Enzidia: What we are about -- To those who are interested in joining the force
The recent progress of our startup, Enzidia, has been summarized in this post.?I share here how I started, how we started, some reflections, the envisioned culture code of Enzidia, and the type of talents we are looking for to join our force.
My observation is that the leader of an organization is often the biggest factor for how the organization behaves. I am the one leading Enzidia, for better or worse, so for anyone who’s exploring whether to invest time or money into Enzidia, it should be of interest to know how I approach things, which means a lot for how we approach things. My face probably doesn’t convey that much information, so I choose to just lay some important things out in words. Well, one thing about me for now is that I write.?
It turned out to be long, like a minibook, so I don’t expect it to get popular, but it’s not intended for everyone anyway. I’ve done my part :)
Table of contents:
A. How I started
B. How we started
C. Some reflections?
Reflection 1. Change.?
Reflection 2. How to know we are doing the right things.?
Reflection 3. Doing. – “Change” revisited
Reflection 4. Academia (& big corporations) vs Startup
Reflection 5. To those who are considering being an entrepreneur
Reflection 6. How to view “failures”
Reflection 7. Hypes vs the real thing
Appendix 1. Enzidia’s culture
Appendix 2. Selected books and resources I benefited from
Appendix 3. If you are interested in contributing your force to Enzidia
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A. How I started
June 20th was the day the idea of a startup crystalized. Before then, when someone asked me about my career plan, my answer had always been, “ideally, a professor leading a group that does interdisciplinary research, addressing real-world sustainability problems and spinning out companies”.?
Then I changed my mind. It was motivated, initially, by the sad realization that academia is not a good place to realize the potential of disruptive technologies. — That system has become misguided by outdated superficial metrics, which sometimes profoundly hinders effective innovation that addresses real-world needs. It was an observation I had had for some time, but it became so tangible in my specific case. (It may still be an OK place for coming up with disruptive ideas, simply because there aren’t many better places.) I won’t get into too many details, except to say that I came to some ideas that have game-changing potential, and I wanted to execute them with independence (so that I don’t have to ask for permission to do many things, because there are many things I want to do and I don’t like delays due to bureaucracy); I didn’t meet any scientific objection to my ideas, but I was met with a lot of reluctance for my request for independence, the reason being that I’m just a postdoc. (I’m not pointing fingers at any particular person, but blaming the system with its undesirable norms.)
It’s one of those things in life that felt bad at first but turned out to be a blessing once you turn your face. Once I started examining the path of entrepreneurship, I became so energized and there was no going back. I realized that a startup is the world’s best way to realize the impact of disruptive ideas, and I had been foolish for not having known this all along.?
On the personal side, something else gave me the feeling of a fish finding water and a peg finding its hole. See, doing research and innovation hasn’t been much of my end goal, as much as I enjoy it. Fixing the world’s environmental and climate problems is, ever since the start of my teenage years. That’s what I chose to be the mission of my life. I decided on the research path, after years of deliberation, simply because that was where I saw I could make the biggest difference and what I could enjoy more peace doing. I designed a grand plan in high school, that I would make some breakthroughs in my research career, and with that I would have a voice to go into society and change the bigger picture. At some point, well into my research career, I stopped thinking much of it (partly because I wasn’t doing so well compared with many peers, which was partly because I prioritized learning new things, and refused to specialize to publish papers), even though the path has been going on as planned, in the grand scope of things.?
To change the world, I knew I had to understand how the world works, how human beings work, and be able to work with it. So I learned and did a lot that had nothing to do with research: taking extra courses and reading books in political philosophy (how things should be), social psychology (how human beings are like), and neuroscience (how human beings work), and in general learning about the big picture of how the world works; doing a minor in public administration, leading a college organization, taking side jobs that involved a lot of social interactions with all walks of people. None of that has much of a place on my academic CV, but it turned out that they come in pretty handy when building an entrepreneurial venture.?
(A side note from here: being a natural introvert, I initially thought I lacked social abilities. Then I realized that was something I could quickly gain and do well with, when the job of leading a volunteer organization fell on my shoulders (because no one else wanted to take it). I grew the team. We did a lot of great things, and even got well-recognized. The teammates liked and respected me. After that I still chose not to continue that social route, because I had to do a lot of bureaucratic reporting in that job, which felt draining, and I wanted to live my life without that feeling.)
