
EleVR leaving Y Combinator Research - alanfalcon
http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/
======
vihart
Vi Hart here... someone sent me this with confusion that it was at the top of
HN yet all the comments are completely irrelevant. My understanding is that HN
and YC are usually about startuppy stuff and business models and investors and
etc, so I guess it makes sense that everyone's in that mindset.

We're not a startup and not looking to reach a broad audience, get investors,
or create a product. We even wrote a thing a while back regarding our not
being a startup, because it is an unfamiliar concept to many people:
[http://elevr.com/were-not-a-startup/](http://elevr.com/were-not-a-startup/)

The HARC group at Y Combinator Research has/had an ambitious vision of
bringing back the basic research model that led to many fundamental
innovations in the 60s, including a handful of groups in addition to ours. The
kind of research that creates enormous value that cannot be captured by
individual investors or companies, but that lifts the industry/people as a
whole.

I think if world events had been different, the timing would have worked out
well for a resurgence of this kind of research.

Ok nice chat, HN. You're a weird place.

Vi

~~~
aphextron
>We're not a startup and not looking to reach a broad audience, get investors,
or create a product. We even wrote a thing a while back regarding our not
being a startup, because it is an unfamiliar concept to many people:
[http://elevr.com/were-not-a-startup/](http://elevr.com/were-not-a-startup/)

Huge respect for the work you guys have done, but I think this is an
unfortunate mindset. The real magic sauce for American capitalism that has
driven us to such heights of technological achievement has always been about
the synthesis of lofty, idealistic goals _combined_ with the desire to make
lots and lots of money. I don't think those two things should be separated as
an either/or. There is certainly a need for pure basic research funded by
private industry. But the real goal should be figuring out how we can do that
in a way that is economically sustainable both short and long term.

~~~
norswap
Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, nuff said.

~~~
panic
Could either of these labs be described as a "startup"? Fundamental research
seems hard to do while searching for the revenue to stay alive. You need a
stable source of funding, either from a large corporation (like SAP, Xerox or
AT&T/Western Electric) or a government department (like DoD/ARPA) -- not VC
funding which carries the expectation of near-term growth.

~~~
nl
That's precisely the point the post you are replying to is making.

------
Judgmentality
As someone who used to be incredibly interested in VR (until recently I wanted
to join Valve to work on it full-time and I followed many of the VR startups),
I'd never heard of them. It seems they did a lot of great work, but perhaps
they could have marketed themselves better? I've no doubt what they say is
true - being non-profit makes fundraising hard. But nothing helps like
building a brand, and it seems they focused entirely on making cool things
instead of making a name for themselves (which is great, but it's not helpful
for fundraising).

~~~
Keyframe
What made you cool off from VR?

~~~
Judgmentality
I haven't seen anything that makes me think it's more than a gimmick. The tech
itself is still a few years away from being where it should be (higher
resolution, wireless, better framerate, improved immersion), but more
importantly I've yet to see a compelling use case for it. Until somebody can
make a case for _why_ VR, it's just an expensive toy, and not even a
particularly fun one after a very short period of time.

It reminds me of the Novint Falcon so many years ago. Really cool technology
that nobody wanted.

~~~
tapoxi
A few friends of mine are VR developers, so I've tried every sort of headset
and game under the sun. Short of CAD/CAM and video games, I can't see a reason
for VR in its current form. And though I love video games, the space
requirements, isolation, and setup involved for the Vive lead me to prefer
non-VR experiences.

Having tried a Hololens though, I'm certain that AR can improve in a direction
where it would replace my laptop. I wouldn't like to use it for games, though.

~~~
Judgmentality
So I haven't tried AR yet, but I do know it has a laws-of-physics limitation -
it's impossible to draw black on the screen. Basically, you can only make
things brighter than the background, not darker - so if you're already in a
bright world, good luck seeing anything. Subtitles become impossible unless
you're in a black/dark room because you can't draw black borders on the text,
and just outlining things in general (so you can see them) is essentially
impossible.

