Slashdot Mirror
Willow Garage Founder Scott Hassan Aims To Build a Startup Village
Tekla Perry (3034735) writes "Scott Hassan, founder of robotic research lab Willow Garage, is behind a large real estate development in Menlo Park, Calif. He reportedly plans to create an incubator village with 18,500 square meters of workspace and another 18,500 square meters of living space on a 30,000 square meter site, combining the advantages of a garage startup environment (what could be more convenient than working where you live) and an incubator (access to other smart entrepreneurs and ideas)." Would you want to live in this kind of environment?
Except that you would rarely see new people.
More innovation happens by accidents, mistakes and misunderstandings. Or the ever silly questions of the newcomers.
Without inflow of new people, the "village" would suffer mental rot pretty quickly.
In a sense, a maker fairs are already better "startup villages", IMO.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
That's an appealing idea, but I don't think it's true. I've read before that innovation generally comes from the experts in a field and the "happy accident" type of innovation from naive newcomers is more myth than reality.
Not in my experience, though.
But of course professional pride kicks in even before the first round of applause fades, and after that it is "of course it was very very hard work!!!"
Then again, I probably define innovation very differently than someone focused on an incubator village and start-ups. I'm thinking more along the lines of Bell Labs [...]
That's precisely the type of innovation I was talking about. (Facebook thingies happen by throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. When lots of people do it simultaneously, there is a chance that some of it sticks.)
The thing about big R&D centers is that nobody really sees what's going on behind the closed doors. Behind the closed doors in the most "productive" labs you would find chaos and disorder - precisely the environment where errors and accidents occur. But it certainly takes dedication (to field or problem) to actually make out of that a "Eureka!" moment.
Otherwise, if innovation was that easy to achieve by simply good planning, then it would have been done a long time ago.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Assuming this project succeeded; I can only imagine that this would be another center of self absorbed web techs and recent college grads. People aiming to make 'apps' that will 'change the face of X' and 'rethink how we approach Y'. Yet, these 'apps', will offer half baked solutions to problems that were solved before but now require you to login to a site to work with.
I could just be jealous of high pay for awful work though.
Eat sleep die
I'm working at home and I think it can easily lead to burnout. I need to figure out some kind of mental partitioning scheme. PLUS being surrounded by workmates 24/7? Yikes.
I know startups aren't exactly paragons of balanced living, but burnout is already a problem with them. Perhaps the physical use of space will help avoid it.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I'm seeing a lot of people getting into startups, not only in the US but the rest of the world. My facebook feed is filled with my friends founding a startup. And some of my previous bosses are funding startups.
However, the problem I am seeing though, is most of these startups is not the next Tesla or doing something innovative, they are just trying to create a new social media app or some new game. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but my opinion is that startups should be about trying to solve a problem. Just like friendster, it got created because the guy just broke up with his girl and wants a way to easily find dates.
On a side note, given this flood of startups, why is it still hard to find a software development job that gives a decent pay? Can it be that these new startup trend is just another way to get people to write code real cheap?
I'm imagining this scenario.
Start Up Boss : Hey you want to join a startup that is like mashable but only better?
Guy : Yeah cool... <and starts coding some HTML5 stuff and JavaScript.> Here boss all done!
Start Up Boss : Wow cool. You know, it would be better if we can integrate this with some legacy code. Since, you are so awesome, can you write me some services to communicate with our mainframe application preferably using json.
Guy: Yeah I can do that... <starts keyboarding some codes>.. ALL DONE BOSS!!! Take note, I've done all this stuff and got time for 2 hours of sleep. I'm really awesome.
Start Up Boss : Cool! Here's your first month's paycheck for 2K. However, there's some new direction that our startup is taking and we need to let you go.
While there are many things about startups that are attractive, in the end, it's just a job, not a lifestyle. It's best to work to live, not live to work. These efforts to create all inclusive environments for programmers will just lead to burnout when the bubble pops. And yes, it is a bubble. We don't need yet another mobile social enabled whatsit pieced together quickly.
If this was an environment to create new formal verification tools or other revolutionary software tooling, then I'd be interested. Right now, it seems we are going a bit backwards. It's harder to create a nice UI on the web than it was on the desktop more than ten years ago. In the last few years, this is the first time that my job is becoming harder. For the longest time, editors got better, debuggers got better, frameworks got better and there were more tools for the job than before. Now, there's no real commercial breakthroughs in static analysis, security, formal verification, domain specific languages. It's all just mobile apps with no depth. Sure, this has driven some new useful stuff (say, Hadoop), but when big data is just for marketing and ads, what's the point?
Yeah college, if they pay your rent and take all of your ideas for themselves.
VCs have finally figured out how to treat technology and creativity like a company town from the 1890s.
[...] comes from the tried and true cycle of hypothesis --> test --> evaluate.
Ah. The science. The scientific process. But science is precisely the example of the branch with closed environment, discrimination and elitism, which abhors and rejects any innovation or change. Unless it comes from a prof with a fat grant, of course.
That's why, for example, computer science, effectively branched off and doesn't use the scientific process. Likewise, most of the industries: the scientific process is way too expensive and way too wasteful when applied to tangible things. Some areas do it because all low hanging fruits are already gone and there is simply no alternative. But again, due to the costs, it is applied in a very very limited fashion.
In the end, in this particular context, it is OK to ignore science because your definition of innovation is simply different. Heck, you measure "innovation" in number of published papers.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.