Also because of my guiding direction, I was rarely a person that would go with the flow. That meant I had to go against the flow quite a lot along the way. And it was a long way, starting as a little boy in a rural village in the then-most populous country, my biggest privilege being a children’s encyclopedia from my uncle that I could almost recite word-by-word at the time. Going against the flow meant occasional setbacks, the kind that send you to the bottom. There were several phases in my life so far, where the situations felt like I was at the bottom of the abyss surrounded by darkness. In those months it was impossible to see how I could still get to make the difference that I set off to make. The most recent one was during my PhD phase, where at one point it was more likely that I would go back to my hometown and find a job as a high school teacher than continue the research path (to be an MIT professor). Well, as Charlie Munger said, sometimes you just gotta soldier through. Miraculously I did, each time, in large part thanks to the guiding direction that pulled me forward one more step (sometimes with warm helping hands). And each time, it turned out that the bottom of the abyss had a hidden door leading to a gold mine for life.?
As it also turned out, already being tested a few times, I feel quite ready to face the uncertainty of a startup journey. I tend to believe that the first step to being fearless is to figure out what’s the worst that can happen, and figure out that it’s something you can live with. I’ve seen the bottom a few times. The worst that happened were some tough feelings, which come and then go; and some longer time to get back on “track”, which is also fine because it often means a lot more learning than with a smooth path, and likely a brand new and better track than I ever imagined. With fear out of the way, you just go forward to give your best shot, and see if you can’t move the world.?
When I read and learned about entrepreneurial people, the kind that led breakthroughs in science, engineering, and business, I found myself constantly resonating with their stories and personalities, things that I felt lonely about (near the end of this article you’ll find a list of the books and resources so you can also learn about them). For examples, all of them are non-conformist, even rebellious. They tend not to work well under a typical boss, and many of them explicitly said that being their own boss was a major drive for their journeys. They tend to be deep and big-picture thinkers, and tend to be generalist rather than only a specialist. They embody both tenacity and mental flexibility. Apart from the other things, I am one of the most tenacious people I’ve ever met, and I’ve seen resilience in me that sometimes surprises myself when I look back. And I do have flexibility regarding the path, without losing sight of the direction or lapsing on conscience. All this, of course, sounds very self-congratulatory to say about oneself, unless you realize that such people don’t always have a good time in everyday life. They are kind of crazy. They are misfits. – Until they find themselves embracing craziness as their identity by doing crazy stuff like starting a startup.?
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B. How we started
As they say, the team matters no less for a startup’s success than any of the other factors. But it did take me only less than one week to build the founding team, because I knew who I could count on, and I guess they also knew they could count on me.?
Prof. Alex Nielsen is our Founding Business and Scientific Advisor. I had admired Alex’s works for more than a year before I ever had a meeting with him. In fact, whenever my conversations with colleagues had Alex brought up, I would find myself saying, “I wanna work with him!” His application-driven approach to research, which naturally also means a multidisciplinary approach that doesn’t show addiction to any particular tool, was so refreshing to me whenever I heard his talks. And of course, he doesn’t let the research sit idle in the lab. He had spun out three startup companies. Fortunately, he also liked me the first time we got to talk. Once I explained my journey and projects, he said, “I like your thinking, -- you start with the problems”. That’s of course what I would say to him as well. I didn’t need to do much convincing for Alex to join on board as my founding advisor. His help has continuously exceeded my expectations, with his deep insights and broad knowledge gathered through decades of wide-ranging experience in industry, academia, and entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial spirit, thoughtfulness, open mind, generosity, and kindness that Alex embodies makes him one of the role models I’ve personally worked with.?
What this team has in common is our down-to-earth truthfulness, our altruistic and sky-high ambitions, our curiosity to never stop learning and wondering, our high energy to move forward and get things done, our strong sense of justice, and the empathy and trust that bind us together.?
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C. Some reflections?
I’m pretty fresh on the entrepreneurial journey. So some of the reflections below are more for my own reminders as the journey goes on. That said, I’ve gone a long way by overcoming a lot, and I’ve been very deliberate on learning, so I do have some lessons I want to share with my peers and younger friends.?
All that I write below has been said by wiser (and older) people before, whether I gained them first through experience or from intellectual learning. That said, the people who say them have always been the minority, so I can’t bet that you’ve heard them. So I’ll add one more voice to the minority.?
