
Researchers and Founders - dmnd
https://blog.samaltman.com/researchers-and-founders
======
Frost1x
>Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising
to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some
qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like
very high levels of self-belief).

This is an interesting quote. From my experience and personal perspectives,
many of the best researchers and scientists doubt themselves, a lot, and are
typically hesitant to make definite statements in general. Research is
inherently high risk and prone to failure... that's fundamental to what makes
it research. If you work in research for awhile, you're wrong so often that it
creates an environment of constant self-doubt and constant questioning of
ideas.

On top of that, from my experience, the more I learn about an area or subject,
the more I realize how little I knew before and the more I've discovered in
terms of what I don't know. As the space of your knowledge grows, the surface
area also increases and you eventually begin questioning things some
fundamentally just accept while the deeper you dig, the more you know where
the current frontiers of uncertainty and knowledge truly lie. Combine that
with the understanding of where you started (knowing even less but thinking
you knew more) and how in hindsight, you were so wrong.. leads to lower
confidence in your assessments, even if most might consider you an expert.

~~~
vikramkr
I'll second that. In my anecdotal and limited experience, the outliers in
successful entrepreneurship are the ones that project vulnerability/self-
doubt, while the outliers in successful research are the ones that project a
lack of self-doubt and create reality distortion fields around their work. The
best of both seem to have self-confidence in their ability to succeed, and
successful researchers seem confident that problems can be solved, and that
they can solve them, but that seems to come with an embrace of uncertainty and
an allowance for self doubt.

~~~
lowdose
> the outliers in successful entrepreneurship are the ones that project
> vulnerability/self-doubt,

Isn't it exactly the other way around? Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg
have a reality distortion field. The outliers in entrepreneurship sell a new
world that they are going to create. When Elon Musk started talking about
electric cars and space travel to Mars 99% of the people thought he was
batshit crazy.

~~~
vikramkr
I'm referring to the outliers among that group. The first level of outlier is
being successful. The second level of outlier is being full of self doubt and
successful

~~~
lowdose
Could you give some examples of these outliers?

I do not know any successful entrepreneurs that project vulnerability nor
self-doubt. For a VC's that's a big no no. So you have made me curious and
this is a sincere question.

~~~
vikramkr
I dont actually know of any off the top of my head, which is the point of my
post. Successful, self doubting entrepreneurs seem rare, successful high
arrogance researchers seem rare. I can think of a few executives that seem
like decent people, but I cant think if anyone that doesnt act like they know
all the answers

------
skosuri
Being an academic researcher (kosurilab.org) and a founder (octant.bio), while
I do think there are some similarities (working hard, etc), I think there are
some really big differences too. Some of these might be more particular to
academic research than research more broadly, but some quick thoughts:

1\. Bias towards action & clear eyed => I think that's right, but there is
another part of this too, that is more important as a founder – making
decisions even under massive uncertainty. In a company, it's not just
uncertain technical decisions, but also market decisions, cultural decisions,
people decisions, etc. This is stomach churning, and most researchers can
focus on the technical challenges in ways that founders can't. You have to do
this in research decisions too; but as a founder it feels like it happens way,
way more often with broader and broader sets of decisiosn.

2\. One of the thing that I feel very different about founders is you have be
honest about what the actual problems you have to solve are, and not turn your
nose at the seemingly mundane and important tasks like managing a company.
Great researchers are focused on their scientific problems over decades -
founders are focused on building a lasting organization. These have pretty
different consequences on what one chooses to spend their time on.

3\. In academia at least, there are some really big differences in running a
company versus running a lab. In a lab, my main mission is training people,
while working on problems I find interesting... slowly moving towards my long-
term scientific/technical goals. In a company, it's building a product that
people will buy, and slowly moving towards those same goals. Again, this has
pretty big consequences on what one spends their time doing and the types of
problems you get to solve. There are positives and negatives to both
approaches, some of which are quite subtle. For example, reputation games are
far more important in academia than industry - I also find authority becomes a
lot more pernicious in academia than industry. Anyways, lots here that are
very different (but again this might be academia rather than research itself).

------
Tarrosion
A small point only tangential to the main point of this post, but something
I've noticed about Sam's writing before:

Is anyone else offput by the phrase "best people"? I get (or at least hope)
it's a shorthand for "best at their respective job of researcher/founder," but
it really seems to reduce people's innate worth and goodness to this single
dimension in a somewhat unnerving way.

