Clearly if it seems promising we&#x27;re going to up the funding significantly.

You are making a wrong correlation. Putting more money won&#x27;t necessarily drive research forward. Most breakthrough researches and inventions were done with little money.

Bell Labs had an annual budget of over 3 billion since the 80s.

This looks amazing ... a modern Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

@sama - Interesting, I definitely think the toss up between meaningful research and high paying engineering work is very broken. You mentioned how compensation will not be determined based on conferences and papers, do you have any specifics on how you would measure &quot;quality of output&quot;? Will researchers be compensated differently based on said quality?(As often times the quality of research output is hard to gauge immediately without the greater context of time passing)

Any helpful teasers on what that domain might be ?

&quot;For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we&#x27;ll do in the future.&quot;Two words: baseband processor.The world really, really needs a fully open baseband processor.

Hand-selecting a bunch of famous folks results in IAS Princeton effect which has the criticism of producing nothing significant. Usually the approach of hiring a towering&#x2F;inspiring figure with an emerging research view works well (like FB did). They bring along a bunch of rookies and experts, and set up research groups quickly and rather smoothly.

For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise).  Not sure what we&#x27;ll do in the future.

Do they have similar policies with regards to openness as YC&#x27;s research lab?

Except when they close entire research labs overnight with practically no notice, corporate-style:[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;view-from-the-valley&#x2F;at-work&#x2F;innovation&#x2F;the-last-day-of-microsoft-research-silicon-valley" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;view-from-the-valley&#x2F;at-work&#x2F;innova...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thmatters.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;letter-re-closing-of-microsoft-research-silicon-valley&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thmatters.wordpress.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;letter-re-closing...</a>

MSR has published lots of great papers but it has not yet replicated the success of PARC or Bell Labs by any means. I am not sure why this has happened, but it has been pretty obvious to everyone in the research community. Google, which came in with a research agenda pretty late, has more or less single handedly pushed the boundaries of industrial research in the last decade.

Microsoft Research is also an excellent organization for CS related research.

MSR has been around for a while, with quite a bit of freedom, and still is a far cry from the accomplishments of Bell Labs (maybe time will tell, though.)

&quot;YCR could be the next Bell Labs&quot;Eh. That a pretty huge jump. Look, most new &quot;tech&quot; companies research is mostly PR, internal and external. If you&#x27;re doing something you have little experience in and therefor can&#x27;t evaluate, which success you aren&#x27;t dependent on or necessarily benefit from and everyone will say how cool it is regardless then it&#x27;s extremely hard to not cut corners and achieve real success.Still exciting, but I wouldn&#x27;t underestimate the challenge.

@sama - are the members of these groups going to be selected by YC or will there be an application process similar to YC?This is awesome to see, maybe YCR could be the next Bell Labs or something (although Google probably has a hold on that now).

It is possible to structure it as &quot;patent granted to everyone, but expires the moment they bring up a lawsuit against us or any of our licensees&quot; to do doubly good for the world.

Well, everyone would be able to use YC Research&#x27;s public outputs defensively as prior art.

No--all IP developed is free to the world, so we wouldn&#x27;t be able to use it defensively.

Apparently not.<pre><code> YCR is a non-profit. Any IP developed will be made available freely to everyone. 

 We’re not doing this with the goal of helping YC’s startups succeed or 
 adding to our bottom line.</code></pre>

you could allow free use of patents under a license that requires the entity doing so to also allow free use of their patents. If you believed the patent system is largely counter productive (as I do), this would be an awesome way of trying to address this a constructive way.

what YC could get out of it ( besides making the world a better place ) is very good knowledge of the capabilities of potential entrepreneurs.  Imagine one of these researchers then founding a startup.  Funding that would be a lot less risky, so that&#x27;s quite a bit of edge

@sama: is one of the intentions for this group to acquire patents, so that you may be able to use them in defense for YC companies?

This is great. I am hoping things like this will shake the dynamics of publication-oriented credentialing and ultimately the value proposition of academia&#x2F;academic research.

Glad to hear that! Some of his thoughts really resonated with me although they run counter to the current corporate research culture.I think Google managed to recreate something similar with their 20% projects

Is there a talk or discussion somewhere that touches on some of these insights into creating a great research organization?

In the article, he suggests finding Michelangelos. I imagine there are many who are clearly the right type, but many more non-obvious Michelangelos. Do you have (or intend to discover) a reliable way to foresee the best people even while circumstances influencing their lives have diverted them from the traditional outlets to look for such individuals? I assume there will be enough obviously great candidates wanting to &quot;work&quot; at YCR that you won&#x27;t need to dig for hidden gems. I was just curious to know if it was something you&#x27;d considered.Sam, when I met you at Startup School last year, I wanted to be brief. The most important thing I wanted to communicate to you was my gratitude, and I thanked you for sharing your startup class. I&#x27;m blown away by and so grateful for the stuff you&#x27;ve been doing since. I&#x27;m very excited to see how these new projects work out. Thank you again man.

We talked to Alan at great lengths in the process of putting this together.  He is the most insightful person I&#x27;ve ever met on how to structure an organization for great research.

At first I thought about that too, but as I got further I was reminded about an article about the person to first theorize the Higgs Boson, and how he had only published a few articles in his entire career.

This thread [0] from couple of days back on Alan Kay&#x27;s views on recreating Xerox PARC seems relevant.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10322929" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10322929</a>

We&#x27;ll have more info on this in a month or so!

&gt; We’ll especially welcome outsiders working on slightly heretical ideas (just like we do for the startups we fund) and we’ll try to keep things small—we believe small groups can do far more than most people think.What&#x27;s the process for an outsider to get involved? This sounds like a really cool and much needed movement. Will more information be coming soon on how to apply&#x2F;join&#x2F;contribute?

As I keep chiming in whenever YC and location come up - please seriously consider Australia&#x27;s East Coast. Like the valley, there is a big supply of world class universities and their graduates, and there&#x27;s also great weather and quality of life that keeps people from wanting to leave. What&#x27;s missing is an American style risk tolerance amongst the holders of capital. That&#x27;s changing, but it&#x27;s something YC could change even faster with an organisation like YCR.Our government has historically underfunded research, and even more often one side funds it then the other gets into power and cuts it again. As a result, there are lots of ex-academics looking for more interesting ways of earning a living!

The first group will be in SF.  TBD on other groups.  But unlike startups we fund, these people work for a YC organization, so we will provide space etc.

This sounds interesting. I&#x27;m curious to see what areas the research will be focused on.Are there plans to provide laboratory space for areas that require it? Would researchers be housed in some space in MV, or would they work out of their own space like YC startups?

While I&#x27;m somewhat skeptical of the idea (I&#x27;ll admit I&#x27;m an academic researcher) this seems like a very good step - the Bay Area is becoming cost prohibitive.

