>Energy, AI, Biotech, and Drug design If you want to advance these fields throw ...

bduerst · on Sept 12, 2014

Are you implying that these fields are only pure science? I'm just curious.

jjoonathan · on Sept 12, 2014

No, but universities are (and always were) highly effective "startup accelerators" for science/engineering disciplines.

The thing YCombinator (and its ilk) did differently was to realize that software was atypical of science/engineering fields in that it didn't benefit as much from many of the services offered by universities, so you could strip out most of the "cruft" and form a "lean" university that was just as effective (more effective, in hindsight).

When you bring the focus back to science/engineering, suddenly the "cruft" doesn't seem so pointless. If you try to build an accelerator aimed at traditional science/engineering problems, you re-invent the university.

What is that "cruft"?

* Formal training and apprenticeships from experts in various fields

* Many-million-dollar macroscopic and microscopic fab facilities (shared but not specialized)

-- Fancy microscopes (optical, electron, etc)

-- Fancy spectrometers

-- Nanofab junk (mask writers, aligners, chemical benches, CVD machines, etc)

-- Chemistry junk (NMR machines, MS machines, Chromatography machines, etc)

-- Physics junk (telescopes, accelerators, etc)

-- Engineering junk ($50k oscilloscopes and logic probes, test machines, FPGAs, CAD/CAE software, expensive simulation software)

* ~$1MM-ish labs (highly specialized but shared less)

-- Strange chemicals, gasses, and the tools required to deal with them

-- Strange biologicals (animal lines, cell lines, specialty constructs, reagents)

-- Fume hoods, centrifuges, schlenk lines, etc

-- 3D printers, milling machines, highly specialized fabrication and diagnostic apparati that are custom-built and one-of-a-kind

* Library/journal access

* Connections to cheap labor (no comment)

* Connections to funding for both blue-sky research

* Connections to funding for seed-stage commercial prospects

YC specializes on the last bullet point and mixes in business training. It could certainly have something to offer to startups in science/engineering fields (especially if their ultimate product was software), but we shouldn't forget that it has relatively stiff competition once it starts wandering outside of its core competency into more traditional fields.