just want to found companies in industry. Things such as YCR make research a bigger dream for youth, whom I would currently argue are too under-exposed to it. It just doesn't seem as glamorous to them.
Thank you for YCR, it reminds me of the cool things research can do. I can't wait to hopefully apply one day.
If you're into any field of applied AI such as Machine Learning, you'll have no trouble transitioning from industry to research and vice versa. It is a very flexible skill set and there is a lot of demand for it.
Just go the best university you can and take as many ML and AI courses possible, there really isn't much you can do wrong.
This is the biggest news since YC started. The YC model works, but it isn't churning out disruptions like Xerox PARC did... ethernet, the laser printer, the PC. It tends to produce Reddits. This could fill that gap. Bravo...
> We think research institutions can be better than they are today.
I hope you'll expand on this. Is there something that YCR can do that academic research can't do? You might have more impact if you use that money to influence US and EU gov't to invest more in basic research. A 1% increase in annual gov't funding will be vastly larger than YCR's total budget.
The Gates Foundation is tackling difficult health issues that aren't profitable for companies and neglected by poor governments. They've found an underserved gap. What's the gap that YCR is uniquely suited to tackle?
To answer your first question,
1. they can move much faster than academic research. More money in basic research isn't going to fix the antiquated process in which academics live. It's also not going to help researchers learn how to budget properly, or learn to manage people. So that alone is a value add. A 1% increase in gov spending simply adds money without fixing a problem that currently exists....not really going to make a difference in my opinion(PhD research scientist)
I agree with this. The most interesting thing I got out of Paula Stephan's How Economic Shapes Science is that a few years' back, the NIH basically doubled its research funding and all that happened was a post-doc bubble and university admin hoovering up the money to build buildings.
I agree that academic science has problems, but YCR isn't going to have any impact on academic research, funding nor publications. My guess is that YCR will attempt to be a mini-Xerox PARC: 20 people working on interdisciplinary stuff in CS. It'll be fun, but it'll be small.
How exactly are you so sure about this? And if it's small, that doesn't mean it can't have an impact. Also, perhaps I'm missing something, but it doesn't see like we have any real info about this, if you have more, I'd love to read it.
It takes someone/something with some ability to make something happen. Are they going to change how all academic science is done? Probably not, but could they have an impact and begin a process in which academic science begins to respond/change? Yes, that is probable.
Between YC and Google life science, things are happening...and it's going to take us (I'm assuming you are a scientist) to support this change.
One comparative advantage that comes to mind is the institutional knowledge of computational and analytics systems. A lot of computational science is still done with a FORTRAN mindset (if not actual code), whereas faster, lighter, dare I say more agile approaches to simulation and data mining could be much better.
Similarly, although I wouldn't guess is what YCR is thinking because it doesn't have the same cachet (though I really don't know what YCR thinks) is building tools for science. In my field (geoscience) there are boundless slopes of fresh, trackless powder in the mountains of computational geoscience just waiting to get skied. Building tools to do, say, probabilistic graphical modeling of stratigraphic systems requires approaching a traditionally intuitive and descriptive science with a much more formal and precise mindset and re-casting a lot of ideas and methods, while at the same time keeping everything accessible for those without the requisite background in probability or graphs... To me this gets closer to the real roots of science than a lot of what gets funded or makes headlines, but won't by itself get funded or make headlines (until you build it and sell it).
> In my field (geoscience) there are boundless slopes of fresh, trackless powder in the mountains of computational geoscience just waiting to get skied.
For one, it can be leaner; tenure-line faculty to student ratios are unchanged while adminstrator-to-student ratios more than doubled in the last 25 years. "There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty." Yet we have to take out our own garbage.
I imagine researchers in YCR will have way fewer administrative obligations than a researcher at a University. No classes to teach, no committees to sit on, no students to act as an amateur psychologist to, no grants to apply for (although this could be a disadvantage - the process of writing a grant often forces ideas to crystalize).
Very interesting! But exactly how fundamental is this research meant to be? Will there be any mathematicians working on projects not at all related to cryptography or physicists working on projects entirely unrelated to fusion?
As an astrophysicist in the thick of applications for jobs in both industry and academia, I strongly identify with the points raised in the article. While I consider my research slightly heretical with the potential to solve many big problems in astrophysics, I don't have any illusions that it will really lead to any practical developments. So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we're working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?
From this statement and, more generally, YC's focus on creating high-growth businesses, I'm guessing they'll be focused on long-term research with potential to disrupt markets and have practical impact.
> So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we're working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?
Are these the only options? You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on solving practical problems.
> You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on solving practical problems.
I don't mean to be dismissive of those working on solving practical problems! There's a good chance that will be me in the near future! I suppose my concern is more that people working on those sorts of things already have many more options and resources available to them. I just mean to state that if one grants that research without immediate practical application has some (perhaps qualitative) value for society, then the relative impact could be larger if it were focused more towards that kind of research. But of course the downside to that is that the resulting research...has no immediate practical application.
None of this should be taken as criticism exactly since both strategies have their advantages (and it's not my money anyway), it's just not quite clear from the post what sort of research is going to be funded.