Yes, but we&#x27;re coming in on the very high end of the comp scale. We&#x27;re also considering doing things like YC guaranteeing 100% mortgages for the researchers--housing prices in the bay area are a joke.We&#x27;re starting relatively small (on the order of 10) and grow from there at a reasonable rate.

That&#x27;s great! Two questions:- Will the researchers need to be based in the Bay Area - AFAIK: not the best place to raise a family?- In the short term, how many researchers do you plan to hire?

This is awesome. I&#x27;m really excited to see what groups are announced - this is going to gather some great minds!

This is a logical step in YC&#x27;s path as the &quot;new&quot; university. It&#x27;s a great experiment to run, and I can&#x27;t think of better people to do it.

(I put together <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycr.org." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycr.org.</a>)Yep, I&#x27;m planning on swapping in the permalink in a day or two, but just want to avoid making changes during this launch.

Awesome news. It&#x27;s interesting to see new ways to fund research.BTW the &quot;Read more&quot; at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycr.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycr.org&#x2F;</a> point to the Y Combinator blog not to the post permalink. It will became confusing once you write a new post.

Interdisciplinary work is incredibly hard to pull off in academia due to tribal affiliations. I think the MSR NYC lab (where I work), which consists of computer scientists, economists, and other social scientists, is one of the few places I&#x27;ve seen it actually flourish.

FWIW, two (partially self-serving) suggestions:1. Try set up a lab in Cambridge at some point down the road.2. Pay particular attention to CS theory: it&#x27;s (arguably) high-impact and very cost effective --you can practically fund an entire generation of researchers in a subfield for a fraction of the cost of, say, a major interdisciplinary initiative. See for instance what the Simons foundation is doing at Berkeley[1].Best of luck with what you&#x27;re doing. You can end up actually changing the world in this way.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simons.berkeley.edu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;simons.berkeley.edu</a>

1. SF for now.2. Yes, eventually we&#x27;d like to have multiple groups in the same space just for this reason--I always think the interdisciplinary stuff is underrated.3. Some of both, probably, but mostly we want to support people that the existing system does not support (e.g. people that are not yet famous)

It&#x27;s not really that different from work in another corporate research division (IBM, PARC, MSR, Bell Labs..). Even in academia you are still getting paid, and your work is influenced by funding frameworks, citation index and faculty interests.Peer review has long been the traditional validation mechanism in science. I don&#x27;t see why it wouldn&#x27;t be applicable here.

How will this research remain bias-free when salaries are being paid for by YC?What happens when some of the research that is done paints some of the activities of YC or their companies in a less-than-positive light?

I like the idea of YC funding research. Bias free and politics free research can go a long way. A couple of questions though for @sama:1. Where will the research be based? Is YC providing space to setup lab?2. One of the problems I see with this is lack of fellow researches present on site making casual collaboration harder (compared to a research university campus). Have you thought of that?3. Are you planning on funding researches with track records or people with high risk&#x2F;high reward ideas that are relatively new?

Gotcha. So this is more about getting brilliant minds in media res, as opposed to discovering fledgling great researchers of tomorrow. Good lure; YC equity is probably increasingly more compelling than Google&#x27;s!

How liquid YC equity is?I assume that by getting google stock, someone can sell them easily in the public market. But how does it work with YC equity?

Seems like an effective system-level path around tech-transfer and licensing headaches. Open inventions feed innovative companies and back into research. Well done.

You could drop the equity and just locate somewhere with a lower cost of living as incentive. I vote for Detroit area ;-)

YC equity is an incredible incentive, but it also encourages researchers to help YC startups succeed.

Above market salaries and also equity.We want to get the best people in the world, and I think YC equity is a pretty compelling thing to get. We&#x27;re competing against e.g. Google, and Google stock is also a pretty compelling thing to get!

Interesting. I am curious though, as to why YCR researchers will also receive equity in Y Combinator as part of their compensation? Especially given that both are organized separately and YCR discoveries won&#x27;t be funneled through or used in YC. I am also assuming that YCR will pay market rate salaries.

Just replace &quot;flux&quot; with &quot;flow&quot; and you get the picture. If you&#x27;re at YC you (presumably) encounter lots of different problems in lots of different contexts, which is often a good environment to foster creativity and inventiveness.

Problem flux means the rate of new problems that need solving.Theoretical breakthroughs are often inspired by real problems. For instance, information theory arose from practical problems of wartime communications. YCR will be in close proximity (geographic, organization, and intellectual) to lots of startups with interesting and worthwhile problems to solve.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;experiment.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;experiment.com&#x2F;</a> - Not sure what their numbers are though.

A significant amount of proposals are too pie-in-the-sky to take seriously but still warrant attention.Honestly I&#x27;d like to see Kickstarter take a stab at this too, providing the general populace with an outlet to support research projects.

&gt; YC has a very high problem flux at this pointWhat does this phrase mean in English?

@sama is this targeted towards pre-PhDs who are deciding between pursuing their PhD or working in industry, as well as post-PhDs who are full-time researchers?

Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world&#x27;s top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn&#x27;t find a way to say this better).

I&#x27;ve been wondering if academia is really fundamentally broken, or whether it&#x27;s just horribly distorted due to some combination of underfunding and overpopulation, resulting in way too much competition for scarce resources.

I was reading the article, and it made my blood simmer, as articles like this do. Then, I looked at the comments which referred to Sean Carroll, and I couldn&#x27;t believe it. The fact he claims his textbook, a fantastic intro to GR and now a standard accessible text, was a mistake with regards to his life in academe is so disheartening, it makes you wonder how science actually continues in the present, hideous environment.

Since this is getting some attention, I want to point out that I had a great experience at MIT, and physics research hasn&#x27;t stopped working.YCR is a great idea because there are issues in academia that need resolving. It&#x27;s certainly not completely broken.

Totally agree. Just wanted to stress how the grant funding systems is totally nonsensical. While as a PhD you could get funding for your entire 3&#x2F;4 year program (at least here in the UK), if you decide to go for a post-doc things get dramatically complicated as your employment is (usually) tied to a particular grant. When the grant expires, you&#x27;re out if there isn&#x27;t another source of money. Is that a decorous situation for a highly skilled person who devoted much of his life to studies? Not sure about that.

Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who&#x27;s leaving to build a startup, I&#x27;m finding it a relief to leave a broken system.The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge.Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change.I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I&#x27;ve seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the &#x27;erratum&#x27; was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge.I&#x27;m super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division![1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.discovermagazine.com&#x2F;cosmicvariance&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;how-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.discovermagazine.com&#x2F;cosmicvariance&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;...</a>

Very well put. I remember seeing a post last month about the researcher from Duke University who resigned for similar reasons:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;jfgariepyneuro&#x2F;posts&#x2F;466442776860755" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;jfgariepyneuro&#x2F;posts&#x2F;46644277686075...</a>.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10177775" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10177775</a>It really is nice to see an organization like YC take an interest in research. I applaud Sam for making that considerable donation and hope the outcome is better than expected.