Reflection 1. Change.?
If you feel out of place when you try to do the right thing, maybe it’s not the right place for you.?
The world is very big. There are many different places in the world. There are many different cultures in different geographical locations. Even at the same location, there are different organizations functioning with completely different principles.?
In some places, telling the inconvenient truth can get you in trouble. In other places, doing so may be applauded. In yet other places, telling the truth and pointing out issues whenever you see them are a requirement, and failing to be straightforward is what can get you in trouble.?
In certain societies, jungle rules are the rules, and people are insecure all the time. Since everyone has to prioritize fending for themselves, they don’t have the brain space to focus on altruistic things like our collective sustainability, and are averse to taking career risks unless they are already wealthy. And they think this is how it would always be, since it seems so natural.?
In other societies, caring about one another is the norm, and people live their life in peace and harmony. There is a strong safety net if one is or becomes vulnerable, so that one can always maintain their dignity, and have the chance to bounce back if they encounter setbacks. So people can safely prioritize being altruistic, and can take career risks without dreading the chance of falling. And they think this is how things should always be, since it seems so reasonable.?
When we are in a certain situation, we tend to think that? “this is how the world works”. I had those experiences, until each time I got out of the situation and into a different one, and marveled at how different things can be – when I changed from one lab to another, one research institute to another, one country to another, and one career path to another.?
We, of course, need to acknowledge that humans can find things to complain about in any situation. Nothing is perfect, and we tend to want more. But there is a difference between some things being challenging, which is OK/great, and some principles being corrupt, which is not OK.?
Ray Dalio says, “Don’t settle.” Steve Jobs quoted, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”. That’s what change means. That’s what learning new things means. Yuval Noah Harari’s observation, after he examined the past and future of human history, is that the world is only going to change at a faster pace, and the way to deal with it is by “reinventing ourselves again and again”.?
Change is never comfortable. It’s up to you how you want your life to be lived. One of the most profound things I learned in neuroscience is how malleable (changeable/adaptable) our brains are. Our brains totally can change throughout life.? It’s a matter of some time for rewiring. Discomfort is the signal that it’s happening. Thus, as long as you have a moderate sense of control over your life, discomfort is something to be excited about.
It is amazing to realize that humans have been so adaptable through the millennia and through different environments without much Darwinian evolution (yes, it is a short geological time, but it has been very different environments. Imagine people with the same brains not having the internet ten thousand years ago! What were they doing?). The reason for this adaptability without Darwinian evolution is that evolution figured out this mechanism of adaptation without requiring death, called the human brain. It is like an artificial neural network which isn’t constructed by hard-coded rules or commands, but by adaptability and learning mechanisms (only that it is a real neural network.)
It takes a few days to a few months or longer for our brains to become used to new realities, accepting them as how the world works, regardless of how small or big the changes are. It is amazing how this always happens, and it is helpful to know that it will. Our instincts are like driving on icy roads: the speed or direction mostly doesn’t have much of an effect, but changing the speed or direction has a big effect, and the bigger the change of speed or direction, the bigger the effect, – according to our instincts. But those are the stupid instincts. In terms of real effects, the effect of change itself is short-lived, and the steady-state constant of speed and direction is what matters for the long term.?
What is also embedded in this discussion is, what matters is what you do, not where you are. The reality of human psychology is, like it or not, that we get used to everything. So there is no position in terms of status or possession that can give us sustained joy. Moving toward something is where the joy is. “The journey is the reward.”?
BTW, a caution about the dopamine system: don’t aim to maximize pleasure. That tends to get people in serious misery. In examples I see, aiming for meaning beyond oneself has always fared better in the long term.
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Reflection 2. How to know we are doing the right things.?
Not all care about doing the right things. Some do care, and they even try to find out. For those who have the ambition to do the right things, there are two major hurdles to be wary about, one is others, the second is yourself.?
One of the things I did to learn about the world was to read a thick textbook called “Social Psychology (Myers)”. I’ll roughly quote some experiments to make the points.?
2-A. We tend to follow others.?
In an experiment, imagine we are to answer some simple questions with a group of others in a room. If we hear all the others give the wrong answer to an obvious question, more likely than not, we are going to change our answer to give the same wrong one when it’s our turn. Our mind would even convince itself that this answer is the right one. We have hard-wired tendencies to follow the perceived majority around us.?