The trick is to create a Bell Labs and not an Institute for Advanced Study. For programming related things (assuming that's the domain?), that's a hard line to draw. Getting regular interactions with the ycombinator classes would be one way to combat it.
If you're wondering about the criticism of IAS, see this quote:
"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"
Strong language. Especially coming from an organization that generally touts "ideas as useless." Well here's a model based exponentially upon the promise of "ideas." I sincerely hope you disrupt the current models, which have been severely hijacked by interest groups, short-term thinking, and governance.
So yes Sam, you have some bold ideas (you're not yet sharing). Put $10m down to validate them and bring them to the world. You've earned the chance. And if you succeed, you'll create a new model that touts the power of ideas, takes responsibility for them, but does not own them.
Perhaps you're thinking of this [PG, 2005]: Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
This is specific to startup business ideas, not scientific ideas. And worthless != useless. Worthless (in the narrow sense) means you can't sell it for a lot of money.
Will scientists at YC Research continue the common pattern of academic research/publications? Or are there some grander plans to disrupt traditional research?
It's pretty important that YCR groups have strong ties with the existing research communities — research collaborations tend to have a multiplicative effect.
So I'd expect to see papers coming out of YCR. However, I'd also expect to see many other forms of communication (e.g. blog posts, code releases, etc). In general, we'll tune our efforts to achieve the best research results and impact, rather than to fit the existing incentive systems.
I love the accessibility and content of blog posts by members of Recurse Center. It would be amazing if scientists from YCR publish informal, yet rigorous posts for newbies.
I was at SOSP until earlier today. During the Q&A of the Chaos graph processing system, there was discussion of a previous exchange between Frank McSherry and the authors of the work ... what was REALLY cool was that parts of the original exchange happened on Twitter and via blog posts and we were hearing about it at the conference some time later :)
Unless YC is promising to fund these researchers for life they'll pretty much have to, or else they'll never get back on the treadmill once the YC money runs out.
@sama is this targeted towards pre-PhDs who are deciding between pursuing their PhD or working in industry, as well as post-PhDs who are full-time researchers?
Sam Altman is personally donating $10 Million to YCR.
This is one of the greatest thing he could do to show some honest generosity towards the world.
Bravo.
Surely I'm missing something here. Won't giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held? Can someone explain why not? Honest question.
If I were to hazard a guess. the equity is intended to make working as a researcher similarly attractive to the equity grants available when going to work for a startup. Given the diversity of YC's portfolio it's probably much more likely to create wealth than any single startup. To me, if YC is creating a research group for the long term, then long term financial stability for the researchers is probably the way to go.
YC startups don't grow on a tree in the YC garden and YC is what most startups want to get into. It makes much more sense to make that research widely available, chances are good for YC that the startups that do something useful with it will join YC at a later point. Even if they don't, a growing technology industry helps everyone, YC included.
> Won't giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held?
That's equivalent to saying "won't paying in U.S. dollars to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits the U.S. Federal Reserve directly and hence increases the value of the U.S. dollars held?"
Obviously not the same scale, but you get where I'm going with this. Indirect incentives don't quite work that way.
The difference in scale is 4-5 orders of magnitude here, probably more. And at such different scales, I don't see how the same rules apply.
For instance, trying to increase the value of USD with your work when billions of people on the planet are doing the same is basically impossible and unpredictable even if you're a great researcher / business leader / whatever, to say the least. The same is not the case with YC equity, where you can expect, with a fairly high probability, a significant increase in your equity if your research contributes hundreds of millions of dollars worth to a YC startup.
I'm not trying to be poke holes in the idea or anything like that, just genuinely wondering -- and the analogy to USD doesn't seem like the right answer.
Doesn't Elon Musk encouraging other people to use Tesla's battery IP help drive the electric vehicle market to maturity faster, creating more opportunity for Tesla to succeed?
The market is still the market. Not sure we should look this gift horse in the mouth. George R. Price figured out altruism can be reduced a math equation decades ago, it doesn't mean we can't embrace the good that comes out of decisions like this. :)
Sorry if my comment came across as needlessly pessimistic. I was super-excited when Elon Musk made the Tesla "open-source" announcement, as I was yesterday when I read this.
That comment was just me trying to apply my meager knowledge of startup economics here :)
It's easier to comment on something specific when you disagree than when you agree but that leaves a very critical trail after a while. Since I've been critical of Sam's airbnb position and expressed a lot of concern over the amount of power a VC would have in the "founder visa" posts in the past, I would like to chime in to say that YC Research is an intriguing and exciting development with a lot of money behind it. This has the potential to be pretty great.
First, this is really great. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works in practice.
"We plan to do this for a long time. If some of these projects take 25 years, that’s perfectly fine with us. "
Building an institution that supports this kind of long-term commitment is going to be a challenge. While there are plenty of organisations that work over those timescales, very long-term projects seem to me to be unusual - and not just because results are increasingly expected in the short-term, but because 25 years is about half of a long career and few people (imo) have the commitment and self-belief to embark on such a project. I can think of some, like SETI [1] and Mass Observation [2], but they tend to be highly distributed. The danger might be that you end-up with something like the Institute for Advanced Study [3] with its debatable productivity record.
Nevertheless, this is a massively positive announcement from YC. We need more stuff like this.
An interesting project - thanks for pointing it out.
I'm not saying that such long-term projects are impossible, just that they are rare due to institutional and human reasons. And because they are rare, we don't have much experience with how to design successful support institutions.
Yes I do agree with you. ACL is just an example of as the devotion of one or two persons can bring unexpectedly successful results. Achieving the same in bigger organisation is a much harder challenge.
That is great news Sam! This is really exciting to see an incubator starting it's own research lab and on top of that, keeping it totally in the open source. I'm fascinated by Research work folks have done at Parc and Disney, you should have a look here and perhaps speak with someone at Disney as well: http://www.disneyresearch.com
You are making a wrong correlation. Putting more money won't necessarily drive research forward. Most breakthrough researches and inventions were done with little money.
I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.
It probably depends on the type of research that you do. Drug research is expensive. But I think that you can do something like Xerox PARC (it seems like YCR might be going for something similar) with relatively little money. It appears that in 2001 their budget was $65m (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872). I'm not sure if their budget was larger during the 70's but that's not that much money considering what came out of there.
From what I can tell, back in the 70's Xerox PARC's annual budget that focused on computing was $10-14.5 million in today's dollars, which seems fairly cheap. But it took multiple years to develop it.
This also feels like cheating because we're targeting extremely successful research. If we knew ahead of time which research would be successful it would be a lot cheaper to do.
But it is inevitable to have a lot of unsuccessful research projects before one breakthrough. Similar to startups where most fail. Those "failures" add up to the cost pretty quickly, and you cannot avoid them.
Yes, but we're coming in on the very high end of the comp scale. We're also considering doing things like YC guaranteeing 100% mortgages for the researchers--housing prices in the bay area are a joke.
We're starting relatively small (on the order of 10) and grow from there at a reasonable rate.
While I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea (I'll admit I'm an academic researcher) this seems like a very good step - the Bay Area is becoming cost prohibitive.
Problem flux means the rate of new problems that need solving.
Theoretical breakthroughs are often inspired by real problems. For instance, information theory arose from practical problems of wartime communications. YCR will be in close proximity (geographic, organization, and intellectual) to lots of startups with interesting and worthwhile problems to solve.
Just replace "flux" with "flow" and you get the picture. If you're at YC you (presumably) encounter lots of different problems in lots of different contexts, which is often a good environment to foster creativity and inventiveness.
This is the kind of thing Silicon Valley should be doing all the time. I hope Sam's guts is replicated rather than just admired by other investors. Even if it's not, this is a great thing.
It is possible to structure it as "patent granted to everyone, but expires the moment they bring up a lawsuit against us or any of our licensees" to do doubly good for the world.
YCR is a non-profit. Any IP developed will be made available freely to everyone.
We’re not doing this with the goal of helping YC’s startups succeed or
adding to our bottom line.
you could allow free use of patents under a license that requires the entity doing so to also allow free use of their patents. If you believed the patent system is largely counter productive (as I do), this would be an awesome way of trying to address this a constructive way.
what YC could get out of it ( besides making the world a better place ) is very good knowledge of the capabilities of potential entrepreneurs. Imagine one of these researchers then founding a startup. Funding that would be a lot less risky, so that's quite a bit of edge
This is great. I am hoping things like this will shake the dynamics of publication-oriented credentialing and ultimately the value proposition of academia/academic research.
There are a few YC technical founders who were fired by their non-tech co-founders for rather flimsy culture reasons. So far YC was pretty hands-off. What makes YC think it can be effective at managing researchers? Wouldn't that be much more a function of the YC director(s) of research than the program?
The culture that exists between companies and founders in YC seems a better measurement of YC's success than the culture that exists inside any one of those companies. They run YC after all, not the companies themselves.
I have seen some difficult divorces between founders (with various combinations of technical and non-technical), and although some might suggest that YC should arbitrate those disputes more proactively, I think their policy of being willing to talk things through but not vote their shares is the right balance for their relationship with the companies.
But YC's success at fostering a positive, supportive culture between companies makes me quite optimistic that they can create a great environment when it's their responsibility.
A lot of "how do we fix academia" discussions might be (kind of) asking the wrong questions. Academia is a very wide cover over a lot of varied things. That cover is an institution. It has values, rules and ways of doing things. There might not be anything wrong with the institution per se, rather its success has brought to many things under its cover. For people, idea or pursuits that don't really belong there, it seems broken.
Take publishing. Publishing is a great practice and a lot of the conventions around it are really useful. But, it's not the only way to make information available, accessible, trustworthy, etc. There are other ways that might make more sense for some other project.
I just passively started looking around for a change. My criteria is exactly what's described here: "work that requires a very long time horizon, seeks to answer very open-ended questions, or develops technology that shouldn’t be owned by any one company." [1]. I have been unable to find very many places that will take non PHDs and let them participate in projects with these characteristics. I really do hope YCR relaxes the PHD constraint a bit. Look forward to it.