~~~
arikr
No. It seems clear to me he's talking about the best people in those groups
from the perspective of their work output.

~~~
jononor
Work output as in financial success/reward, prestige or impact, or something
else?

------
underdeserver
I wonder what these differing qualities are, then.

It sounds very generic, but I've found it to be true. If I spend time thinking
about what's the best way forward, then just do it, relentlessly and
persistently, and with a healthy disregard for cynicism and disbelief from
others, I get a lot done.

It also reminds me of the concept of "taking ideas seriously":
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-
ide...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-ideas-
seriously)

~~~
vikramkr
In the link you posted, there's a disclaimer that the author no longer
endorses the post. Do you know why/is there an updated post from the author?
I'm curious what changed in the author's thinking and what particularly they
no longer agree with.

~~~
underdeserver
I just noticed that too. No idea.

I also disagree with a lot of how the idea is presented in that text, but the
idea itself - that if you get convinced of a basic point, you should extract
the second, third, fourth and fifth order effect of that idea - is profound.

It reminds me of a story of a startup that did cybersecurity for SCADA
systems, for factories. They would connect to diagnostics APIs, do anomaly
detection, and could then alert on any cyber attacks.

Turns out factories are _extremely_ sensitive to downtime (millions lost per
hour of downtime), and a lot of them operate under "if it works don't touch
it". So they pivoted - instead of actively tapping APIs, they would passively
sniff network traffic, draw a picture of the network and what talked to what,
and do anomaly detection on that.

But reality took the passivity idea seriously - and the value to factory
operators ended up being visibility into the network topology. The company
pivoted away from cybersecurity and into analytics and made a lot of money.

~~~
vikramkr
I wondered if maybe he'd posted something else in the blog and I think I found
it. Something about bad style, too few details, and something about
contributing to bad norms?

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QePFiEKZ4R2KnxMkW/posts-i-
re...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QePFiEKZ4R2KnxMkW/posts-i-repent-of)

""Taking Ideas Seriously": Stylistically contemptible, skimpy on any useful
details, contributes to norm of pressuring people into double binds that
ultimately do more harm than good. I would prefer it if no one linked to or
promoted "Taking Ideas Seriously"; superior alternatives include Anna
Salamon's "Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality",
though I don't necessarily endorse that post either."

------
dekhn
I would have thought this was obvious- the archetype in Silicon Valley would
be Fred Terman, but there are a lot of others. In particular, Arnold Beckman,
who was an intern at Bell Labs where he learned to make vacuum tube
amplifiers, moved to Caltech to be a professor and founded the amazingly
successful Beckman Instruments company, invented the pH meter (which used a
vacuum tube amplifier to turn the tiny signal into a useful one) and the DU
spectrometer. He used his proceeds to fund the first transistor company in
Silicon Valley, and made huge contributions to the US war effort.

I've worked with researcher/founders a lot; many of the people from my PhD
program (Biophysics, UCSF) went on to start companies (Amyris, Zymergen) and
we had strong educational pathways to learn how to start biotech companies.
The two groups of people are definitely drawn from a highly overlapping
distribution, although many scientists would make poor founders, and vice
versa.

