
Cindy Wu and Experiment.com (YC W13) - dluan
http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/07/08/woman-raised-1-2-million-with-a-spirited-3-minute-speech/
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danieltillett
What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects
driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas. At the moment all
scientists have to live from grant to grant which makes it near impossible to
go after the really risky projects. If you try a difficult project and fail
then you are out of a job.

We also, because of the wonderful system of peer review, pretty much only give
grants to old established researchers with long track records. These
scientists are great at running mini-empires, but not so good at coming up
with the really novel ideas that we so need.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _What we really need to find a way to support long-term, high risk projects
> driven by young scientists with breakthrough ideas._

Fellowships typically fill the roll of paying for long-term, high risk
research.

If it needs to be weighted away from established researchers, make it a
lottery.

Current funding models are optimised for convergence on leading hypotheses. A
lottery would increase coverage.

~~~
danieltillett
Having a lottery is a good idea and one I support for grants in general. The
grant review process should be simply "is this idea viable and worthy of
funding - yes or no”. If yes put it into the lottery and fund as many good
grants as you have resources. Peer review works well for this type of sorting,
but it is terrible for trying to pick a top 10% idea from a top 15% idea. It
just isn’t possible for even the best scientists to be able to do this
consistently.

The problem with fellowships is that the longest I know of only go for 5 years
and most of the junior ones are only for 3 years. This is just not long enough
to take the chance on failure.

If you want to encourage young talented people to tackle really hard and high
risk problems you need to provide funding for at least 10 years.

I would go as far as adding a restriction that recipients of these high risk
fellowships can’t publish in anything but the absolutely top tier journals
(Nature, Science, Cell, etc) for the first 7 years so they don’t get
distracted from the high risk work that other scientists can’t afford to do.

~~~
cindywu123
In my opinion we are missing out on great discoveries because we allow a small
number of humans determine if a scientific research question is worthy of
funding. If a single scientist thinks an idea is worth doing and can find the
resources to support it, she should do it.

We will move to a system where we only ask 'can this question be answered by
the scientific method?' If we use the scientific method to answer these
questions we will uncover secrets of the universe that would never survive in
the current system humans have designed.

The best scientists do not design their experiments with a goal of publishing
in top tier journals. And as a community, we should not be encouraging this
behavior.

The best scientists investigate questions out of pure curiosity and as a side
effect publish the most impactful research.

Young talented people are already tackling really hard and high risk problems.
If this is truly what young scientists want to do, they will find a way. 10
years of guaranteed salary is not the solution, but giving everyone the
opportunity to be a scientist may be.

~~~
danieltillett
>Young talented people are already tackling really hard and high risk
problems. If this is truly what young scientists want to do, they will find a
way. 10 years of guaranteed salary is not the solution, but giving everyone
the opportunity to be a scientist may be.

I love your idealism, but having climbed the greasy pole to academic tenure (I
have since left science) I can say that you really can’t afford to work on the
high risk projects. When you are a junior scientist the more senior scientists
control what you can work on and they want you generating publications. When
you are a post doc you can’t afford to not get publications out and hence you
have to work in areas which will produce results within 2 years. Once you are
a senior scientist you are forced to work on projects that will generate x
number of papers within the 3 year grant period or else you wont get any
further funding. At every stage of your career you are effectively forced to
work on projects that are guaranteed to generate publishable results within
the next 2 years.

The reason I suggested that the scientists awarded one of these 10 year
fellowships are not allowed to publish in anything but the top journals is to
remove the pressure of publishing off the fellows and allow them to
concentrate on solving the difficult problems. The only reason I suggested an
exception for the top tier journals is in rare case the fellow made a lucky
breakthrough - we don’t want them sitting on some important result for years
just because they not allowed to publish.

I have many high risk/high reward projects that I would have loved to have
worked on when I was a professional scientist, but I could not afford to do
so. I knew if I failed to produce consistent publishable results I would be
out of a job. Even once I had tenure I could not in all honesty ask my
students or post docs to work on projects with a significant risk of failure.
We have created a system where we have a high probability of making
incremental progress, but almost no chance of big breakthroughs.

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PieSquared
The SF Bay Area community bio labs (BioCurious and Counter Culture Labs [0])
are considering using this platform to try and fund their iGEM team,
researching inducing UV resistance in E. Coli and then optimizing it with
directed evolution. Community labs have effectively no funding to operate
with, so these types of platforms (Experiment, Kickstarter, etc) are
incredibly important for them.

If you'd like to support the SF Bay Area community labs and hobbyist
biologists trying to do real research without academic and commercial funding,
watch the Experiment.com biology section [1] over the next week or two!

[0] [http://biocurious.org/](http://biocurious.org/) and
[https://counterculturelabs.org/](https://counterculturelabs.org/) [1]
[https://experiment.com/discover](https://experiment.com/discover)

~~~
cindywu123
andrew, come by our office next week!

~~~
PieSquared
Sadly I'm not in the Bay Area for the next 3-4 weeks and missed the original
message :) Also I'm not really the one organizing the BioCurious funding, so
maybe not the right person to speak to on that matter...

Nonetheless I'd be delighted to meet you at some point, Experiment.com sounds
like a pretty great organization :)

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joshu
Silly summary; the talk isn't the thing that raised the money.

(I am an investor in Experiment.com)

~~~
teej
The world wants to belive that YC works like Shark Tank.