We especially tend to follow those with perceived authority. The Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment are famous examples: most subjects followed orders, no matter how horrendous the orders were. (The extent of the results was later challenged, but the effect is undeniable.)
We have ample such examples if we just look at history. A nation of people could be asked to follow orders or norms, no matter how unthinkable those orders or norms are by today’s standards. The orders of the Church to kill those who spread what we call truth today, the orders of Nazi to kill what we call equal human beings today, or the norms of a whole society to enslave those who look different. And we shouldn’t think we are so superior now. Our human brains didn’t evolve. We have the same potential as we did.?
The good news, to those who have the ambition to do the right thing, is that not all did follow the orders or norms, both in the experiments and in history. The bad news is that they were the minority, and they had to endure a lot. See, as the wise have discovered, we didn’t evolve to be truth-seeking animals. We evolved to be social animals, which means conforming. – Those who insisted on different ideas often got killed or banished. In today’s world, we don’t kill anymore, but being different does still have its cost: at least with popularity on the outside, and with uncomfortable feelings that our brains were evolved to make on the inside.?
Thus, if you want to do the right things, you’d better think twice about conforming, which is the easier and more comfortable thing to do, but has poor correlation with being the right thing to do. And if you are an entrepreneur, you might have to do the right thing. Conforming makes you average. Average startups die. Being different is what leads to the rare successes. Enjoy the comfort of conformity only when the stakes are low enough.?
Warren Buffet quoted his mentor Ben Graham: “You are not right or wrong because 1000 people agree with you. You are not right or wrong because 1000 people disagree with you. You are right because your facts and reasoning are right.” If the majority of people were wrong through history, the majority of people today, which is tomorrow’s history, aren’t necessarily right either. – If you care about finding the right.?
The greatest entrepreneurs are not that much smarter than the rest. But they do have minds that are much clearer to fend off our instincts to conform, in the quest to do the right things based on the full picture of truth. And the entrepreneurial path is one that works the best for doing the right things: it minimizes the cost of doing the right thing by 1) minimizing hierarchy and 2) the expectation to conform, since being different is the expectation, not the anomaly.?
2-B. We tend to follow our previous self.?
In another experiment, each of two groups of people were given a notion and a supporting story, about whether it’s better for a firefighter to be cautious or adventurous. Most agreed with the notion they were given, and were asked to explain the reasoning for why so. Then they were told that the supporting story was made up. The factual foundation for the general statements was gone. Well, when asked, most people still chose to stick with the notions that they were given (and internalized through reasoning to be their own). That is, people chose to stick with two contrary convictions without factual basis.?
Not all did. I guess some were OK to be wishy-washy and say they don’t have enough information. Some were even able to accept the possibility that they’d been foolish.?
If you want to be right, don’t care about how things look. Don’t care about how you look. You want to be right, not to appear right. That means being inconclusive when you don’t have enough information, asking seriously how you might be wrong, and telling people, especially yourself, that you were wrong when you were wrong.??
Society is stuck in ridiculous situations because we succumb to social pressure and ego attachment. The world is moved forward by those who stick to doing the right things against the tide, the tide outside or within.?
2-C. How to know what’s right.?
Learning and thinking, or “facts and reasoning”, are how we get to Truth.??
2-C1. Learning is the way forward.?
Gather facts. This is as simple as it sounds, and as time-consuming as it gets. It’s better to assume that you don’t yet have enough facts, so that you keep seeking more from different sources. Sometimes the more distant (in many dimensions) the better, because they contain the most new information to you.?
Go beyond facts, and learn deep knowledge to develop systematic understanding of things. I’ve seen people who know many pieces of information, but would avoid anything that involves more than two factors to understand. There are numerous facts in the world, but limited numbers of fundamental principles. Complexity is a product of several things interacting with one another based on simple principles, and complexity is the general state of the world. Always try to see the full picture – the ability to do this is surprisingly rare these days. Failing to do so means you can’t tell what is important, and you can’t be sure that your solution doesn’t create imbalance in the bigger system.?
Regarding who to learn from, one level of answer is everyone. Everyone knows something that you don’t know. The second level of answer is to go beyond the circle of people around you. Learn from the people who have had true successes, even if they are no longer alive. Read their stories and hear their lessons. You realize that they often had to be different from all those around them, which means that by chance, you shouldn’t expect to have met people who are like them. It is thus great to have books and the internet so that you can learn from them anyway.?
