Benʼs working notes

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§Startup Constraints

  • Startups need to make a lot of money or have a lot of users

  • Startups need to conform to investor timescales

  • Venture capital doesn’t work for things that only realize their value on long timescales
  • Startups need an exit strategy
  • Startups need a great story
  • Startups need to produce a scalable product
  • Startups need to break development into correctly sized stages
  • Startups need specific growth curves
  • If a project has massive possible upside and low enough risk it is venture fundable
  • Scalability and venture fundability happens when you turn a process innovation into a tool innovation
  • Startups are good at point changes

  • Startup Constraints - essay

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§Academia Constraints

Decoupling from market discipline is like cave diving

Current value capture mechanisms are crude

When should an idea that smells like research be a startup?

§Corporate R+D Constraints

Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

Ideally corporate R+D enables work on a general purpose technology before it’s specialized

There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model

Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup

One function of a private ARPA is to fill in the gap once filled by corporate R+D

There are many important innovations that are just bad investments

Startup Constraints - essay

The market in for-profit organizations is fairly efficient

Profit-maximizing organizational structures can hamstring technologies whose impact depends on them

It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions