

Ask HN: What's the difference between a cool research project and a startup? - zxcvvcxz

In academia I see many seemingly-useful research papers and projects where I think, &quot;Damn, that could be pretty valuable! Why aren&#x27;t they doing a startup?&quot; It seems like there is much more &quot;raw value&quot; (if that makes sense) in these research projects than what others have tried making into startups (insert redundant &quot;X for Y&quot; or clone app).<p>Thoughts?
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agibsonccc
Mine isn't from academia specifically. It was along the same vein though. I
wanted to figure out how different components worked and ended up making my
own full stack NLP platform exploring every topic (question answering, named
entity recognition, summarization,...). Within about nine months or so, I got
it done enough (fully implemented, maybe not perfect like a full team of
engineers could do) to build things on top of it. However, it's accurate
enough relative to competing or similar products.

I decided to think of ways of making money on it, and just built something on
top of it, now I have customers and all that fun stuff.

A research project and a startup (software obviously) both have code parts to
them.

It really comes down to the problems you're attempting to solve.

In my case, I love the position I'm in now since I have the ability to make a
lot of different kinds of products by just adding a web app in front of a rest
API.

As long as it solves a particular need, customers don't care how or even when
you built it as long as it does what's advertised.

Research projects are how startups can start though. That's why I think they
say get out there and just build something interesting to you (in this case a
research project) and see where it takes you.

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opminion
At risk of simplifying too much: they fulfill very different goals, acquiring
public knowledge vs getting rich.

You might be forgiven :-) for thinking that an academic research project can
be identified with its publications and declared outcomes, because that's what
is usually presented.

At its best, an academic research project is an exploration of some narrow
corner of the space of ideas, perhaps with no immediate application. Depending
on the area, its publications represent both improvements and dead ends. (At
its worst it's just a load of exaggerations and distortions of the truth
designed to fool an already self-deceived funding body into providing
salaries, a travel budget and equipment. Most projects strike a balance).

On the other hand, startup=growth [1].

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

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dkuntz2
I think it has more to do with the intent behind the project.

Startups are businesses, and the intent behind them is typically to make
money.

Research projects don't intend to make money. Or, they do, but as a fairly low
priority.

It seems to me that research projects typically come across as "cooler" or
more interesting because they don't exist to earn money, they exist to see if
something cool could be done. To me, it seems that the reason a large number
of startups are uninteresting is because they're attempting to piggyback on
existing success (hence the X for Y stuff).

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27182818284
A useful idea from academia can be used to create a startup, but a startup is
more than idea. The key thing that is there is that it must have growth. From
Steve Blank: "A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable,
repeatable, profitable business model." Paul Graham also has the essay
[http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)
where growth is again emphasized.

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lutusp
> Ask HN: What's the difference between a cool research project and a startup?

The outcome. If the outcome is a success, that was the plan all along. If the
startup fizzles out, it was really an interesting research project.

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stevenrace
In 'Academia', researchers may not actually own the intellectual property
resulting from their research.

