
Are you solving a NASA problem or a LEGO problem? - nateberkopec
http://nateberkopec.com/post/10043183328/nasa-problems-and-lego-problems
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toddmorey
I don't really see the point of this article. It's not the difficulty of your
solution--it's the quality of your solution and whether it resonates with
customers. I've seen some very profitable startups solving "LEGO" problems in
elegant and interesting ways. Meanwhile, any competitive advantage you think
you built solving "NASA" problems with complex technology is fleeting at best.

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DallaRosa
Isnt that the point of the article? Dont think your idea is the most complex
and that no one else will be able to copy you. If you're solving a lego
problem stick to the lego but try to solve it the best you can cause people
will come and its gonna be easy to copy most of your solution

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nateberkopec
That was exactly the point I was trying to make. Thanks!

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Jach
It always seemed to me that the prevalence of LEGO problem startups, or in
other words endless companies doing endless variations of "cat picture sharing
webapps", was a reason to discount the total effect a startup can have on
humanity and a reason why you should go work for BigCorp. We all more or less
agree that NASA problems are more beneficial to humanity than LEGO problems,
but in terms of money gained, both options are equally viable. Microsoft
started as a LEGO problem, Google started as a LEGO problem, Facebook started
as a LEGO problem. Now they're gigantic corporations that can see and manage
and fund NASA problems, or buy up and piece together enough LEGO problem
startups, who individually were doing NASA problem R&D possibly without
realizing it.

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nkassis
I don't think you can classy what Google did as a LEGO problem. At the time
they started, indexing the web and comming up with pagerank was a hugely
complex thing to do. And you can see how it impacted their future direction as
a company that seems intent on attacking larger world problems. Microsoft did
not get huge deal. Sure writing a BASIC interpreter wasn't something super
complex but that isn't what made them successful in the end.

When I look at company like Dropbox, I don't really see a lego problem since
building the infrastructure for what they are doing isn't easy. But it's not
stopping people from competing with them as this article claims it would.

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6ren
NASA has competitors. The competitive landscape is dynamic, and solving a
difficult problem only gives you a head start. A head start is a great thing,
it has founded incredible businesses, and it is enormous fun to be the best.

It's sad, because whatever exceeded customer expectations today (so that they
think it's incredible, magic, they can't believe it, how did you do that man)
won't work tomorrow, when their pesky expectations have habituated to it.
"New" is intrinsically time-sensitive. What have you done lately?

Here's Joel essay _Where there's muck, there's brass_
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/06.html>

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idanb
What if it was made out of an erector set? Then after that you moved to a hand
crafted duct tape garage prototype? Then to a small scale SLA prototype to
model it's characteristics. Then maybe a scale replica using CNCed parts?

Burt Rutan used to build small scale models of his concept planes and mount
them to the roof of his car to test their aerodynamics. Last time I checked he
managed to turn that "Lego" project into a manned space vehicle.

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wccrawford
Even if you're solving 'NASA problems', competitors will come.

It would have been better to give us some idea of WHY we need to know what
scale of problems we're solving, and what kind of problems we'll have if we
don't know.

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esk
In fact, if you're solving "NASA problems", being the first solver even has
some potentially crippling disadvantages—nimble competitors can learn from
your public mistakes and build off your public successes, all for a _lot less
time and money_ than it took you.

Solving a problem can be a lot easier the second time—what had been a
tortuously long and painful process for you is often significantly easier for
a competitor who had the benefit of watching.

You'll also also have this issue if you're the first to solve an easy problem,
but I believe it's less exaggerated.

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sparsevector
This is true for some things. For example, UI design can be a long and
difficult process for the first mover but easy for competitors who can just
lift the design. However, it's not so easy to lift, say, the design of a
distributed file system from its public interface.

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SteveJS
There are a couple of possible points in this article. One is bemoaning the
quality of the problems (not the solution) attacked by startups. Is the
startup curing cancer? Or enabling a more advanced form of ironic hipsterism?
Of course curing cancer is more important. That doesn't mean Lolcats fails to
make the world a better place.

Another is that people in startups are delusional in thinking they are solving
difficult problems. Maybe, but they are taking risks and it seems innocuous
and may be even helpful to be slightly delusional on that point.

Finally the metaphor of a moon mission is telling. Landing on the moon, was
hard, but it didn't create a sustainable business around space flight. In fact
by some measures space flight went backward for some time. In the 90's I was
at Draper Laboratories and remember a literal rocket scientist saying it would
take more than 10 years to put a man on the moon again. (He was saying this
while complaining about milspec components.)

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nateberkopec
I live in Brooklyn, so this could in fact by advanced hipsterism.

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jonpaul
I think that a lot of folks get really caught up in competition. Big deal.
Competition drives innovation. If there is a market, competitors will come
regardless. I'd almost argue that competition can validate a market.

I believe that if businesses focused more on customer service and solving one
or two key problems really well, then they'll have a higher likelihood of
succeeding.

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Udo
If you find yourself coming up with a NASA-style solution, that's a pretty
good indicator something is going horribly wrong. NASA-style architectures are
non-modular, highly complex, non-reusable, bureaucratic, inefficient,
difficult to test, high maintenance, and high risk solutions.

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AndrewMoffat
> NASA-style architectures are non-modular, highly complex, non-reusable,
> bureaucratic, inefficient, difficult to test, high maintenance, and high
> risk solutions.

