§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

Startups are good at point changes

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

PARPA could walk the line between profit and non profit

Startups  need to spend effort on sales, marketing, and productization

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

The Architected Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions

An institution riffing on the ARPA Model could enable paradigm shifts that are not happening

# §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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Without scalability APM systems are worthless

# One way to think about scalability is as the number of operations that happen without human intervention
We often talk about scalability both in terms of software products and manufacturing. On their surface these two types of scalability seem relatively disconnected beyond “you can do a lot without spending a lot.” However, the *reason* things are usually expensive is because of skilled human labor that goes into each operation in each case. In the software world, a scalable product requires less developer work for each additional person who uses it. The more scalable a manufactured product is, the less skilled labor you need for each additional unit.  

A widget’s design is *directly* related to how scalable it is. This is one of the reasons [[Prototyping needs manufacturing in the room]].  Often the way that a proof of concept is creating is completely unscalable and needs to be redesigned almost from scratch. Shifting an unscalable process to a scalable one is one way that [[fillerFundamentalManufacturingProcess2020]]. Producing something in a scalable way drastically reduces its cost as long as there are enough buyers to cover the fixed costs.[^1] Cost matters to whether technology has an impact because [[Someone needs to buy manufactured technology eventually in a monetized economy]]. Therefore, the debate between “doing new things” and “doing old things better” is absurdly murky.  

When you frame scalability this way, it basically falls out that true automation just makes more things scalable. 

### Related
- [[Scaling up processes is a critical thing to commercialization]]
- [[Commercialization occurs above TRL 6]]
- [[Atomically Precise Manufacturing is more a matter of systems engineering than discovering new physics]]
- [[Without scalability APM systems are worthless]]
- [[Scalability and venture fundability happens when you turn a process innovation into a tool innovation]]
- [[Startups need to produce a scalable product]]

[^1]: These fixed costs are why general-purpose manufacturing tools like robotics and 3D printers as well as general-purpose software tools like Django change the game - they enable low-labor production without high fixed costs. 

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§Startup Constraints

Xora has unique structural advantages that could allow it to push the technological frontier

# Startup Constraints - essay
- [[Startups need to make a lot of money or have a lot of users]]
- [[Startups need to conform to investor 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]]
- 
### Published
10/2018
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
[[§Startup Constraints]]
## Authors
- [[Benjamin Reinhardt]]
## Link
[Startup Constraints](https://benjaminreinhardt.com/startup-constraints/)

[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Startup_Constraints_-_essay)

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One way to think about scalability is as the number of operations that happen without human intervention

# Startups need to produce a scalable product


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Benʼs working notes

Startups need to produce a scalable product

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