The best story I heard about this was from a math grad student &#x2F; instructor about how you had to jump through multiple hoops to even re-up on chalk for the blackboard.

The amount of financial and administrative skullduggery within the UC system 2009 (after the financial crisis)-present (I was at UCSB as a grad student 2009-2011) is almost uncommunicable to people who weren&#x27;t there. People simply refuse to believe some of the stories I tell them.e: Here&#x27;s some hard facts - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;universityprobe.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;universityprobe.org</a>

I think there is a bit of exaggeration on the non-availability of grant money for research in applied science&#x2F;technology. @sama acknowledges the adequacy of funds for applied research explicitly, &quot;[1] Funding for technological development is actually relatively high, but funding for fundamental research keeps getting cut. Investors want to fund incremental progress—and the world has gotten very good at delivering that. This is more valuable than it sounds; incremental progress compounds quickly.&quot; This is true of industrial research and to an extent, academia.It conforms with my experience.That said, the skills required to write great grants and schmooze with grant-givers are quite different from that needed to do quality research in science or engineering. So the academic researcher community in science and technology is whittled down to the small set of {those good at research}∩ {those good at writing grants} + ⊂{those good at writing grants} + geniuses

They are losing me. Almost 15 years and twice as many grant submissions. I&#x27;m writing a grant atm (a fucking good one), and I hope not to be around to be turned down for it. I&#x27;m literally pitching investors between experiments.

I love this idea.Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you&#x27;ve scaled startups.I&#x27;ve watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science &amp; Chemistry &#x2F; Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade.Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created breakthrough science in self-healing materials for the &quot;benefit of the world&quot;10 years of grant fights, personnel struggles, under-served licensing resources, conflicting lab-vs-student priorities, etc has put him out the other end hopeless and disenfranchised.The world will probably lose one of their best &quot;public&quot; researchers to the bowels of commercial science as a result.Go for it Sam, good luck and excited to see what your first projects are.

&gt;The height of the bubble was reached in the winter of 1636-37. Tulip traders were making (and losing) fortunes regularly. A good trader could earn up to 60,000 florins in a month— approximately $61,710 adjusted to current U.S. dollars. With profits like those to be had, nothing local governments could do stopped the frenzy of trading. Then one day in Haarlem a buyer failed to show up and pay for his bulb purchase. The ensuing panic spread across Holland, and within days tulip bulbs were worth only a hundredth of their former prices. The tulip bubble had burst.Florins appear to be pretty steady with the dollar...

Reminds me of a great historical figure of Hungary, István Széchenyi.&gt;Széchenyi gained a wider reputation in 1825, by supporting the proposal of the prime minister, Nagy, to establish the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Széchenyi donated the full annual income of his estates that year, 60,000 florins, towards it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Istv%C3%A1n_Sz%C3%A9chenyi</a>

Alan Kay&#x27;s group got $5M from NSF to &quot;reinvent computing&quot;. The money lasted 6 years, in which they produced a reasonable prototype (called &quot;Frank&quot;) of a complete personal computing system in only 20K lines of code.

It may not be a lot in terms of research, but it&#x27;s certainly a lot in terms of a voluntary personal donation to anything, however much money someone has.

&gt;$10m isn&#x27;t really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science researchSure, but the NIH is funding near to 50,000 competitive grants a year. Some googling online gives median&#x2F;average grant size at $300k&#x2F;$350k. Even $25bil over 50,000 projects is $500k a project a year. An academic institution will take 50% or more straight off the top, so you&#x27;re looking closer to $150k to $250k a year.$10 million is a lot of money. Science can be expensive but that $10 million can last a long time.

I don&#x27;t want to minimize the awesomeness of the YCR proposal, but $10m isn&#x27;t really very much in the scheme of research. NIH alone funds to order of $25bil a year in science research. Public-private funding schemes probably fund an order of magnitude more every year.$10m is pretty much just enough to fund one reasonably sized group, doing advanced research, for about a year to a year and half. Seems to me that Sam is hedging so YCR can do its first round in about a year and get a bigger ask by pointing to the starting groups achievements.

As a researcher, I&#x27;ve run the numbers on what it would take to start a new nonprofit research institute.  Assuming some other sources of revenue (e.g. grants), 10M was actually the sweet spot to get a minimum sustainable group off the ground (about 5 PIs, with postdocs and grad students).  This is for math&#x2F;cs&#x2F;physics theory, where there are no experimental costs.  The IP stance is surprising -- for an independent group, it is tough to give up on a potential source of revenue.  Seems like YC itself provides a way to monetize the ideas, though, since some of them will likely feed into the VC side and help the companies.

&gt; &quot;To start off, I’m going to personally donate $10 million...&quot;Holy cow. That&#x27;s real money. Sincerely very impressed by the commitment.

@sama:  how are you thinking about evaluating progress of the groups?  it seems all the bureaucracy in the current research ecosystem derives from the fact that it is really hard to evaluate progress in research&#x2F;science.  So you form a committee of experts to evaluate if a given researcher is doing well, and that eventually leads to politics and bureucracy.  what are you thoughts on evaluation?

If every poster here had their net worth attached to their username, you&#x27;d probably cry.We all realize founders maintain &quot;a lot more&quot; equity than employees, but it&#x27;s almost like our brains aren&#x27;t wired to recognize, remember, or rationalize how some people get really really rewarded more than others. With Sam being grand poobah of YC, he&#x27;s on a life track to being a liquid-capable multibillionaire within 5-10 years after the current unicornpalooza goes through a few rounds of lofty exits.My propositions for SF to require all equity-exited techies to tattoo their net worth on their foreheads keeps getting shot down by anonymous &quot;concerned citizens.&quot;

HAHA - I thought the same thing. I ACTUALLY scrolled back up to the top of the article to see if it was truly posted by him after reading that line....

Ditto - would love to hear how he went from Loopt to that kind of wealth!

Looks like he was an angel investor in a lot of BIG startups, so not too surprising:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sam_Altman#Pre-YC_angel_investing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sam_Altman#Pre-YC_angel_invest...</a>

TIL that Sam Altman has considerably more personal wealth than I would have guessed, if I&#x27;d ever been inclined to guess.Anyway, this is very cool. Exactly the sort of thing that needs to happen to push the world forward in deeper ways. I&#x27;ll be very curious to see what sort of teams they put together and just how fundamental and long term and heretical they go with their research.

Sweet! We&#x27;ll need more things like this if we want to see our share of societal progress. I have faith that more programs like this will blossom in the coming years.@sama -is this only for severely resource intense research projects? And do you envision this turning into an alternative to graduate school too?