Source?

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InclinedPlane
History.

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AndrewMoffat
Right, but, given the amount of incredibly useful products and discoveries
that have come out of NASA's "inefficient, non-modular, non-reusable,
difficult-to-test" architectures (see:
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-
leaps-how-nasa-rocked-our-world-879377.html)), I think such a broad statement
about the way NASA works deserves a little more qualification than a witty
one-word answer, don't you?

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InclinedPlane
A lot of the alleged NASA spinoffs are vastly overrated or incorrectly
attributed to NASA. Overall the spinoff benefits do not justify the enormous
cost of, especially, NASA manned spaceflight and thus aren't a good argument
for its continued existence. Trying to justify hundreds of billions of dollars
in expenses with hand-held vacuum cleaners and better golf balls is patently
ridiculous.

The only good argument is the direct one: it's something we want to do and
something we should do for its own reasons and merits. Personally I believe
that to be the strongest argument and also a perfectly adequate argument.

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andrewljohnson
I've seen this posed as Twitter vs. Hoverboard, without denigrating the
Twitter side.

[http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2011/07/a-twitter-a-
hoverboar...](http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2011/07/a-twitter-a-hoverboard-
or-something-in-between/)

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phatbyte
Why are people so afraid of competitors ? For me this article is what make so
many projects fail, they try too much. Sometimes, you just need to solve
simple things to make people's life a little better.

It isn't about the competitors, it's about who come first with a viable
solution.

PS: You not a scientist, you are not NASA, you will never be, you will never
have the need to develop anything close to a space rocket in your life. And if
you do, don't start a startup for god sake, do something more valuable to the
human kind, please use you knowledge for much more important things.

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pmiller2
False dichotomy much? There are plenty of problems that lie in between LEGO
problems and NASA problems. I'll call them "Wright brothers problems" -- i.e.
the kind of problems that can be solved by two guys in a garage over a period
of a few years. I'd say the development of Pagerank actually falls into this
category, since it was originally Larry Page's thesis topic, which he
developed with Sergei Brin, then brought to fruition at a small scale at
Stanford, then (finally!) at full scale with the founding and development of
Google.

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rshm
I agree with the message that you need something substantial to survive and
prosper. Unlike 70s and prior, market and community of innovators at this age
openly exchange their small yet fully specialized ideas. The result of which
is the complex eco-system. I would rather compare the space exploration with
current state with the internet, instead of few big firms working with their
million-man hours, we have the swarm of innovators all over the world
producing and exchanging their accomplishments of "LEGO" missions.

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gavanwoolery
Tackling a NASA-scale problem would (most likely) require NASA-scale funding.
Ping me when somebody finds an investor that is this rich/foolish.

I admire the notion, but I actually think the scale of the problem is
irrelevant. There are some really "small" problems (that are hard, but could
be solved by one person), throughout mathematics and computer science that
could have profound impacts.

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nateberkopec
Eeeehh...I'm not so sure about that. Palantir, Dropbox, and Heroku are all
examples of startups that solved massive technical issues (mostly with
redundancy/stability) that keeps their competition at bay. Would _you_ want to
recode Dropbox? Would you like to take a stab at one-upping Palantir's massive
effort in the next gen of financial intelligence?

Hm, I think I need to go back to the drawing board with this post. There's
something good here but I didn't quite get it across.

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Rantenki
It isn't a big deal when you are solving a LEGO problem and think you have a
NASA problem. The big deal is when you are trying to solve a NASA problem, and
you think it is a LEGO problem. The first leads to an inflated sense of self
worth, the second leads to untold suffering and failure.

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vacri
Weird, he does LEGO in capitals like the company wants, but still uses an S to
make it plural.

Also, his numbers seem to be off, both for years and number of missions.

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InclinedPlane
Yeah, no clue where those numbers come from. The better estimate would be
about 8 years and on the order of 20 manned missions.

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jcampbell1
NASA took $1000 from every American, and paid scientists to put 12 people on
the moon. If you think about it, it is as pointless as the pyramids. LEGO on
the other hand stimulates the creativity and entertains kids for billions of
hours. LEGO solves a real problem, NASA solves non-problems. I am all for NASA
and working on hard problems just to show they can be solved, but any startup
working on NASA problems is destined to be a commercial failure.

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kakali
Can you provide a link for that dollar amount? At its peak in 1966, NASA was
4.4% of the federal budget. That's 5.9 billion dollars for that year. The
population of the United States was 196 million at the time. This puts the
cost of NASA at $30 (1966 dollars) per person. That's a lot a bang for the
buck!

Source: <http://www.infoplease.com/year/1966.html>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA>

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kakali
A quick follow up, from those same sites you can work out that NASA costs
Americans about $55/yr per person today. Not bad, maybe others would like to
buy a video game instead. I however enjoy the pretty pictures from around the
solar system.

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Cushman
Just imagine if the average American spent as much on space as they do on
their car.

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juiceandjuice
But my paycheck comes from NASA...

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mkramlich
If I can achieve FU money by solving a LEGO problem rather than a NASA
problem, then I'll do it. There will always be NASA problems to solve later.
Solve the money problem first.

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dewiz
I'm an algoholic, not in the SEO sense pls, gimme something NASA-big to solve
then ;)