Is this more targeted at semi-cofounders/early-employees that fall by the wayside (like Aaron Swartz, poor soul) or is the plan hiring top researchers (the way Google got Hal Varian and Peter Norvig)?
DARPA, the publicly funded agency that generates most of the core tech that sustains Silicon Valley, has an annual budget of $3B. The National Science Foundation, which funds a large chunk of core science research, is $7B.
Where would YC Research fit in this landscape? Would it be seeking government funds, and just offer a different institutional model than universities for hosting the research? Or would it be primarily based in private funding somehow (and how?)
I'd love to see research on shaking up governments and the existing political process with technology.
Now, there are flaws to the use of electronic voting systems and the level of transparency required, but that is not what I mean.
What I mean is that every time I have run a large community the social structure that naturally emerges is not the one that we all allow ourselves to be governed by.
I'd like to research how tech could be used to empower lay citizens to shape their society in the way that they imagine it should be.
For example; I was interested in Google's internal experiment with voting transparency and delegation, and how it allows for a different kind of inclusive democratic process that isn't reflected in our existing systems.
One of the moonshot goals of the forum/community startup I created was to start to provide tools to support communities that shaped their own political and social structures, with an express goal of training them in the possibilities of being engaged in their society and then letting them use the tools to shape the real world in the same way that they shaped online societies.
Simply, I'd love to see research and later innovation into how societies and democratic functions could be.
When we talk about changing the world, I really mean it.
I always considered getting a PhD and becoming a researcher, but decided to remain an engineer for the time being because I've heard so much about how the academic research system is broken, both with politics and low pay.
If this model works, it might not only help existing researchers be more productive, but it might motivate other people considering this career to actually do it instead of other careers.
> We’re not doing this with the goal of helping YC’s startups succeed or adding to our bottom line.
Helping YC startups succeed might not be the primary goal, but it's silly to say the project isn't also aimed to help YC startups. Having access to a top quality research team can absolutely help startups succeed, so this is either disingenuous or surprisingly unimaginative.
How about "We’re not doing this with the goal of helping existing YC’s startups succeed". If this solves some big problem, and there are no new YC startups that come out of it, would indeed be unimaginative.
I agree, making the world a better place doesn't pay well. Screwing the world over pays really well.
I remember when I was in school people would often say that to get money, you have to find something you love doing and the money would come by itself. I don't know if that used to be true, but that is certainly no longer the case.
In general, doing good is at odds with earning money.
sama has written multiple times about the 'distractions' that pull founders away from building beautiful products. Things like attending conferences, networking, fundraising, etc...
Conservatively, the academic equivalent of those things takes up at least 80%+ of the time of a professor's time - and the more successful you become, the less time you actually dedicate to research. In the life sciences, it's not uncommon to have PIs with 30+ people in their groups, and they might be barely aware of the kind of research that's being done in their lab.
I cannot emphasize enough how thrilled I am by this. One tiny concern: it's currently much easier to get H1B visas for researchers working in educational institutions than it is for people working in private for profit companies. Is there any way YC can spin this research into a legal status that would allow it to recruit researchers through the 'easier' academic H1B pipeline?
It's an interesting point about fundamental research. The old industrial labs are dead and while academic institutions can do a lot someone in the private sector has to pick up the research mantle. Google X is a good example, but I think smaller efforts like this are much more interesting. If it's done right that is...
Interesting. I am curious though, as to why YCR researchers will also receive equity in Y Combinator as part of their compensation? Especially given that both are organized separately and YCR discoveries won't be funneled through or used in YC. I am also assuming that YCR will pay market rate salaries.
We want to get the best people in the world, and I think YC equity is a pretty compelling thing to get. We're competing against e.g. Google, and Google stock is also a pretty compelling thing to get!
Gotcha. So this is more about getting brilliant minds in media res, as opposed to discovering fledgling great researchers of tomorrow. Good lure; YC equity is probably increasingly more compelling than Google's!
Seems like an effective system-level path around tech-transfer and licensing headaches. Open inventions feed innovative companies and back into research. Well done.
I like this idea; it's pretty novel. Since there is just one group starting this off, which makes a ton of sense from a funding perspective, is this an MVP or a long term bet with regards to this specific group? Meaning if this group has trouble getting their idea off the ground in the next 1-2 months, do they get scrapped or are they going to have years to conduct their research?
An idea for future research may be to do almost like a round of start-ups where a bunch of groups come to SF for 3 months but unlike start-ups you find the promising ones and keep them all and drop any that do not look promising. Basically thinking of ways to not put all your eggs in one basic. Naturally this becomes quite problematic if you're researching something highly complex that won't show signs of promise for a decade!
To be honest, the freedom to fail alone would make a huge difference. On one hand there's a lot of freedom for intellectual growth in academia - in the last few months I've used deep learning, assembled hardware under a microscope, performed neurosurgery and genetic engineering (this is somewhat standard for my field). On the other hand, I make less than I did as a new cable guy, won't make more for 10 years, and every postdoc and phd student in my lab works 7 days / week standard. And if I fail, I will probably be done career-wise. LOTS of talented people leave because they see startups as the 'safer' bet - at least if your startup fails you're not doomed.