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

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

~~~
Frost1x
As much time as I've also spent time in R&D through industries, over the years
it's moved from R&d to R&D to r&D... approaching D. The two, IMO, are
converging.

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

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

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

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

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

------
itsmefaz
John Schulman's article provides better practical insights than the one Sam
has authored himself. So, people looking for more concrete views and pieces of
advice I'd suggest taking a look at the John Schulman article:
[http://joschu.net/blog/opinionated-guide-ml-
research.html](http://joschu.net/blog/opinionated-guide-ml-research.html)

------
ejo0
I agree with this, definitely have seen this with the culture of the early R&D
team at Genentech, where a number of the early employees had these attributes
right from the beginning. I have reread the book below numerous times, which I
recommend, which discuss the dual nature for being both a founder &
researcher, having an incredible long-term vision that seems to be almost
impossible, but remaining very focused in the short term. "Genentech: The
Beginnings of Biotech (Synthesis)" by Sally Smith Hughes
([https://www.amazon.com/Genentech-Beginnings-Sally-Smith-
Hugh...](https://www.amazon.com/Genentech-Beginnings-Sally-Smith-
Hughes/dp/022604551X))

------
hypewatch
I’ve never heard of the phrase “problem taste” until this post, so if Sam just
coined that phrase, well done!

This is such an important issue in the startup world. The most common mistake
that founders I’ve worked with make is that they focus on the wrong problem or
even worse focus on too many problems.

Having good “problem taste” is critical for anyone who wants to start a
successful company or publish breakthrough research.

~~~
wenc
I'm not sure if the phrase itself is novel. The idea of having good taste in
problems is certainly not; and is very useful -- Richard Hamming (cited by Sam
Altman) spends a great deal of time talking about how to choose problems [1].

The basic idea is that you need to work on an important problem. But an
important problem isn't what you think (e.g. time-travel, teleportation,
antigravity, etc.) -- instead it is a problem for which there exists an
"attack".

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html)

~~~
pouta
What does "attack" in this context supposed to mean?

~~~
wsxcde
An attack is a reason to believe that _you_ can solve the problem. I have no
idea how'd I go about solving P=NP, but I did have some thoughts on provable
security against transient execution attacks. Which is why I work on the
latter but not the former.

------
lifeslogit
For a researcher, this difference can lead to deep unhappiness. I moved from a
research-heavy institution to a founder-heavy culture thinking the freedom and
increased salary would lead to improved happiness, however this was very far
from the case. After about 1 year, my CEO began to understand the difference
and support me, however, the time and stress prior to that point was very
difficult. It required Investor-level individuals with research careers to
validate my perspective. Sam's post validates my struggle and I am happy to
see it publicized by someone with clout. I hope more founders will begin to
give researchers a bit more room and support.

------
mkagenius
> They are extremely persistent and willing to work hard.

I think it might be important to quantify these terms, but then I think it is
pretty hard to do so. If I worked on some idea for 2 months, then am I
persistent enough? And if I worked on it 10 hours a day, have I worked hard
enough?

I guess, you just know it when you work hard or are persistent enough, but
sometimes you dont know and you are hurting inside that you are not working
hard enough or being persistent enough as you don't see any success

------
bonoboTP
This post would not survive blind review, though.

The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's
really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important
problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision.

Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are
getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

~~~
hellofunk
I think it's common among many founders who became very successful for them to
assume they have a special and deeper insight into how the universe works.