Well I always wanted to be in Y funded startup. Now my dreams become bigger - now I want get to YCR.Congrats Y team! I&#x27;m can&#x27;t wait to see what you come up for next announcement!

I like this idea; it&#x27;s pretty novel. Since there is just one group starting this off, which makes a ton of sense from a funding perspective, is this an MVP or a long term bet with regards to this specific group? Meaning if this group has trouble getting their idea off the ground in the next 1-2 months, do they get scrapped or are they going to have years to conduct their research?An idea for future research may be to do almost like a round of start-ups where a bunch of groups come to SF for 3 months but unlike start-ups you find the promising ones and keep them all and drop any that do not look promising. Basically thinking of ways to not put all your eggs in one basic. Naturally this becomes quite problematic if you&#x27;re researching something highly complex that won&#x27;t show signs of promise for a decade!

Way to put your money where your mouth is! Kudos to Sam. You are a good man. Hope this delivers amazing results.

It will cost you a buck buddy:). I was about to weep after losing my hard earned karma point. (Just kidding).

I downvoted by mistake! I wanted to upvote.

It takes a special person to donate $10 million to a new project. You don&#x27;t get enough credit Sam Altman. Good job and a very good idea.EDIT: Why am getting down votes for this comment? You must know that in this world not everyone is willing to part with their money and are not that giving. So relax before you down vote me promptly:)

Will this be structured in a way where there are groups headed by &quot;PIs&quot; that set the research agenda, and researchers working under them, or will you be pursuing a different model?

We are extremely hands-off with the companies we fund.These people will actually be part of the YC organization.

&gt; There are a few YC technical founders who were fired by their non-tech co-founders for rather flimsy culture reasons.Is the reverse Zuckerberg a thing now? Can you share perhaps one example?

The culture that exists between companies and founders in YC seems a better measurement of YC&#x27;s success than the culture that exists inside any one of those companies. They run YC after all, not the companies themselves.I have seen some difficult divorces between founders (with various combinations of technical and non-technical), and although some might suggest that YC should arbitrate those disputes more proactively, I think their policy of being willing to talk things through but not vote their shares is the right balance for their relationship with the companies.But YC&#x27;s success at fostering a positive, supportive culture between companies makes me quite optimistic that they can create a great environment when it&#x27;s their responsibility.

There are a few YC technical founders who were fired by their non-tech co-founders for rather flimsy culture reasons.  So far YC was pretty hands-off.  What makes YC think it can be effective at managing researchers?  Wouldn&#x27;t that be much more a function of the YC director(s) of research than the program?

Can&#x27;t view the ycr.org site. Flagged as malware by OpenDNS. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malware.opendns.com&#x2F;controller.php?url=ycr.org&amp;server=yvr15&amp;prefs=&amp;tagging=&amp;nref=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malware.opendns.com&#x2F;controller.php?url=ycr.org&amp;serve...</a>

&gt; You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on solving practical problems.I don&#x27;t mean to be dismissive of those working on solving practical problems! There&#x27;s a good chance that will be me in the near future! I suppose my concern is more that people working on those sorts of things already have many more options and resources available to them. I just mean to state that if one grants that research without immediate practical application has some (perhaps qualitative) value for society, then the relative impact could be larger if it were focused more towards that kind of research. But of course the downside to that is that the resulting research...has no immediate practical application.None of this should be taken as criticism exactly since both strategies have their advantages (and it&#x27;s not my money anyway), it&#x27;s just not quite clear from the post what sort of research is going to be funded.

&gt; YC has a very high problem flux at this pointFrom this statement and, more generally, YC&#x27;s focus on creating high-growth businesses, I&#x27;m guessing they&#x27;ll be focused on long-term research with potential to disrupt markets and have practical impact.&gt; So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we&#x27;re working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?Are these the only options? You sound dismissive of scientists (computer or otherwise) working on solving practical problems.

Very interesting! But exactly how fundamental is this research meant to be? Will there be any mathematicians working on projects not at all related to cryptography or physicists working on projects entirely unrelated to fusion?As an astrophysicist in the thick of applications for jobs in both industry and academia, I strongly identify with the points raised in the article. While I consider my research slightly heretical with the potential to solve many big problems in astrophysics, I don&#x27;t have any illusions that it will really lead to any practical developments. So is this initiative meant to keep scientists like me working on the problems we&#x27;re working on, or is it meant to prevent computer scientists working on a new way for cars to drive themselves from jumping ship and joining Google or Uber?

This article seems to have relevance. The Recurse Center is a YC company that recently began pursuing programming language research. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recurse.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;83-michael-nielsen-joins-the-recurse-center-to-help-build-a-research-lab" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.recurse.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;83-michael-nielsen-joins-the-re...</a>

How about &quot;We’re not doing this with the goal of helping existing YC’s startups succeed&quot;. If this solves some big problem, and there are no new YC startups that come out of it, would indeed be unimaginative.

&gt; We’re not doing this with the goal of helping YC’s startups succeed or adding to our bottom line.Helping YC startups succeed might not be the primary goal, but it&#x27;s silly to say the project isn&#x27;t also aimed to help YC startups. Having access to a top quality research team can absolutely help startups succeed, so this is either disingenuous or surprisingly unimaginative.

Ideas: Free Global Health Care, Free Global Education, Government Management Software (A to Z), or Private Secondary Government.

I love the accessibility and content of blog posts by members of Recurse Center. It would be amazing if scientists from YCR publish informal, yet rigorous posts for newbies.

(I&#x27;m working with Sam on YCR.)It&#x27;s pretty important that YCR groups have strong ties with the existing research communities — research collaborations tend to have a multiplicative effect.So I&#x27;d expect to see papers coming out of YCR. However, I&#x27;d also expect to see many other forms of communication (e.g. blog posts, code releases, etc). In general, we&#x27;ll tune our efforts to achieve the best research results and impact, rather than to fit the existing incentive systems.

That&#x27;s not true. University professors have sabbaticals, and can also go on extended leave for multiple years and return just fine.

Unless YC is promising to fund these researchers for life they&#x27;ll pretty much have to, or else they&#x27;ll never get back on the treadmill once the YC money runs out.

Will scientists at YC Research continue the common pattern of academic research&#x2F;publications? Or are there some grander plans to disrupt traditional research?

This is fantastic. Addresses the completely broken aspects of doing research in academia, gives researchers access to top developers through the YC network, gives you a much better environment stress and pay-wise than if you&#x27;re a researcher, and focuses on meaningful innovation. And the research will be free to use. Nailed it in so many aspects.@sama - since you mention that startups aren&#x27;t good at solving certain types of problems, is this something you&#x27;ve always believed, or is it a realisation through your work at YC?Also was it inspired by the Shuttleworh Fundation in any way?