This sounds interesting. I'm curious to see what areas the research will be focused on.
Are there plans to provide laboratory space for areas that require it? Would researchers be housed in some space in MV, or would they work out of their own space like YC startups?
The first group will be in SF. TBD on other groups. But unlike startups we fund, these people work for a YC organization, so we will provide space etc.
As I keep chiming in whenever YC and location come up - please seriously consider Australia's East Coast. Like the valley, there is a big supply of world class universities and their graduates, and there's also great weather and quality of life that keeps people from wanting to leave. What's missing is an American style risk tolerance amongst the holders of capital. That's changing, but it's something YC could change even faster with an organisation like YCR.
Our government has historically underfunded research, and even more often one side funds it then the other gets into power and cuts it again. As a result, there are lots of ex-academics looking for more interesting ways of earning a living!
Phenomenal undertaking! When you say "Shouldn't be owned by any one company" does that imply that these releases will all be open-source? Do you have plans to develop a new form of IP licensing to go along with the research?
Great job Sam! YC isn't any more only about starting new companies and making them profitable. But about improving lives for everyone on the planet. And to do that
>'YCR is a non-profit.'
Just brilliant!
There's repeated mention of academia being broken due to issues such as politics, and mis-aligned interests between researchers and their departments. What have been the changes over time in Academia that led to this?
One of the big ones is that funding has not grown with the number of researchers, so researchers must spend a larger and larger portion of their work time on competing to get the work funded (or a longer portion of their professional life waiting for their chance at actual research-focused employment).
I decided not to go into academia many, many years ago, because a short look revealed that it seems to destroy the love of the subject matter more quickly than just about anything.
Now that I am partly back working on my PhD, I am still glad I didn't make it my main source of income, because now I have the freedom to do real research, rather than gaming the system of academia with minimal viable papers and incremental research re-gurgitating old insights. ("Doing X in Smalltalk" 10 years later: "Doing X in Java" 10 years after that: "Doing X in JavaScript" Sigh).
After the collapse of Bell Labs and the inefficiencies at the University level, this is an effort that can truly impact change.
True fundamental innovation takes 15+years... stable ecosystems (govt policies, strong economies etc) are needed to foster this type innovation. YC is definitely a stable environment to foster fundamental inno.
Fundamental innovation also creates new methodologies in two or three areas, whether it be technology, market or implementation. Everything else is incremental innovation (new tech enhancing products in a known market), this can be achieved in 1 to 3 years. Kudos YC!
Would you be willing to let someone just participate? I have multiple lines of research and my physics background allows me to reach further into biology and computation than most biology types. And for a variety of reasons I don't quite have the same funding problems most people have, but I would really like to work with the groups you are able to put together. I would be happy to fill out the same application.
Your log files should be able to unmask me but for additional reasons I'd rather not publicly associate my claims above with my identity.
I love this idea. However I am not too surprised that YC is doing this. YC is a different kind of corporation. Instead of hiring engineers, they hire startups. And just like any well established company, they are now investing in R&D. Make no mistake, there will be a commercial bent to the R&D that YC does and there is nothing wrong about that. R&D should not be just about publishing papers but advancing new ideas in the market too. So overall I hope this takes off and they bring ground-breaking research out of this venture.
I'm curious what areas of research will be chosen, and how. I wonder if there is any room for a voting style 'the community would like to see resources put behind this idea' decision making process. (On the other hand, its not the community's money, so do what you will :)).
I'm guessing all of this will be in the Bay Area?
It'd be great if there was a way for regular folks to help out with this. It seems to be something genuinely intended to help people and I'd love to contribute in some way.
As a researcher, this is very exciting news. I can't wait to see what areas of research YC will be directing their efforts towards. I hope the world of genomics/genetics gets a nod!
Will this be structured in a way where there are groups headed by "PIs" that set the research agenda, and researchers working under them, or will you be pursuing a different model?
This seems weird. They'll fund open ended research and then what? Are there any metrics to guide the outcomes? Why would the average super rich guy want to put any money into this?
DE Shaw gave away his hedge fund empire to start DE Shaw Research. He similarly used his own money to start a privately funded research lab. He is their Chief Scientist.
This is extremely exciting and I will apply as soon as the application process is announced. I would love to get funded to work on this open source digital audio workstation I've been working on[1]. Its goals are perhaps a little too ambitious and 25 years is not an unreasonable timeline for realizing them.
@sama: how are you thinking about evaluating progress of the groups? it seems all the bureaucracy in the current research ecosystem derives from the fact that it is really hard to evaluate progress in research/science. So you form a committee of experts to evaluate if a given researcher is doing well, and that eventually leads to politics and bureucracy. what are you thoughts on evaluation?
Absolutely fantastic! It's nice to see Sam et al putting their money to good use.