~~~
closeparen
How would you check whether someone has special and deep insight into how the
universe works? Making a lot of correct predictions seems like some of the
best evidence available.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Being the CEO of Ycombinator, the business consulting firm, would give him
very special insights into the industry, as many new companies would come
straight to Ycombinator, looking for advice. Altman was in a good position to
study the whole industry.

~~~
Judgmentality
You're saying he has special access to data, but it doesn't _necessarily_
follow that he has special insight based on that data. That said, Sam is a
smart guy, so he probably does have some special insight - but it's not
immediately obvious and this is hardly an evidence-based argument.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Sam Altman's mind will never be beyond doubt. It's in his skull, so we can
never know it. I'm just focusing on the concrete, observable details. I'll let
the psychologists argue about Altman's mind.

------
some_furry
This article seems a little half-baked to me, like it's missing the great
insight that ties these seemingly random observations together and then a
conclusion.

Instead, it just kinda stops abruptly.

------
pplonski86
The title could be: Researchers and Founders and Mothers. I think mothers have
a lot in common with successful researchers and founders. They are laser
focused on tasks (can do many in paralell) and have long term vision (a
family). Although mothers dont get attention and press. They are very
underrated

------
locacorten
Sam, I know that you now spent a couple of months with researchers, and thus
can write "deep" articles on researchers vs. founders now. Everyone knows that
the best kind of researchers in the world are all at OpenAI now, and that
gives you a chance to observe them.

On a serious note, I beg you to write about things other than research and
researchers. Leave them alone, outside of the media spotlight and your
writings. You see the media and its spotlight have a tendency to disrupt and
destroy value. If you truly want do good, leave them alone. Please.

------
divbzero
Previous discussion of the “Hamming question” that Sam referenced:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626349)

------
m0zg
I had the opposite experience pretty much. I've worked with researchers quite
extensively, and they nearly universally have one massive weakness: they have
a hard time committing to any kind of a product plan. They are great at
throwing a bowl of spaghetti at the wall in creative ways, and at determining
whether any of it stuck, but beyond that - caveat emptor, you better have a
great technologist with product chops on board or you'll be stuck repeatedly
throwing spaghetti until money runs out.

------
diNgUrAndI
I like the comparison. Both types of people chase the most important problem.

Having met people from both groups, the other word I hear a lot is _impact_.
That's a qualitative metric to define success.

------
wyc
I had to make the decision whether to start companies or pursue a career in
research, and chose the former. I think I would've been happy with either. The
thing I enjoy about both is that there are rarely closed-form solutions, as
the problems are mostly open-ended in nature. This in turn has the potential
to grant you absolute freedom to pursue what best matches your interests and
values, even as they evolve. You just have to be okay with risk and
uncertainty in the pursuit of what is interesting.

------
vzidex
> They are creative idea-generators—a lot of the ideas may be terrible, but
> there is never a shortage.

I feel like I almost never have creative ideas - the entirety of my (short)
engineering career has been spent working on school projects, contributing to
a design team, or set projects at work.

Am I screwed if I want to be successful as a computer engineer? (specifically
hardware)

~~~
switz
Absolutely not -- in fact, being self-aware of your deficiencies is hugely
important. You should find people that compliment your skillset. Not everyone
needs to be a creative firehose. If you're capable of understanding and
implementing other people's visions, you'll find a lot of success in almost
any industry.

But also keep in mind -- creativity is a muscle that can be flexed. Don't sell
yourself short. Work on it.

------
zuhayeer
Related: PG’s essay on Design and Research

[http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html)

------
sjg007
I am curious about the differences he observed between these two groups.

------
oklol123
Reading all these comments makes my tummy grumble

------
liambuchanan
People with the ability to "work hard" on "important problems" are not rare.
People who have the privilege to do so are incredibly rare. It's
disappointingly thoughtless not to acknowledge that in a post published on
Juneteenth. If gatekeepers, like Sam, put a little more effort into
acknowledging how they perpetuate systemic inequality, and trying to avoid it,
they could have a huge impacts.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
They are rare, friend. Most people havent grown up enough to be able to work
on important problems, though they can be trained. Could you handle it, if you
saw your best friend get struck by an explosive harpoon, fall into the ocean,
drowning and bleeding to death in front of your very eyes? What about a mile
long stretch of highway, almost a thousand charred bodies, dead or screaming
in the middle of the night? How about watching an elderly woman waste away
into nothing as her "caretakers" starve her to death? Can you really trust
yourself to watch over millions of dollars for decades without stealing a
little off the top? Are you ready for the feelings of loneliness and isolation
that can occur when youre the only person who's willing or able to do the
work?

I mean, youre always welcome to give it a shot if you think youre so good. I
can guarantee though that the results will surprise you. Most people cant even
handle raising a child, the most important work there is.