2-C2. Dedicate time to think. We don’t use the thinking part of our brains nearly enough. That’s the conclusion of social and behavioral psychology. There’s a lot of potential for seeing things more clearly and making better decisions simply by giving us the space to do so.
Think while our brain is well-functioning. That means time when we are not lying in bed trying to sleep. I take a lot of walks these days. Steve Jobs was famous for his meditations and walking meetings. Ray Dalio and Yuval Harari are big advocates of meditation. Jeff Bezos emphasized getting good sleep for making high-quality decisions. The alternative of not thinking deliberately is following others or our instincts and emotions. Studies of humans have shown numerous times that our instincts and emotions are not reliable.?
2-C3. Never stop questioning yourself.?
If you are happy to just be a talker, you can be happy to live with validations only. If you are a doer, seek criticism. Ask others where you might be wrong. If you don’t do this, you’ll have results to tell you, which is more costly. Others’ input may not be the right answer either, but you have to listen to and hear them anyway. More than half may not mean much eventually, but without living with that half, you won’t get to hear the other half, or even 1%, that saves your venture. Try to see why others may be right, then why they might be wrong.?
Ask yourself how you might be wrong. One can ask a question rhetorically, or they can ask seriously. I mean serious consideration here. This means considering how the alternative scenarios or theories might be right. Before things happen, all predictions are hypotheses, and you’ll have to be open to possibilities.?
Seemingly ironically, the harder you’ve seriously questioned yourself about something, the more confident you can be about the conclusion. It’s unfortunate that most people don’t realize this, but it’s the logical thing to practice: your level of confidence in a certain matter should be proportional to the efforts you’ve taken to consider how you might be wrong. High confidence without proportional efforts to prove yourself wrong is called arrogance.?
Some people stopped learning new things or updating their mind in their teenage years, and spend the rest of their decades talking, in the manner of an adult but with the brain of a teenager. Other people continue learning and listening and reconsidering, whether they are 30 or 50 or 80. You can live a life of always looking smart while being stupid, or you can live a life of routinely looking stupid while getting wiser and wiser. It’s your choice what is more important.?
2-C4. Guard against making judgments based on words or labels. Words and labels are always representations of real things. With the same words and labels, different people mean different things and associate different things. You have to go beyond such superficiality and deal with the real things.?
Refuse to commit to any ideology other than truth. Truth is sought, not given. Ideologies are typically systems or principles for approaching things. How do you know such approaches work? Because they sound logical in theory? Talk with an experimental physicist or biologist about how beautifully well their theories can work by logic, and how badly theories fare against reality. They often deal with a much more limited set of factors, thus need to make much less assumptions, and use much more rigorous reasoning to derive their theories, than any of the ideologies we handle. And more often than not the theories don’t work. So it is foolish to be attached to any theory, which is often no more than a hypothesis. You are always welcome to try them out, but if they don’t work, you have to amend your theories.?
The better alternative to being attached to theories or ideologies is to do things based on truth and reasoning, also called “first principles” by many. Think fundamentally, question every assumption, and leave nothing off the table, regardless of experiences and opinions (aka samples and theories).?
Reflection 3. Doing. – “Change” revisited
After you figure out what’s the right thing to do, you need to figure out how to get it done.?
I and many others have realized that doers are the best thinkers, because they have to be rigorous about their thinking. Their thinking will be tested by reality, and refined through failures and successes.
If we are talking about how a big plan may or may not work, once you design a plan, examine them in theory, and then in practice.?
First, see how things would never work in theory, for example, based on physics principles or human nature: would such laws of nature be violated if you implement your plan at a large scale? For example, for an organization (human system) you design, would doing the right thing require most people to work against their self interest or convenience (violation of human nature)? If so, go back to the scratch and redesign. If you fail to prove that the plan won’t work in theory, then the plan is alive in theory.?
The next step is to see how the plan can be implemented in practice. Very often there are things that are just very hard, but not impossible. So it becomes a cost/risk-and-benefit analysis. There are things that are really worth it, such as saving the world, though they can be very hard at the same time. People tend to mistake very hard things as impossible things.?