I really hope that we see some development of new types of programming languages. We seem to be stuck in a rut with procedural/OO/mostly-functional languages. Some research around flow based programming, especially related to machine learning. I can't help thinking we're missing something here...
Would love to know which fields/areas YC will be focusing for research. Is it for only Computer Science? or Physics? Biomedical Science or behavioral economics? or combinations of few fields?
And what kind of ideas/research will be given priority? Will it be bench/desktop based research projects or applied to people lives directly?
My academic friends and I are constantly talking about how we need startups to counter/disintermediate the constantly growing administrative overhead at universities. Without viable alternatives there is just no pressure to keep administrative costs from balooning. This is a great start and I hope to see more like it.
Why not give YC a 7% ownership of the IP and YC the other 93%. That would definitely drive the more entrepreneurial scientists to work there and also allow YC to monetize products out it's own research.
I have some ideas on technologies that are harder to create and takes time, but actually want to own the IP at the end.
Sweet! We'll need more things like this if we want to see our share of societal progress. I have faith that more programs like this will blossom in the coming years.
@sama -is this only for severely resource intense research projects? And do you envision this turning into an alternative to graduate school too?
How do we search and see if the area where I currently do research in is something that YC Research would focus on in the near future? I am finishing up a MS in ChBE with a focus on designing materials using computational methods (eg. DFT) and would like to continue with similar projects.
"You can't fall in love with the one thing being the hub for all things to come." Agree, now tell that to the dev responsible for tracking everything I do on my PC outside of Internet Explorer to be tracked in its search history, forcing me to revert to an older version.
The better yet native is to focus on quality of research outputs rather than just number. "Grant committees can't read, but they can count".
Trouble with that is it doesn't scale. It's easy to do when you're funding a handful of researchers like YC, but impossible when you're funding thousands like NSF or NIH.
Hope YCR works. Suggestion:
Get a board of advisors who
have had a lot of experience
managing research, and let them
occasionally advise you on
opportunities and pit falls.
I got an applied math Ph.D.,
just to improve the good
career I already had going in
applied math and computing,
had no intention of being a
professor, but for a while,
having to do with my wife in
her long illness, I was a professor.
The biggest problem I had in research
was just getting the mathematical
word processing done. The typing
was much more difficult than the
research! I published some papers
in some good journals and never
had a paper rejected or needing
significant revision. I could
have done a lot more in research,
but I was really interested just
in making money.
For research in academics, that is,
the STEM fields, I have long
had a suggestion: Borrow from
research in medicine!
Why, how,
in what respects? Sure: Research
in medicine also has a clinical
side, and a lot of the research,
applied research intended to
connect with applications, very
much needs the clinical side.
E.g., instead of all the seminars
being professors and students presenting
solutions still looking for
applications, have about half the
seminars with people
from the real world outside
academics present problems
looking for solutions.
Have professors
with their students attack such
problems. That way could
get some problems to work on,
simple, medium, and really
difficult and important, e.g.,
P versus NP just from
applications of optimization
to, say, vehicle scheduling
or communications network
design. E.g., I was working
on something applied and
rediscovered k-D trees --
a few years earlier and I
would have been the inventor
of k-D trees. And there are
other examples of starting
with a real problem from the
real world and getting good
results for that problem,
getting a good research problem,
and getting some good research
progress.
Besides, such research already
has one application and, thus,
is much more likely to have
two or many more than two.
Have an expectation that a professor
pursuing applications is a
professional and needs to practice
their profession. And the students
need to be there also as apprentices.
Also, have codes of ethics,
standards on how revenue is to
be distributed, and professional
peer review of the clinical
practice.
For more, it would help if the
venture capital community were
ready, willing, and able to
evaluate original research
intended as the crucial core
of startups.
As long as the people hired in are more hands-on and not the Sheldon Cooper types then it's a wonderful idea, especially that the good stuff will be made free for everyone. It's also quite endearing that you are putting so much of your own money into the idea.
Congratulations on this great endeavour! I've frequently mulled setting up website like patreon to help support and accelerate crucial research, which is seeing less and less progress these days. I'm glad YCombinator took note of this problem too!
This is such an insanely great idea. This (alongside with the YC Fellowship and the classic YC program) makes us really have no excuse for not doing something great, that matters for us and for the world. Wow, YC, well played.
This is really cool! I wonder, though, if YCR will accept donations? It will be nice if I could personally contribute to a research project.
[Loong time lurker here. Couldn't help myself from commenting on this one.]
I am not applicable for any visa in so-called "developed" countries - too old and without higher education (lack of which does not imply much in some cases, as one might see).
Will YC Research only focus on applied research ideas? Specifically, I'd like to know about whether or not researchers in pure math, theoretic cs, theoretical physics, etc will have a place at YC Research.
This is simply brilliant n fundamentally good ... as a former Bell Lab researcher in fundamental physics, I hope this will allow people with profound ideas to pursue the ideas ...
Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.
"the day-to-day experience of most people in this country" is nothing like any of the things Altman, PG, Livingston etc... experience on a daily basis.
It's strange to me the huge gap between $5-9k and "over $10k". I wonder if that gap has more to do with upper/middle class or young business owners vs working 9-5?
