not everyone should be a founder. one quarrel i have with SF culture is that it pushes everyone to found a company, when 95% of people would be better off joining a hot startup / big company. think deeply about your personality & ambitions before making that big of a leap

to be very clear, the point of this tweet was not to incentivize people to market their RL startups, it was to make you think. they aren't simple. these are research problems that require months of thought and likely won't be "solved" any time soon. they are fundamental to RSI.

sparked from a conversation i had earlier today: unless you have some sort of moat to the space (i.e. worked at a lab + have some deep speciality in a niche space), or have worked in data for > 1 year and understand the space, it's unclear to me that starting a data company right now is a good idea, for the following reasons: (1) arguably the most competitive space to be in right now. although no one's really figured it out save for a few vendors in niches like code, etc, it is unbelievably hard to make good data. pretty much every benchmark released has some kind of issues, quality checks at most vendors are subpar because they don't understand what to check for. just because labs may buy what you're selling, doesn't mean the data itself is good lol. synthetic data is interesting but it's very, very difficult to do without creating bad data. i have only seen a few people do synth well, and they've been in the data space since its conception. (2) if you're convinced data is the place to be, and you NEED to found in data, i would just join a pre-existing company. selling to labs is increasingly becoming a game of who-knows-who, and labs are rightfully becoming more skeptical of new vendors (considering most people are producing slop). breaking into this industry when there are so many dominant players is difficult without having a moat like the one mentioned above. instead, if you're convinced you have the necessary skills and want to print cash, it's better to join a company that can give you the upside, without wasting the time to build the relationships and burning months. if this is your plan feel free to reach out and i can connect you with a company that fits the profile you're looking for/help you broker. (3) if you're young, although it may seem like a cash grab, i don't think you learn that much being a data monkey outside of data-specific problems. the exposure is minimal and if you're doing it with contractors, you are inherently an operator, not a researcher/engineer. the caveat to this is companies that are doing novel data types and are pure engineers, but even amongst those, if data is the only end result of the company, you are not learning that much beyond the walls of data. this could be your calling, but <25yo who want to be researchers, this doesn't seem like an ideal path. naturally, i think there are always exceptions to this rule, but i've been hit up by so many YC companies or friends of friends who've founded in the space and pivoted out after 6 months. save your time, join a company, learn from the amazing engineers you're surrounded by, not everyone needs to found, especially in this space.