[http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-
hard-...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-ar-
anytime-soon/)

~~~
guycook
> laws-of-physics limitation

This is only true if you limit your AR HMD design to beamsplitter + projector.
There are existing prototypes [1] which demonstrate quite accurate lcd based
occlusion for darkening the environment on a per-hmd-pixel basis.

[1]
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3041178](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3041178)

------
wonderous
Anyone aware of an explanation of how YC Research makes choices to fund and
defund projects?

------
yeukhon
To be honest, there aren't that many choices left: Google, Facebook,
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Telsa are probably the only one with deep pocket
for VR research...

There is no real non-profit research (unless you really want to go back to
become a university research lab); peoole want the results and commericalizd
them.

I would be surprised if none have reached out througout the years.

~~~
alanfalcon
I'd be shocked if Disney isn't on that list, though I have no idea what
commercial pressure their imagineering team is under. I'd love to see eleVR
continue at Pixar, though I'm not really sure if Vi and the team see that kind
of destination as a viable option given their goals.

~~~
ptrott2017
yup Disney should be on the list - Disney Research
([https://www.disneyresearch.com/](https://www.disneyresearch.com/)) have a
long history of being involved in multiple areas of VR research.

~~~
throwawaybbqed
Seems really cool. I wish they had systems openings.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You might look through their published papers, find someone in the area you're
strong in, and ask them if they need help, or if there are likely openings in
the future.

------
macsj200
YC has a research division? What do they work on?

~~~
p4bl0
You can visit [http://ycr.org/](http://ycr.org/) for more info.

------
Invictus0
It has always appeared to me that VR was like 3D++, a fad inspired by
futurists that would never be economically viable or practical. 360 video is a
nice novelty but I don't think anyone ever thought that it would be preferable
to have all video recorded or viewed in that format.