Is this more targeted at semi-cofounders&#x2F;early-employees that fall by the wayside (like Aaron Swartz, poor soul) or is the plan hiring top researchers (the way Google got Hal Varian and Peter Norvig)?

You know, normally I&#x27;m one of those jerks constantly criticizing the Silicon Valley Way of things.  But this was a very good idea, I wish you the best of luck with it, and if, God forbid, my current employer went pear-shaped, it&#x27;s the kind of place I&#x27;d love to work.

Same question here. But I guess sign up page will arrive on due time. What a fantastic initiative anyway!

My only question is where do I sign up? (as a young researcher who wants to work on important problems)

Thanks!  Was wondering if YC would eventually do something like this, given the path it seems to be taking wrt nonprofits...  It was a huge pain setting up an independent nonprofit to do the research I wanted to do, then fundraising was hard again, and then I didn&#x27;t raise enough money to pay myself...  So good luck to everyone who applies to this.

Good on you sama. This is one of those &quot;for future generations&quot; quests. It&#x27;s nice to see people proactively shooting for the stars.

I was hoping to answer questions here for awhile but I&#x27;m getting pulled into a crisis so I have to go.I&#x27;m going to do an AMA on HN later this week (mostly to answer questions about applying to YC) and would be happy to answer more questions about YCR then.

This sounds fantastic; I&#x27;m so glad to see it.I&#x27;m curious what areas of research will be chosen, and how. I wonder if there is any room for a voting style &#x27;the community would like to see resources put behind this idea&#x27; decision making process. (On the other hand, its not the community&#x27;s money, so do what you will :)).I&#x27;m guessing all of this will be in the Bay Area?It&#x27;d be great if there was a way for regular folks to help out with this. It seems to be something genuinely intended to help people and I&#x27;d love to contribute in some way.

&gt; Why not give YC a 7% ownership of the IP and YC the other 93%.I suspect that one of these &quot;YCs&quot; is supposed to be someone other than YC, but its not clear which one.

Why not give YC a 7% ownership of the IP and YC the other 93%. That would definitely drive the more entrepreneurial scientists to work there and also allow YC to monetize products out it&#x27;s own research.I have some ideas on technologies that are harder to create and takes time, but actually want to own the IP at the end.

Great news! Probably the only other non-university lab at the moment with this type of long-term basic research goal is Microsoft Research.

This is the biggest news since YC started. The YC model works, but it isn&#x27;t churning out disruptions like Xerox PARC did... ethernet, the laser printer, the PC. It tends to produce Reddits. This could fill that gap. Bravo...

I just passively started looking around for a change. My criteria is exactly what&#x27;s described here: &quot;work that requires a very long time horizon, seeks to answer very open-ended questions, or develops technology that shouldn’t be owned by any one company.&quot; [1]. I have been unable to find very many places that will take non PHDs and let them participate in projects with these characteristics. I really do hope YCR relaxes the PHD constraint a bit. Look forward to it.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycr.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycr.org&#x2F;</a>

We’ll especially welcome outsiders working on slightly heretical ideasAre you going to require qualifications, or just sufficiently intriguing proposals?

The trick is to create a Bell Labs and not an Institute for Advanced Study. For programming related things (assuming that&#x27;s the domain?), that&#x27;s a hard line to draw. Getting regular interactions with the ycombinator classes would be one way to combat it.If you&#x27;re wondering about the criticism of IAS, see this quote:&quot;When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don&#x27;t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they&#x27;re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there&#x27;s not enough real activity and challenge: You&#x27;re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don&#x27;t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!&quot;

YC Research, meet Megalith: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;progrium.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-next-10-years-megalith&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;progrium.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;10&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-next-10-years-megali...</a>

As long as the people hired in are more hands-on and not the Sheldon Cooper types then it&#x27;s a wonderful idea, especially that the good stuff will be made free for everyone. It&#x27;s also quite endearing that you are putting so much of your own money into the idea.

I feel like you&#x27;re using &quot;normal people&quot; as pejorative. I meant it as &quot;is able to relate to the day-to-day experience of most people in this country.&quot;

I guess it&#x27;s because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us.Not to sound contemptuous, but are there really people out there who consider the folks running YC &quot;normal people?&quot;

I&#x27;m not quite sure who would have that illusion. The executives of investment companies (which is essentially what YC is, albeit a little bit different) tend to be wealthy.

&quot;turns me off&quot; is a negative emotion. Does the realization that we&#x27;re not all financially equal feel worse than the fact he&#x27;s donating $10m to this cause?

I&#x27;d probably argue that it&#x27;s a bad thing for anyone to have the chance to be &quot;insanely wealthy.&quot;

If it&#x27;s any consolation, they were &quot;normal people&quot; before they became insanely wealthy. If anything, that&#x27;s the point of YC .. to give &quot;normal people&quot; with intellect, determination and good ideas the chance to become &quot;insanely wealthy&quot; while improving the world.

Agreed. It&#x27;s important to remember that sama is SV elite (tm) and can afford to throw his money after extremely ambitious and risky projects-- he isn&#x27;t living the &quot;normie&quot; life. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that, but it can be a bit jarring to be reminded of it.I still think that this is a great (fantastic and maybe even unprecedented, depending on how serious he is about the duration) move by YC, though. I really hope that they nail the concept of research being different from shipping products, though-- the mentality that research is a product that has to be shipped out has largely killed the scientific research community of academia, warping it into a horrendous paper-churn for survival.

I wouldn&#x27;t want to be sheltered from such a fact but being reminded of it is jarring and changes my feeling towards YC.

He got 40M from selling Loopt? Didn&#x27;t Loopt raise 40M? How does Sam have 10M lying around?

why would you want to be sheltered from such a basic fact of life? Anyway, if it&#x27;s any consolation, 10m is probably not small change for Sam. His biggest liquidity event so far was 40m for Loopt, so 10m is definitely a considered investment for him. He probably wrote it in an off the cuff manner to set a precedent for the mentality towards the fund. Basically signaling to other investors not to think about putting money up too much since its such a worthy cause

I share some of your sentiment, yet...not. I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class. I turned down a National Merit Scholarship, in part to go be &quot;normal&quot; and walk away from the sick inculcation with being an obnoxious brainiac and social outcast, hiding my insecurity and emotional pain over the social end of things behind a wall of contempt and superiority. I have managed to wash off a lot of that shit, but being a nobody for years and becoming quite poor -- even homeless -- has failed to make me normal by any stretch of the imagination. I have given up on being normal.I still hope to find ways to put out useful information that will benefit people who are more &quot;normal&quot; than I am and I do have my concerns about the world being designed and run by so many people who absolutely cannot relate to the day-to-day experiences of most of their target audience&#x2F;customers. But I don&#x27;t know that hoping for &quot;normal&quot; people to do the design work is in any way useful.I don&#x27;t know what the answer is, but it seems like a lost cause to want people to do brilliant design work and also be normal. If you are that brilliant, you simply are not normal. Period.

I was surprised at the $10 millions number at first, but a quick thought process clear it out for me: it&#x27;s very easy to see  that a few of YC founders will be (or already are) billionaires. Is it really a surprised that the head honcho of YC might be worth in the hundred millions range?

Completely agree. Would love to understand the money here - think it would provide a lot of perspective on how the technology financing community works.

This is worth answering.I made single-digit millions from the Loopt acquisition. Almost all the money I&#x27;ve made has been as an investor. I got lucky in that the first few investments I made in 2009 (very small dollar amounts) were really good, so I was able to raise capital to keep investing at a much larger scale with other peoples&#x27; money. I didn&#x27;t have much liquidity until last year.Takeaway 1: the easiest, lowest-risk way in the world to make a lot of
money is to get fees for investing other peoples&#x27; money.Takeaway 2: if you make money that way I think you should give a lot
of it away.Takeaway 3: FWIW this is a lot of money for me, but it&#x27;s what I most
want to support.As a side note, I was pointing out that living in SV is becoming
possible only if you get a job like that one, and that that&#x27;s really a
problem.

If you haven&#x27;t noticed the acceleration of YC from the moment Sam took over, I feel like you&#x27;ve not really been paying attention. From scaling up the numbers, to outreach to females and minorities, to the increased transparency, and the YC Fellowship and now this, you really believe you&#x27;re just watching someone collect golden eggs? Do you realize how hard it is to grow a community? And how easy it is to screw it up? If Paul Graham was Steve Jobs, then Sam Altman is Tim Cook, and more.

The whole sama thing doesn&#x27;t compute for me and has negatively impacted my otherwise stellar view of YC.He dropped out of Stanford, founded Loopt (which raised $30 million and then acqui-sold for $43 -- and I&#x27;m sure Sequoia got the bulk of it), was then made a YC partner and finally appointed president. His Wikipedia page says he&#x27;s made some angel investments in successful companies like AirBNB, but my question is: &quot;With what money?&quot; Maybe he sold some private shares of these companies at some point. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that. But again where did the original money come from? Family?I just don&#x27;t get it. Please explain to me how dropping out of college and having your only startup fail leads to (a) being handed one of the most prestigious and influential positions in SV and (b) having so much money you can donate $10 million dollars like it&#x27;s chump change. How does that make any sense in this universe?pg started YC and deserves all the credit for basically inventing the accelerator archetype. He can do whatever he wants and I guess he thought sama was the best guy for the job. Maybe he is. Heck, I&#x27;ll even admit that I think he&#x27;s done a good job so far, although I also think plenty of people would be equally adept at watching a golden goose lay eggs.I think SV -- and YC especially -- perpetrate a few huge myths which cause people to have unrealistic expectations of their lives and ventures. (&quot;There aren&#x27;t enough engineers!&quot;, for example. Just last week, sama was saying how easy it is to live in SV if you work at Facebook, make a $150k+ salary and got a $75k signing bonus... a situation he was pawning off as &quot;average&quot; but is actually highly above average.) These lofty, then unfulfilled expectations then cause depression in vast amounts of people, both inside the Valley and out.To me, sama is a colossal SV myth, incarnate. &quot;Look! If you&#x27;re smart enough, you can rocket to the moon! Even if you drop out of school and your only startup fails!&quot;I don&#x27;t understand the full story, apparently, but I just hope people aren&#x27;t fooled. There is more than meets the eye, here.

&gt; I’m going to personally donate $10 millionStatements like this always turn me off. I guess it&#x27;s because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They&#x27;re not. They&#x27;re INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.

This is extremely exciting and I will apply as soon as the application process is announced. I would love to get funded to work on this open source digital audio workstation I&#x27;ve been working on[1]. Its goals are perhaps a little too ambitious and 25 years is not an unreasonable timeline for realizing them.[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;genesisdaw.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;genesisdaw.org&#x2F;</a>

DARPA, the publicly funded agency that generates most of the core tech that sustains Silicon Valley, has an annual budget of $3B. The National Science Foundation, which funds a large chunk of core science research, is $7B.Where would YC Research fit in this landscape? Would it be seeking government funds, and just offer a different institutional model than universities for hosting the research? Or would it be primarily based in private funding somehow (and how?)

While what US has now is bad, your solution is not complete: One can imagine that in your scenario a doctor can claim you&#x27;re not really sick, or lie that you have been cured. So what actually becomes profitable is not treating people.

That&#x27;s essentially just the divide between fee for service and capitation, both common models. HMOs work the way you describe. ACOs have been around not as long (at least, by that name) but became big with Obamacare and essentially do the same thing.

How about getting less sick by using a cure? That&#x27;s still sick but the cure works (but maybe not in the strict definition of &#x27;cure&#x27;).

Except that tweet isn&#x27;t really accurate - vaccine research is pretty active, and modern, new vaccines have made their makers a fair bit of money.Beyond that, vaccines are a &quot;Pay $X per month while healthy&quot; treatment - you have to treat everyone whether they&#x27;re sick or not, and as long as humans keep breeding, you have a replenishing customer base unless we manage the (rare) feat of eradication.The problem is that modern vaccine targets are hard. Multiple strains, dangerous responses from partial immunity (Dengue), very rapid viral evolution (HIV, flu), etc.

As someone else already replied, that&#x27;s an incentive problem. If you change the incentives to &quot;pay $X a month while healthy, pay nothing when sick&quot; then the profit would be in the cure.Unfortunately, we switched from that a while ago (my understanding is that we used to do &quot;pay while healthy&quot; around the 1900s) and now the current way seems &quot;normal&quot;.

Reminds me in some way of this tweet from PG last year:&gt; Paul Graham (@pg) — Markets are usually quite clever but one place they break is in encouraging treatments rather than vaccines. Subscription revenue.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;498875418527543297" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;paulg&#x2F;status&#x2F;498875418527543297</a>

It&#x27;s easier to comment on something specific when you disagree than when you agree but that leaves a very critical trail after a while.  Since I&#x27;ve been critical of Sam&#x27;s airbnb position and expressed a lot of concern over the amount of power a VC would have in the &quot;founder visa&quot; posts in the past, I would like to chime in to say that YC Research is an intriguing and exciting development with a lot of money behind it.  This has the potential to be pretty great.

Interesting comments by pg 1322 days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3622545" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=3622545</a>

This is the kind of thing Silicon Valley should be doing all the time. I hope Sam&#x27;s guts is replicated rather than just admired by other investors. Even if it&#x27;s not, this is a great thing.

It&#x27;s an interesting point about fundamental research. The old industrial labs are dead and while academic institutions can do a lot someone in the private sector has to pick up the research mantle. Google X is a good example, but I think smaller efforts like this are much more interesting. If it&#x27;s done right that is...

