
Ask HN: Is it better to start a business in society or on the frontier? - concietedmouse
I mean figuratively, of course.<p>By &quot;society&quot; I mean how once something is invented legisliation gets put up all around it making it more difficult for upstarts.<p>You have to be a lot smarter to be on the frontier but there are fewer rules. AI, blockchain, and VR&#x2F;AR all seem to be on the frontier.
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mswen
Edges and intersections are always more interesting. This is true across
multiple domains. Coastlines, roads, music, business and academic fields to
name a few.

Starting a business that relies on the edge of the frontier raises the stakes,
higher risk and higher reward.

If you guess right that the market is going this direction you can get a head
start on defining the new direction and you have little or no competition.
However, it is very difficult to get all of the following right: technology,
general market direction, timing of readiness to accept a new technology or
process, brand desirability/acceptance and willingness to spend money on your
innovation.

I have done some arguably cool innovative things at the edge. But here I am
still selling my time. It is really tough to get them all correct.

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concietedmouse
What lead you to trying things on "the edge" in the first place? Were you
actively looking to make money or were you having fun?

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mswen
I came from a research background - PhD dropout and although I made money
selling my time in consulting there is part of the research mindset that stuck
around.

One of the best ideas that didn't really work out came out of a casual
conversation with a tech friend and my statistical background combined with
his programming background suggested that we should just try it. The proof of
concept worked. No one else seemed to be doing what we developed and competing
techniques didn't get as good of answers. The application would have been in
search. But at the time no one had yet made significant money in search.
Google was still burning through VC cash and the investors that we had access
to just couldn't see how search would ever become a big business.

In the end, we just walked away and went back to making a living in more
ordinary manner. About 7 or 8 years later the kind of techniques/technology
finally became hot with VC firms but we were not in a good place to circle
back around.

So that is a long answer to "making money" versus having "fun". Building the
proof of concept was mostly just for fun. After seeing cool results we spent
some time and effort trying to figure out if it could be a business. In
retrospect it feels like we should have found a way to persist.

~~~
concietedmouse
That sort of goes back to the same problem of simply knowing what to make,
when. Im not even sure what I'd make if I could start two years ago knowing
everything now.

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megamindbrian2
I like your brain.

But in order for something to be salable, lots of people have to like it. If
you are always on the leading edge you might be more in to research than
business. There might even be grants available to help fund it. There are
research laboratories that build things and then those inventions are used for
entirety different purposes. The example I was given were the airport scanners
could have been used in malls for fashion instead.

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DrWest
I've seen a few times the term "smarter" almost used synonymously with crueler
or more negligent to society. Conversely, "stupidity" means those that do the
footwork of following a market's consumer or worker protections.

"Better", for now, might be business that elevates worker and consumer rights
while still making a profit (or being non-profit).

As you mentioned blockchain, it's vastly driven by speculation (including
manipulation), marking it a sign, in my opinion, of a dire state of capitalism
as Marx explained best. Real estate markets are in a similar cycle.

