Startups
There seems to be a non-negligible deal of overlap between this community and Hacker News, both in terms of material and members. For those not aware of HN, it’s a news aggregator for people interested in startups, technology, and other intellectually interesting topics, with a reputation for high-quality material and discourse.
While rationality and LessWrong gets its fair share of attention over at HN, I haven’t heard of much discussion about startups over here. Off-line, I’ve heard a claim that in terms of contribution to existential risk prevention charities, startups are suboptimal when compared to jobs in finance, but not much else other than that. I find this odd, as many of the contributors in this site seem to be prime founder material, and rationality should really be of use when working in a high-stakes ever-changing environment.
My intention with this post is simply to kickstart a discussion around startups and gauge the attitudes of fellow LessWrongers. Does anyone (else) aspire to becoming a startup founder in the next few years? Do you believe startup founding to be a viable means of contributing to groups existential risk prevention?
I proposed sometime ago that LW members who want to make money to fund x-risk research could start a part-time programming project or startup together. I’m a poor businessman but a pretty good programmer, and would be up for joining such a thing immediately if it existed. No one took up the offer.
It’s already being done. There is a group trying to develop a game after this comment by JamesAndrix.
I don’t remember seeing it back then. I too am a pretty good programmer (and not businessman at all) - I write code for a living.
I’d seriously consider joining such a project. What’s the general idea? Is there anything we could code that would reduce X-risk in itself, or would we be coding strictly for money to contribute to anti-X-risk causes?
I don’t care about x-risks at all. If we ever make any money, I’ll spend my share on having fun and helping my friends/relatives. Others may spend their shares on charity, x-risk, SIAI, makes no difference to me. The idea is just that LW is full of smart and moral people, so banding together to make some money looks like the logical thing to do.
I’m totally in support of that. So, any other takers?
If you don’t mind, count me in. PM’d email to cousin_it. Primary skill: programmer.
What’s your email address? I think the sensible thing for me to do right now is to email Alexandros, Jack, and you. I already know their addresses.
EDIT: never mind, found it.
Sure. Unlike you guys, I’m not really a programmer at all.
I would be interested in this assuming it didn’t require me to agree with particular hypotheses regarding x-risk.
I’ll email you.
It might be nice to see a breakdown of this goal from an epistemic vs instrumental rationality perspective. I.e. from an epistemic perspective, your terminal value is probably NOT to found a startup. It is probably something else: money? seeing an idea instituted? control over your daily activities? What are the best ways to achieve those things? “Found a startup” is probably only a tiny part of the answer to these questions.
From an instrumental perspective, evaluating business plans and estimating risk seems difficult but in a straightforward way. I don’t see what new insights it would offer to the rationality community, unless you could provide some case examples as an exercise in identifying bias.
I can see another direction you could go with this. A community of rationalists should “win”. If winning implies developing a comparative advantage at something, and business tells us comparative advantage can be translated into money, then why not monetize on our comparative advantage (if it exists)? You could ask what these businesses would look like. But I suspect they look like businesses do already: e.g. Google has a more rational way of evaluating relevance, and has turned that comparative advantage into profit.
There have been a few posts recently to the Existential Risk Reduction Career Network lately about startups that want to hire programmers. You might want to check those out.
I have a few thoughts on startups. Let me know what you guys think:
1) People have commented that they are bad businessmen. “Business” isn’t mysterious. Business is Like Chess. People tend to (at least implicitly) treat it as a barrier rather than an overcomable obstacle. (Paul Graham said he made this mistake of “being afraid of business”.) If you’re a rational person, you could read a few books, apply your rationality skills, and probably be a very competent businessman.
2) Startups are hard, but doable. Very doable. There are tons of things people want, and to generalize, it really just comes down to making something that people want. Sorry, I don’t really know how to support this belief. It really just comes down to me believing that there are so many opportunities to start multi-million dollar businesses.
3) Startups are by far the best way to make a lot of money and contribute to the world (assuming that the value of money is rather inelastic). Way better than things like jobs in finance. This really comes down to what I said in 2), that they’re doable and you have a high chance for success if you’re rational. Also, even if you apply normal standards for chances of success (rather than my proposed standards that are much higher), it’s still much better than things like jobs in finance. See this. The reason people choose safe jobs is because they are risk averse, but if you are mostly interested in doing good for the world, you wouldn’t be so risk averse, and you’d choose startups because they have the highest expected value.
It’s not mysterious but it’s a set of specific skills. Depending on who you are, some may be hard to acquire. For example, it will be hard for someone on the autistic spectrum to acquire good salesmanship skills.
Clearly so, but that’s not the right question. The right question is “What is my estimated probability of success for a given startup?” Keep in mind that the prior is pretty low.
Nope. I think there is a lot of empirical evidence against this proposition.
By the way, startups are not the same thing as small businesses.
I’d like to be involved in a start-up. I’m don’t know if I have the self-confidence to do it myself, though. Also, my ideas usually require capital or programming proficiency I don’t have.