Ya, or even "is able to relate to the day-to-day experience of most people who read Hacker News."
Sam's startup --like for many here-- was not a roaring success. Few of the entrepreneurs and engineers here on HN have an extra $10m in the bank after an experience like that.
Agreed. It's important to remember that sama is SV elite (tm) and can afford to throw his money after extremely ambitious and risky projects-- he isn't living the "normie" life. There's nothing wrong with that, but it can be a bit jarring to be reminded of it.
I still think that this is a great (fantastic and maybe even unprecedented, depending on how serious he is about the duration) move by YC, though. I really hope that they nail the concept of research being different from shipping products, though-- the mentality that research is a product that has to be shipped out has largely killed the scientific research community of academia, warping it into a horrendous paper-churn for survival.
"turns me off" is a negative emotion. Does the realization that we're not all financially equal feel worse than the fact he's donating $10m to this cause?
I share some of your sentiment, yet...not. I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. I turned down a National Merit Scholarship, in part to go be "normal" and walk away from the sick inculcation with being an obnoxious brainiac and social outcast, hiding my insecurity and emotional pain over the social end of things behind a wall of contempt and superiority. I have managed to wash off a lot of that shit, but being a nobody for years and becoming quite poor -- even homeless -- has failed to make me normal by any stretch of the imagination. I have given up on being normal.
I still hope to find ways to put out useful information that will benefit people who are more "normal" than I am and I do have my concerns about the world being designed and run by so many people who absolutely cannot relate to the day-to-day experiences of most of their target audience/customers. But I don't know that hoping for "normal" people to do the design work is in any way useful.
I don't know what the answer is, but it seems like a lost cause to want people to do brilliant design work and also be normal. If you are that brilliant, you simply are not normal. Period.
why would you want to be sheltered from such a basic fact of life? Anyway, if it's any consolation, 10m is probably not small change for Sam. His biggest liquidity event so far was 40m for Loopt, so 10m is definitely a considered investment for him. He probably wrote it in an off the cuff manner to set a precedent for the mentality towards the fund. Basically signaling to other investors not to think about putting money up too much since its such a worthy cause
Why would this change your feelings toward YC? I don't understand why, in yours eyes, someone's wealth would affect the validity of their contributions.
There's an unfair implication there, as YC does want to improve the world (while making great wealth along the way).
It'd be more to the point to say that it's a reminder than YC is part of an institution where a small class of people (investors and founders) routinely take home millions, while rank and file employees (even with employee #1, 2, 3...) get to only watch as the CEO and investors play with their Maclarens and spend their millions on whatever they're passionate about.
According to the press releases from the Loopt exit, they had raised 17m at that point, and 9.8m of the acquisition was the golden handcuff for the employees. So sama probably doesn't have 10m just lying around and is probably pulling some financial acrobatics to get it, but he's putting on a brave face by quoting the amount nonchalantly.
If it's any consolation, they were "normal people" before they became insanely wealthy. If anything, that's the point of YC .. to give "normal people" with intellect, determination and good ideas the chance to become "insanely wealthy" while improving the world.
That's an excellent point. Would love to chat with you more about it, but I don't see contact info in your profile. Feel free to hit me up at p@pwhite.org.
I'm not quite sure who would have that illusion. The executives of investment companies (which is essentially what YC is, albeit a little bit different) tend to be wealthy.
The whole sama thing doesn't compute for me and has negatively impacted my otherwise stellar view of YC.
He dropped out of Stanford, founded Loopt (which raised $30 million and then acqui-sold for $43 -- and I'm sure Sequoia got the bulk of it), was then made a YC partner and finally appointed president. His Wikipedia page says he's made some angel investments in successful companies like AirBNB, but my question is: "With what money?" Maybe he sold some private shares of these companies at some point. There's nothing wrong with that. But again where did the original money come from? Family?
I just don't get it. Please explain to me how dropping out of college and having your only startup fail leads to (a) being handed one of the most prestigious and influential positions in SV and (b) having so much money you can donate $10 million dollars like it's chump change. How does that make any sense in this universe?
pg started YC and deserves all the credit for basically inventing the accelerator archetype. He can do whatever he wants and I guess he thought sama was the best guy for the job. Maybe he is. Heck, I'll even admit that I think he's done a good job so far, although I also think plenty of people would be equally adept at watching a golden goose lay eggs.
I think SV -- and YC especially -- perpetrate a few huge myths which cause people to have unrealistic expectations of their lives and ventures. ("There aren't enough engineers!", for example. Just last week, sama was saying how easy it is to live in SV if you work at Facebook, make a $150k+ salary and got a $75k signing bonus... a situation he was pawning off as "average" but is actually highly above average.) These lofty, then unfulfilled expectations then cause depression in vast amounts of people, both inside the Valley and out.
To me, sama is a colossal SV myth, incarnate. "Look! If you're smart enough, you can rocket to the moon! Even if you drop out of school and your only startup fails!"
I don't understand the full story, apparently, but I just hope people aren't fooled. There is more than meets the eye, here.
I made single-digit millions from the Loopt acquisition. Almost all the money I've made has been as an investor. I got lucky in that the first few investments I made in 2009 (very small dollar amounts) were really good, so I was able to raise capital to keep investing at a much larger scale with other peoples' money. I didn't have much liquidity until last year.
Takeaway 1: the easiest, lowest-risk way in the world to make a lot of
money is to get fees for investing other peoples' money.
Takeaway 2: if you make money that way I think you should give a lot
of it away.
Takeaway 3: FWIW this is a lot of money for me, but it's what I most
want to support.
As a side note, I was pointing out that living in SV is becoming
possible only if you get a job like that one, and that that's really a
problem.
I respect the fact that you took a moment to add some clarity. Obviously you have a good sense for politics -- you know this is something people need to understand.
But hot damn! If you've been so successful people are literally having a hard time believing it's true... that's... that's... I don't even know.
If you haven't noticed the acceleration of YC from the moment Sam took over, I feel like you've not really been paying attention. From scaling up the numbers, to outreach to females and minorities, to the increased transparency, and the YC Fellowship and now this, you really believe you're just watching someone collect golden eggs? Do you realize how hard it is to grow a community? And how easy it is to screw it up? If Paul Graham was Steve Jobs, then Sam Altman is Tim Cook, and more.
The golden goose thing was obviously an exaggeration. I think he's done a good job. And I'm sure the pressure is intense. I definitely couldn't do it.
But the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that life is about opportunities. If you want them, you have to put yourself in the position to get them (as sama did). More importantly, you have to make the best of them (as sama has). But many, many people who don't deserve opportunities get them (inheritance, for example) and many, many people who do deserve them, don't get them. They did all the right things... they simply were never given a shot by bosses, would-be cofounders, investors, etc. (Cue "Lose Yourself".)
A question I've been pondering a lot recently is the power of talent and whether or not it'll eventually rise to the top. How efficient is our society at finding "the best"? I tend to believe that someone as ridiculously talented as, say, Elton John, will always emerge. But then you hear the story of how someone like Matthew McConaughey was discovered (director of Dazed and Confused found him in a bar at 2am and said come to the set tomorrow -- zero acting experience) and you want to slap yourself.
And if you get into the genetic and familial lotteries (how smart you are, how good looking you are, are you black?, etc), then you'll just go completely crazy when you realize how unfair the world is.
In any case, from his answer, it looks like sama is a talented guy who put himself in the right position to succeed and is now an outlier on the normal curve. Good for him. It's gotta be somebody, might as well be him.
Anyway, if you would like any more than baseline success (where baseline success = working really hard to get into a profession with barriers to entry, like lawyer or doctor), you will have to deal with risk and uncertainty. You can't account for life without accounting for luck.
But life is long, and over the long-term, luck has a way of averaging out. And then the big question is how well did you capitalize on the luck you were given? A lot of people put themselves in positions where they have no chance of getting lucky, because they don't like the vulnerability and uncertainty that comes with realizing just how much of their life comes down to luck. That pretty much guarantees that they'll only be exposed to the unlucky events.
I was surprised at the $10 millions number at first, but a quick thought process clear it out for me: it's very easy to see that a few of YC founders will be (or already are) billionaires. Is it really a surprised that the head honcho of YC might be worth in the hundred millions range?
Completely agree. Would love to understand the money here - think it would provide a lot of perspective on how the technology financing community works.
This is a charitable cause. My guess is that YCR-sponsored organizations will be involved in the kinds of projects that might affect world hunger, etc.
I mean, I didn't go to MIT, but I just finished a PhD in CS from UPenn, and I'll attest that he's not wrong. Perhaps excessively pessimistic on it, but like, what he's expressed is not an uncommon sentiment. Like you'd hear the same thing from like a third of the grad students I personally know (across the entire spectrum of top-20 CS departments). I myself was fairly ambivalent on my own PhD, but ended up finishing it because
1) I had some strong publications early on in my grad career (first 2 years) so it made it much easier to get to the eventual finish line without much hassle.
2) I'm not a US citizen, and graduating means that the immigration pathway gets a lot easier (EB-1 green card application instead of EB-2, for instance, and since I'm from India that's a huge difference).
3) My advisor let me study/work on what the hell I wanted in my final 2 years (essentially some macroecon + finance research at the Wharton school, and spending a bunch of time reading up and working on large scale graph computation) so the opportunity cost was low to "finish up" the main line of thesis work, with the understanding that any future academic career was out of the question.
His comment is near the top, so if everyone who reads it starts believing what he has said but he isn't actually an MIT student, people will suddenly believe that MIT's educational system is broken. But we now have evidence, thanks to your post, that it's true. At least from his perspective.
Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups.
I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade.
Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created breakthrough science in self-healing materials for the "benefit of the world"
10 years of grant fights, personnel struggles, under-served licensing resources, conflicting lab-vs-student priorities, etc has put him out the other end hopeless and disenfranchised.
The world will probably lose one of their best "public" researchers to the bowels of commercial science as a result.
Go for it Sam, good luck and excited to see what your first projects are.