This is amazing. Where do I sign up to help?

No one at YC thinks that ideas are useless.Perhaps you&#x27;re thinking of this [PG, 2005]: Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here&#x27;s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there&#x27;s no market for startup ideas suggests there&#x27;s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.This is specific to startup business ideas, not scientific ideas. And worthless != useless. Worthless (in the narrow sense) means you can&#x27;t sell it for a lot of money.

&quot;heretical&quot; &quot;dangerous&quot; &quot;free to everyone&quot;Strong language. Especially coming from an organization that generally touts &quot;ideas as useless.&quot; Well here&#x27;s a model based exponentially upon the promise of &quot;ideas.&quot; I sincerely hope you disrupt the current models, which have been severely hijacked by interest groups, short-term thinking, and governance.So yes Sam, you have some bold ideas (you&#x27;re not yet sharing). Put $10m down to validate them and bring them to the world. You&#x27;ve earned the chance. And if you succeed, you&#x27;ll create a new model that touts the power of ideas, takes responsibility for them, but does not own them.Whatever we can do to help.

Hey there! Can I apply to YC Research for my AGI research project? :)

One of the big ones is that funding has not grown with the number of researchers, so researchers must spend a larger and larger portion of their work time on competing to get the work funded (or a longer portion of their professional life waiting for their chance at actual research-focused employment).

There&#x27;s repeated mention of academia being broken due to issues such as politics, and mis-aligned interests between researchers and their departments. What have been the changes over time in Academia that led to this?

Great idea!I decided not to go into academia many, many years ago, because a short look revealed that it seems to destroy the love of the subject matter more quickly than just about anything.Now that I am partly back working on my PhD, I am still glad I didn&#x27;t make it my main source of income, because now I have the freedom to do real research, rather than gaming the system of academia with minimal viable papers and incremental research re-gurgitating old insights. (&quot;Doing X in Smalltalk&quot; 10 years later: &quot;Doing X in Java&quot; 10 years after that: &quot;Doing X in JavaScript&quot; Sigh).

this is great, I&#x27;d love to see something similar to the Kavli Foundation growing from this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Kavli_Foundation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Kavli_Foundation</a>

Would love to know which fields&#x2F;areas YC will be focusing for research. Is it for only Computer Science? or Physics? Biomedical Science or behavioral economics? or combinations of few fields?And what kind of ideas&#x2F;research will be given priority? Will it be bench&#x2F;desktop based research projects or applied to people lives directly?

This is really cool! I wonder, though, if YCR will accept donations? It will be nice if I could personally contribute to a research project.
[Loong time lurker here. Couldn&#x27;t help myself from commenting on this one.]

Phenomenal undertaking! When you say &quot;Shouldn&#x27;t be owned by any one company&quot; does that imply that these releases will all be open-source? Do you have plans to develop a new form of IP licensing to go along with the research?

I agree, making the world a better place doesn&#x27;t pay well. Screwing the world over pays really well.I remember when I was in school people would often say that to get money, you have to find something you love doing and the money would come by itself. I don&#x27;t know if that used to be true, but that is certainly no longer the case.In general, doing good is at odds with earning money.

I&#x27;d love to see research on shaking up governments and the existing political process with technology.Now, there are flaws to the use of electronic voting systems and the level of transparency required, but that is not what I mean.What I mean is that every time I have run a large community the social structure that naturally emerges is not the one that we all allow ourselves to be governed by.I&#x27;d like to research how tech could be used to empower lay citizens to shape their society in the way that they imagine it should be.For example; I was interested in Google&#x27;s internal experiment with voting transparency and delegation, and how it allows for a different kind of inclusive democratic process that isn&#x27;t reflected in our existing systems.One of the moonshot goals of the forum&#x2F;community startup I created was to start to provide tools to support communities that shaped their own political and social structures, with an express goal of training them in the possibilities of being engaged in their society and then letting them use the tools to shape the real world in the same way that they shaped online societies.Simply, I&#x27;d love to see research and later innovation into how societies and democratic functions could be.When we talk about changing the world, I really mean it.

Absolutely fantastic! It&#x27;s nice to see Sam et al putting their money to good use.I really hope that we see some development of new types of programming languages. We seem to be stuck in a rut with procedural&#x2F;OO&#x2F;mostly-functional languages. Some research around flow based programming, especially related to machine learning. I can&#x27;t help thinking we&#x27;re missing something here...

To be honest, the freedom to fail alone would make a huge difference. On one hand there&#x27;s a lot of freedom for intellectual growth in academia - in the last few months I&#x27;ve used deep learning, assembled hardware under a microscope, performed neurosurgery and genetic engineering (this is somewhat standard for my field). On the other hand, I make less than I did as a new cable guy, won&#x27;t make more for 10 years, and every postdoc and phd student in my lab works 7 days &#x2F; week standard. And if I fail, I will probably be done career-wise. LOTS of talented people leave because they see startups as the &#x27;safer&#x27; bet - at least if your startup fails you&#x27;re not doomed.

I agree with this. The most interesting thing I got out of Paula Stephan&#x27;s How Economic Shapes Science is that a few years&#x27; back, the NIH basically doubled its research funding and all that happened was a post-doc bubble and university admin hoovering up the money to build buildings.

I agree that academic science has problems, but YCR isn&#x27;t going to have any impact on academic research, funding nor publications. My guess is that YCR will attempt to be a mini-Xerox PARC: 20 people working on interdisciplinary stuff in CS. It&#x27;ll be fun, but it&#x27;ll be small.

To answer your first question,
1. they can move much faster than academic research. More money in basic research isn&#x27;t going to fix the antiquated process in which academics live. It&#x27;s also not going to help researchers learn how to budget properly, or learn to manage people. So that alone is a value add. A 1% increase in gov spending simply adds money without fixing a problem that currently exists....not really going to make a difference in my opinion(PhD research scientist)

&gt; In my field (geoscience) there are boundless slopes of fresh, trackless powder in the mountains of computational geoscience just waiting to get skied.I need to steal that quote from you...

One comparative advantage that comes to mind is the institutional knowledge of computational and analytics systems. A lot of computational science is still done with a FORTRAN mindset (if not actual code), whereas faster, lighter, dare I say more agile approaches to simulation and data mining could be much better.Similarly, although I wouldn&#x27;t guess is what YCR is thinking because it doesn&#x27;t have the same cachet (though I really don&#x27;t know what YCR thinks) is building tools for science. In my field (geoscience) there are boundless slopes of fresh, trackless powder in the mountains of computational geoscience just waiting to get skied. Building tools to do, say, probabilistic graphical modeling of stratigraphic systems requires approaching a traditionally intuitive and descriptive science with a much more formal and precise mindset and re-casting a lot of ideas and methods, while at the same time keeping everything accessible for those without the requisite background in probability or graphs... To me this gets closer to the real roots of science than a lot of what gets funded or makes headlines, but won&#x27;t by itself get funded or make headlines (until you build it and sell it).

