I think you’re a great example of a successful founder who is also a prolific researcher and writer. I wish I had your capacity for the last two; you’ve been high impact in all three channels!
I think you’re right in that research startups should generally be led by researchers, and good researchers track the field closely and ideally publish. I think at some size of organization, this becomes much harder, but I don’t want to deter it! If Elon wants to go deep on his rockets, this seems good, even if he’s an outlier CEO.
I was trying to say two somewhat related things in this article:
The status gradients strongly favor “become a researcher” over “become a founder”, which means we have less founders than ideal and our successful founders tend to follow the “lab PI” archetype, for better or worse.
Implied: there is plenty of value that founders in non-research roles can have (field-building, advocacy, product development, etc.) and this is systematically undervalued relative to the impact, which discourages people from trying.
For your point 2, are you thinking about founders in organizations that have theories of change other than doing research? Or are you thinking of founders at research orgs?
The former. Even large research nonprofits (e.g., RAND, AI2, ATI, SFI) tend to be led by people with research experience, though they probably do a lot less research than CEOs at small research orgs.
I think you’re a great example of a successful founder who is also a prolific researcher and writer. I wish I had your capacity for the last two; you’ve been high impact in all three channels!
I think you’re right in that research startups should generally be led by researchers, and good researchers track the field closely and ideally publish. I think at some size of organization, this becomes much harder, but I don’t want to deter it! If Elon wants to go deep on his rockets, this seems good, even if he’s an outlier CEO.
I was trying to say two somewhat related things in this article:
The status gradients strongly favor “become a researcher” over “become a founder”, which means we have less founders than ideal and our successful founders tend to follow the “lab PI” archetype, for better or worse.
Implied: there is plenty of value that founders in non-research roles can have (field-building, advocacy, product development, etc.) and this is systematically undervalued relative to the impact, which discourages people from trying.
For your point 2, are you thinking about founders in organizations that have theories of change other than doing research? Or are you thinking of founders at research orgs?
The former. Even large research nonprofits (e.g., RAND, AI2, ATI, SFI) tend to be led by people with research experience, though they probably do a lot less research than CEOs at small research orgs.