@jerryjliu0: It is really hard to combine research and product. A lot of the traditional wisdom in building product at a startup don…

It is really hard to combine research and product.

A lot of the traditional wisdom in building product at a startup don’t apply for research. Building pure product requires scrappily building MVPs, iterating as quickly as possible on customer feedback, and being able to change direction in order to align within ICP needs. The product that satisfies customer needs doesn’t necessarily need the latest scientific discovery.

Research requires longer-term thinking. It requires dedicated focus time for deep exploration, synthesis, and experimentation in order to iterate on a deep piece of tech. It requires a longer-term bet and can’t be disrupted on a whim by customer feedback. To some extent in order to do successful research, you have to basically ignore most/all customer feedback in order to focus on a core set of research goals. You care about general insights, not overfitting to a specific datapoint/bespoke need. In a vacuum where you only do research, the risk of course is that you create a beautiful piece of tech that doesn’t have PMF.

We’ve experienced this firsthand at @llama_index, where we have to do applied research to drive the frontiers of document understanding. But that means we have to simultaneously balance a wide volume of customer needs with a focused effort on improving the core pareto frontier of cost-accuracy.

Robert Yang (@GuangyuRobert): Sharing the biggest mistake we made building a neo-lab: Confusing research with product

It’s been 3 years since we started @Fundamental and 1 year since we launched @tryshortcutai . We made lots of common startup mistakes including hiring too fast, too loose w/ the purse, losing