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reasonattlm
Experiment.com falls into an awkward area for my fundraising efforts for
longevity science projects. The community I raise from has been funding a few
n*$10k scientific projects every year or so for a decade now, and the yearly
fundraiser I cheerlead brought in $150k last year, and will hopefully do as
well this year (halfway there). We're growing slowly in reach, but would
greatly benefit from a Kickstarter-like thing that helps us pull in a larger
audience and new faces.

That doesn't seem to be experiment.com yet, or indeed any of the organizations
trying to crack the same nut of how you make crowdfunding work for research
projects. We wouldn't do any better with them than we do with our own hacked-
together infrastructure and communication channels. We need the existence of a
large successful science crowdfunding community before it is worth our trying
to surf on that science crowdfunding community, and I'm sure we're not the
only people with that chicken and egg situation.

Some folk in the community have had luck with indiegogo.com for scientific
research projects, such as mouse gene therapy or immune transfer treatments in
European labs at a few tens of thousands of dollars, but even there I think it
is a case that you are buying infrastructure for the audience you bring to the
table, not buying fresh faces and new listeners to persuade to your point of
view.

I'm vaguely hopeful that among the competitors in this space someone will come
up with something that works and scales and pulls in the crowds, the halo of
attention. There are some quite different styles of approach floating around,
such as labcures.com that implements a "back a team" strategy, or lifespan.io
that'll be launching sometime soon. Perhaps one of them will gain more
traction. Experimentation is key.

~~~
dluan
Eh, I guess I don't mind. Our lever on the chicken-egg problem is that we'll
always go out to find the best and most impactful science, and this type of
science will always be funded because this type of science is always growing.
We'd rather have 1000 $1k projects than 1 $1M project. The halo of small
groups is what will bring meaningful scientific results. Caveat to all of this
is that there is one project right now that's so far raised $1.55M
([http://experiment.com/curebatten](http://experiment.com/curebatten)) for
orphan disease research.

Researchers who use Indiegogo are only using it because 1) they are locked-in
by their institutions (a small number of universities coerce their faculty
like this) or 2) they can't yet use Experiment because they are outside of the
US.

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niels_olson
I didn't realize Cindy was the driving force behind this. I just need to re-do
my video and my project should be ready to launch...

~~~
cindywu123
👌🏻

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shanev
What a great idea. Maybe this is what will keep corporate interests out of
scientific research, as there's more transparency and diversity in funding
sources. I'm willing to bet the reproducibility rate for these studies will be
much higher than the ~30% average.

~~~
cindywu123
In my opinion reproducibility is a technical problem. Once research is
published and peer reviewed in real time, all studies should be reproducible.
If they are not reproducible, we should have insight into exactly why they are
not and propose a solution.

------
ambicapter
Scanning through the website (Experiment.com) I am both surprised and elated
at how many projects seem to be 100% funded.

~~~
technotony
Sadly the stats aren't that good. From the article "Two years on and with a
smart name change, “Experiment” has launched 5,058 projects and funded 336 of
them" so still a long way to go - Kickstarter's success rate I think is around
40%. That's still 336 research projects that wouldn't have been funded
otherwise! Go Cindy!

~~~
dluan
The 5,058 projects figure are people who've signed up and started projects.
There've actually only been 836 launched projects, with 336 funded and 395
failed. Not sure why that number got reported, perhaps an attempt at "there
are 5000+ researchers who've signed up".

[https://experiment.com/stats](https://experiment.com/stats)

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desdiv
I shudder to imagine how much the experiment.com domain must have cost.

~~~
trevyn
$54k :) [http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-
ex...](http://priceonomics.com/how-microryza-acquired-the-domain-
experimentcom/)

~~~
bloaf
Meanwhile, GivingTo.Science is sitting at $75

Is there a reason people would want to avoid newer domains like .science?

~~~
jonathankoren
Branding. .com is the top-domain. It's synonymous with Internet companies.
Without a traditional TLD, your domain doesn't even look like a domain.
Instead it look s like a bunch of random.words.smashed.into.one. (Which
coincidentally, is a valid domain.)

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keso_77
I like this a lot. Kickstarter for scientists. It would be very welcome if
scientists didn't have to come up with military applications of their research
in order to get funding.

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devanti
It seems they used to have more employees and 2 other co-founders. Wonder what
happened

~~~
cindywu123
one day we will write about the experiment story. one thing that is true for
all startups is things never go the way you expect. 😏

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throwawayhs
Hah, I went to high school with her. I saw the early Microryza stuff, didn't
think much of it. I'm glad it seems to be going well.

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tonydiv
To tie a funding round to nothing more than a "spirited 3-minute speech" is
silly. If I had to guess, Cindy is a fearless founder who has been working
hard for a long time to achieve her vision.

This article's title makes it sound like it's as easy as skipping your
Starbucks run to found a company and raise $1M+.

~~~
dluan
> If I had to guess, Cindy is a fearless founder who has been working hard for
> a long time to achieve her vision.

Yup.

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rory096
A 3-minute speech... at YC Demo Day.