~~~
vasilipupkin
as virtual experience quality gets better, you will see more and more
applications starting with anything porn related

~~~
ethbro
Real-time 3d graphics started with computer games rather than porn.

------
abetusk
Why is YCR so short-sighted? Isn't this a clear win for everyone involved and
good press for Y-Combinator to begin with to keep EleVR alive and funded?

------
tw1010
So what can we learn from this? Did they tackle more things than their time-
constraints allowed? Or was the issue that they thought they had more time
than they did and they weren't in clear enough communication with the
investors? Would it have been better to just stick with a few really promising
projects and build something that they could sell so they wouldn't have to be
as dependent on investors which would give them some margin for
experimentation?

------
fuzzfactor
Looks like you have an impressive amount of technical accomplishments.

I know what you mean about irrelevance. Maybe I can be less so.

No surprise that most of your new technology is not within reach of attracting
commercial interest since that was not the idea to begin with.

>Unfortunately, a combination of forces in the world make nonprofit long-term
research a tough sell right now. It doesn’t matter how good we are at what we
do. Everyone is overextended trying to solve all the world’s problems at once,
and we’re in the unpopular space of being neither for-profit nor directly and
immediately philanthropic.

So true, but I actually feel like it was a much more rare combination of
events which made it possible to do what you have done. It's almost never
going to be an easy sell. You were so fortunate and wise to have jumped at the
opportunity to research in a way that few will ever experience. Even if you
did not have very much chance of making it your life's work without
appropriate funding over such a term in advance, you seem to have immediately
utilized what you did have by devoting the maximum amount toward as much
technical progress as possible. From experience I say that carrying on as if
you had funding for longer term open-ended projects is the best way to make
technical progress without distraction. It can still take many years to get
good enough to make even an exponential increase in the breakthrough rate
become tangible or useful though.

I'm an extreme alternative researcher where my life's work has been to
independently out-research some of the most well-funded petrochemical giants
without a PhD myself using the same equipment on my own analytical benches. So
I guess that is ambitious too. Took a while to get good here and people didn't
think it could be done but experimentation & discovery always was one of my
strengths. Paying for it as I go by operating at an insignificant fraction of
their cost, and when the opportunity is there, prioritizing commercial
projects where money can be made relative to the rate at which it would cost
them to do it themself. Having a commercial component in service to such high
rollers in their regular operation was the path of least resistance for the
young me to gamble on the likelihood of my ships continuing to come in.

I like clean environments, would prefer less toxicity and have always been an
extreme energy saver so otherwise I don't need more tankers on my own behalf,
but it's our local industry, and the most promising thing for survival when I
was young was to get into alternative fuels and additives, so it is what it
is. Even though I've been a small-time operator, the environment is a hell of
a lot better off than it would be with anyone who would have otherwise
replaced me. Battery research seems more promising than ever now, and I feel
so bad for having done almost nothing in that field but it would probably take
a couple years to get up to speed. Not having actual prosperity I could never
start that without giving up my current life's work, but it does seem like an
area where butt could be kicked to widespread advantage.

As long as you need to devote excessive effort toward survival activities, you
never get to really do what you prefer to do or are best at for enough of the
time to accomplish but a fraction of your technical potential.

Anyway, in a situation where a good year still yields only 1% of breakthroughs
that could be made profitable over the near term on the commercial side, it
was essential to keep the nose to the grindstone maximizing the amount of
experimentation. So you end up finding an abundance of excess stuff which
would be good for other kinds of businesses or could become the foundation for
entirely new businesses, most of which would require capital so that would be
out of the question. Without capital having been available to get rolling
doing this, there has never been anything like a network in place. When you're
making unprecedented progress on technical breakthroughs that can be exploited
for survival using the resources you already have, one of the least rewarding
gambles you can make is to divert attention to pusuit of elusive new sources
of backing rife with dead ends and unfavorable terms to boot when there is
interest.

Any way you look at it there's an incredible balance where you can't depend
too much on continued good fortune and you can't justify dramatically slowing
technical progress by diverting the amout of resources it takes to avoid the
ravages of all possible bad fortune with absolute certainty.

You'll get better at this.

You are going to do extremely well, already experienced at getting up on the
tightrope without a net not knowing what lies at the other end, tripping up,
falling off, badly injured and now very near death in this incarnation.

Even if the Grim Reaper completes the call, you are still willing to try again
in the same type situation where a single mistake or miscalculation can be
devastating.

Ambitious people you are.

If you want to continue to try it the same way all you are going to need is a
better network. You've accomplished a huge milestone with only a single
obstacle remaining, not like when you were first getting started any more.

And I'm here to remind you that there are unexplored alternatives however
unlikely, with the best option probably not thought of yet.

I would get to work heavily researching both of these possibilities
thoroughly. You all need to talk to the maximum people everyday anyway in
various network directions and during the hard sell maybe you already have a
product or service that could be offered for a fee when you run into someone
who could not provide you with financial help otherwise. Salvage from what you
have accomplished if possible. Whenever someone doesn't respond positively get
two names & numbers from them and you will eventually never be able to call
them all.

Seems like the best opportunity would be expected when you find someone who is
benevolent and directly has a close relationship with a highly suitable
potential partner, and you have their trust to the degree that they will
actually make the introduction for you. You would be surprised too when a
contact does the opposite and gives you the number of someone they dislike who
they want you to bug instead of them. If you expect the unexpected this may
also have some potential itself. Benevolence seems to be what you need for
mere survival now rather than the overall strength which could give a bigger
impact in the long run.

YCR sounded like an interesting concept to me since nonprofits are one of the
alternatives I have always considered experimenting with. Extreme money-making
under that umbrella can be done where it's perfectly legitimate to optimize
for producing new or providing low-cost already-baked technology and licensing
it or providing a service around it for much more money since you're just
going to use the income no differently than donations for continued operations
anyway, with no greedy shareholders to get in the way. With the impression I
get of the YC network it just seems like butt could be kicked through YCR
somehow unforseen.

It's almost always going to be impossible for most to survive financially as a
byproduct of what you do without diverting extreme effort away from what you
actually do at least occasionally.

You wouldn't have done this if you weren't going to someday be comfortable
enabling other companies to bring in more income or solve more problems
leveraging and commercializing your breakthroughs than you would ever expect
for yourself to begin with. That's the business model that exists which you
can not help finding yourself in without trying.

Not too dissimilar to me who has had no choice but to operate in a capitalist
market when I have not been a capitalist, merely an entrepreneur focusing on
research overwhelmingly more so than development, according to my resources.

------
nostrademons
We seem to be in an interesting time where everyone is casting around looking
for the next "big" idea, regardless of whether it works, and as a result the
only way to do useful "small" ideas that work is to fund them yourself or get
ordinary, non-import people to help fund them (i.e. crowdfunding or ICOs). All
the attention is on flying cars, self-driving cars, killer robots, alternative
currencies, artificial intelligence, 600 mph vacuum transportation, and
missions to Mars.

The last time I can think of when the tech landscape looked like this was the
early 90s, when everybody was hung up on artificial intelligence, pocket
computing, handwriting recognition, voice recognition, WebTV, 3D graphics, and
virtual reality. We ended up getting many of those, 15 years later, but the
real huge story of the decade was the WWW, which was _really_ unimpressive
when it first came out (I remember comparing it unfavorably to Gopher in 1993;
Gopher at least was semi-organized).

The WWW overshadowed everything else because the _problem_ it was solving -
which many people didn't know they had - was more universal than the problems
solved by any other technologies that had just entered the market, and its
solution was just barely viable enough to solve that problem. Meanwhile, the
tech for many of the other much hotter problems of the time was 15-20 years
out; they couldn't actually be solved by the processing power available in
1992. I wonder if there's a similar overlooked-but-universal problem that
someone in a garage is working on now, that'll spark a new wave similar to the
dot-com boom.