I imagine researchers in YCR will have way fewer administrative obligations than a researcher at a University. No classes to teach, no committees to sit on, no students to act as an amateur psychologist to, no grants to apply for (although this could be a disadvantage - the process of writing a grant often forces ideas to crystalize).

For one, it can be leaner; tenure-line faculty to student ratios are unchanged while adminstrator-to-student ratios more than doubled in the last 25 years. &quot;There are now two nonacademic employees at public and two and a half at private universities and colleges for every one full-time, tenure-track member of the faculty.&quot; Yet we have to take out our own garbage.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;necir.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;06&#x2F;new-analysis-shows-problematic-boom-in-higher-ed-administrators&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;necir.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;06&#x2F;new-analysis-shows-problematic-b...</a>

&gt; We think research institutions can be better than they are today.I hope you&#x27;ll expand on this. Is there something that YCR can do that academic research can&#x27;t do? You might have more impact if you use that money to influence US and EU gov&#x27;t to invest more in basic research. A 1% increase in annual gov&#x27;t funding will be vastly larger than YCR&#x27;s total budget.The Gates Foundation is tackling difficult health issues that aren&#x27;t profitable for companies and neglected by poor governments. They&#x27;ve found an underserved gap. What&#x27;s the gap that YCR is uniquely suited to tackle?

Wow, YC is realizing a dream of mine. Congratulations, it is a great idea!

Sorry if my comment came across as needlessly pessimistic. I was super-excited when Elon Musk made the Tesla &quot;open-source&quot; announcement, as I was yesterday when I read this.That comment was just me trying to apply my meager knowledge of startup economics here :)

Doesn&#x27;t Elon Musk encouraging other people to use Tesla&#x27;s battery IP help drive the electric vehicle market to maturity faster, creating more opportunity for Tesla to succeed?The market is still the market. Not sure we should look this gift horse in the mouth. George R. Price figured out altruism can be reduced a math equation decades ago, it doesn&#x27;t mean we can&#x27;t embrace the good that comes out of decisions like this. :)

YC startups don&#x27;t grow on a tree in the YC garden and YC is what most startups want to get into. It makes much more sense to make that research widely available, chances are good for YC that the startups that do something useful with it will join YC at a later point. Even if they don&#x27;t, a growing technology industry helps everyone, YC included.

If I were to hazard a guess. the equity is intended to make working as a researcher similarly attractive to the equity grants available when going to work for a startup. Given the diversity of YC&#x27;s portfolio it&#x27;s probably much more likely to create wealth than any single startup. To me, if YC is creating a research group for the long term, then long term financial stability for the researchers is probably the way to go.

The difference in scale is 4-5 orders of magnitude here, probably more. And at such different scales, I don&#x27;t see how the same rules apply.For instance, trying to increase the value of USD with your work when billions of people on the planet are doing the same is basically impossible and unpredictable even if you&#x27;re a great researcher &#x2F; business leader &#x2F; whatever, to say the least. The same is not the case with YC equity, where you can expect, with a fairly high probability, a significant increase in your equity if your research contributes hundreds of millions of dollars worth to a YC startup.I&#x27;m not trying to be poke holes in the idea or anything like that, just genuinely wondering -- and the analogy to USD doesn&#x27;t seem like the right answer.

&gt; Won&#x27;t giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held?That&#x27;s equivalent to saying &quot;won&#x27;t paying in U.S. dollars to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits the U.S. Federal Reserve directly and hence increases the value of the U.S. dollars held?&quot;Obviously not the same scale, but you get where I&#x27;m going with this. Indirect incentives don&#x27;t quite work that way.

Surely I&#x27;m missing something here. Won&#x27;t giving YC equity to these researchers (who are working not-for-profit and releasing IP freely) incentivize research that benefits YC startups directly and hence increases the value of the equity held? Can someone explain why not? Honest question.

This sounds like a great idea, and I can&#x27;t help but think of this as a very &quot;Valley&quot; take on Renaissance-style patronage.Here&#x27;s hoping this effort has similarly transformative results!

As a researcher, this is very exciting news. I can&#x27;t wait to see what areas of research YC will be directing their efforts towards. I hope the world of genomics&#x2F;genetics gets a nod!

Love the epic lack of perspective in this thread

If you&#x27;re into any field of applied AI such as Machine Learning, you&#x27;ll have no trouble transitioning from industry to research and vice versa. It is a very flexible skill set and there is a lot of demand for it.Just go the best university you can and take as many ML and AI courses possible, there really isn&#x27;t much you can do wrong.Good luck.

Hi. Seventeen-year old high schooler here, I love this idea.
(@sama, anyone else behind YCR):All my life I had wanted to go into industry, follow that classic Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel dream that many CS High Schoolers go into.But recently, I got into research. The CollegeBoard opened up a class called AP Research I am now in, and I spent my last summer researching Machine Learning at my local private university. I was surprised by how much I loved it, the math behind it fascinates me (context: am currently taking Adv. Diff Eq and Linear Algebra my Senior Year.)I am now trying my own Deep Learning algorithms and working on my paper. I have always been conflicted between industry and academia, since all of my fellow HS CS friends just want to found companies in industry. Things such as YCR make research a bigger dream for youth, whom I would currently argue are too under-exposed to it. It just doesn&#x27;t seem as glamorous to them.Thank you for YCR, it reminds me of the cool things research can do. I can&#x27;t wait to hopefully apply one day.

Will YC Research only focus on applied research ideas? Specifically, I&#x27;d like to know about whether or not researchers in pure math, theoretic cs, theoretical physics, etc will have a place at YC Research.

This seems weird. They&#x27;ll fund open ended research and then what? Are there any metrics to guide the outcomes? Why would the average super rich guy want to put any money into this?

Are there plans for peer review and highly rigorous verification of results prior to publication?Hopefully YCR busts some of the myths perpetuated by industry.

My academic friends and I are constantly talking about how we need startups to counter&#x2F;disintermediate the constantly growing administrative overhead at universities.  Without viable alternatives there is just no pressure to keep administrative costs from balooning.  This is a great start and I hope to see more like it.

Amazing! This may have far greater impact than all of YC&#x27;s billion dollar unicorns in terms of making the world better!

Would you be willing to let someone just participate? I have multiple lines of research and my physics background allows me to reach further into biology and computation than most biology types. And for a variety of reasons I don&#x27;t quite have the same funding problems most people have, but I would really like to work with the groups you are able to put together. I would be happy to fill out the same application.Your log files should be able to unmask me but for additional reasons I&#x27;d rather not publicly associate my claims above with my identity.