~~~
Judgmentality
So what do you think are the big problems being worked on today which people
are overlooking because the technology isn't as sexy as self-driving cars? I
agree with you that funding chases the flashy stuff, and real businesses are
built on substance. I'm just curious what you think will end up breaking out
from this era of funding.

Obviously hindsight is 20/20, but I heard an interesting tidbit from a famous
investor about the dot com bubble: you either invested in Google or you
didn't. I wonder if things will turn out similar this time as I still haven't
seen a good IPO from a tech company in years (would love for people to provide
counter-examples as I don't track this very closely).

~~~
nostrademons
If I knew that, I'd a.) be a lot richer than I am and b.) wouldn't tell the
Internet.

I just feel that we're looking in the wrong places for the next big idea. The
next big idea invariably seems to grow out of the next small idea; ideas that
are big from the beginning almost never work. (Gall's Law: "A complex system
that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that
worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be
patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple
system.")

~~~
chubot
I'm sympathetic to the small idea thing (I wrote a long comment to your
original reply). But that doesn't seem true in the case of the web and the PC.

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-
Lee](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee)

 _This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty
whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access._

\- (19 August 1991), the announcement of the first WWW hypertext browser on
the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.next.announce.

TBL knew that the WWW would be "world wide". He explicitly designed it that
way.

So I would say the web is small TECHNOLOGY, but not a small idea. It was a
huge idea.

Although honestly, I don't think the tech was that small for the day either.
GUIs + networking was not super easy in 1991. There were still a lot of
unsolved problems (e.g. DOS wasn't even a multi-tasking OS, I remember you had
to download WinSock or whatever to use NetScape on Windows 3.1).

Likewise, Wozniak wanted to "own his own computer" so he built one. I don't
think that's a small idea either. I guess you can say that it is one that most
people wouldn't understand the utility of though.

~~~
bhaumik
Linus Torvald's first email re: Linux belongs here:

> I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
> professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

~~~
chubot
Yeah that quote definitely crossed my mind. However I think the OP is
confusing ideas vs. systems:

 _The next big idea invariably seems to grow out of the next small idea; ideas
that are big from the beginning almost never work._

That doesn't really make sense with respect to ideas. The real quote is about
SYSTEMS, from this book:

[https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-
Large/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Bible-Beginners-Guide-
Large/dp/0961825170)

The system is the realization of the idea. You can have a big idea, but you
can't implement it all at once. TBL had a big idea, which is necessarily a big
system. So he grew it from a very small piece of code (HTTP 1.0 was
ridiculously simple.) There was an unbroken chain from small system to big
system.

The misleading thing about Linux is that it IS IN FACT a big idea -- it's just
not a technological idea. We already knew how to write monolithic kernels. But
the real innovation is the software development process. The fact that
thousands of programmers can ship a working kernel with little coordination is
amazing. That Linus wrote git is not an accident; he's an expert in software
collaboration and evolution.

Linux is a universal hardware abstraction layer, which is an easy idea in
theory, but extremely difficult in practice until Linus figured out how to
make it work.

So Linux is a big idea too, as well as a small system that grew into a big
system.

\-----

This reminds me of Paul Graham's advice:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

 _Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem
as big as the ones I 've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it.
Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you
raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be
asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see
you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless._

 _Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with
deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by
writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to
make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads
to stalk one another._

I think that's pretty much in line with what's said here. You can have a big
idea, a big 10 year goal, but you have to break in into steps. Gates had an
explicit goal of "a PC on every desk" and Zuckerberg had an explicit goal of
"connecting the world" (at some point, not at the very beginning). But they
necessarily started small.