That’s what entrepreneurship is about. Everything that no one has seen or done before will inherently seem impossible. That’s why in the telegraph time, most people believed telephones would be used in most homes only after most homes had adopted them; most people only saw the power of computing machines only after they became pervasive in our life; most people got convinced of what an internet would bring only in the last few decades. All these things had been foreseen by prophets way earlier (Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush…), based on mathematical and logical projections. But it’s one thing to look at E = mc^2 and see the number it produces. It’s another thing to see the number in real life, first in the lab, then in terrible bombs and power plants. Most people have a hard time seeing what numbers mean, but an easier time to believe a physical reality in front of their eyes. The problem is that the world can’t be led by doing only the latter.?
So if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be the minority, the few who see it in your minds’ eyes, that then build it into life so that all will see it and believe it. Examine the theoretical possibility of your grand plan, and try hard to disprove it; if the theoretical possibility can’t be disproved, find a viable path to make it reality.?
At the level of execution, especially for big things, know that planning and doing are two distinct phases. Set time dedicated for planning. When doing, focus on doing one thing at a time. I make yearly plans, monthly plans, and daily plans, in the form of to-do lists. (The plans can be reexamined and updated frequently.) Mixing planning and doing leads to wasted brain energy. Carrying several things in your mind crams the working memory, which makes it impossible to be efficient. That’s the conclusion of cognitive science. The analogy I like to make is with the so-called “juggling”: people like to say, wow, how did that person get to juggle several balls at the same time. I say, don’t juggle. Put them down (in writing). Then you pick one up. Isn’t it much easier to work with one? The other balls won’t be lost, because they are on your list. Over a week or a month, it may look like someone is multitasking with 100 things. But in any given quarter or hour, they are probably do one thing.?
Appendix on Reflection 3:?
To end this section with a bit of Steve Jobs: “When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use…. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
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Reflection 4. Academia (& big corporation) vs Startup
0) Wanderers vs problem solvers
My discussions in this section are mostly about problem solvers, thus I need to make the distinction between the two types of research (with the awareness that the line can be crossed). One is called science. The other one is called engineering.
Science is to know what is. Curiosity is known as the fundamental driver, and is supposed to be detached from any utility. That’s at the individual level. At the society level, there tends to be the expectation that such new discoveries will mean potential for breakthroughs. Otherwise the funding sources will be stingy about giving away money. Fundamental science is necessary to have. Most of the applied research we do today traces back to discoveries made when people didn’t know what they would be good for. The human race has a portion of people who are patient wanderers that just want to find out how things work, and they are most suited for being scientists. Think about Issac Newton, Charles Darwin, or Albert Einstein.
Engineering is to solve problems in society. Even if you don’t work in social sciences, you have to realize that the problems you are solving are fundamentally social. Ivory tower, btw, is actually imaginary. The general framework of engineering is to understand the problem, and figure out solutions using the technical tools we have. It’s very important to point out that, it should start with the problems, and by problems we mean problems in the real world.
Then there are what I call moving-target research projects. They don’t have the patience to figure things out and discover new knowledge, and they don’t have the bandwidth to understand real-world problems to make sure they are doing something useful. If you think they are seeking new knowledge, they say, well, we don’t have the time, since we are really trying to achieve some goal of making something work. If you think they are doing engineering, which means they should understand what the real-world need is, so that they are working on something theoretically viable, they say, well, we are not really trying to do that yet, we are just exploring and creating knowledge. In the end you might realize that the real goal is to publish easy and colorful papers by making toys. Since everyone cites everyone in academia, it does work out in this system.
Richard Hamming remarked in his talk on creativity: not everything that is new is meaningful. We can go so far as saying, all research that is done could potentially be meaningful, since it’s hard to know whether something is completely useless. But then there are constraints to consider: constraints with money, and constraints with time. Money is limited, and it would be better to spend it on something that is meaningful, such as good science or good engineering, instead of moving-target research. Time is limited, both in terms of the time of talented brains, and in terms of the time before the problems of the world become much worse. A researcher in applied research said to me, “we are just doing research, and there is value in all research; we are not trying to save the world!” Well, it sounds great, except that we are paid to come up with solutions, and the world is counting on us, yet we say that’s not what we are doing, while the clock is ticking. Who’s gonna do it then?
I’ll be specific about the synthetic biology field: we’ve had enough toys. Especially with what we are working with, which is biology, something with immense diversity, there are endless toys we can make that look really pretty and really impressive. They can generate a lot of press and great publications. 20 years ago such works were really valuable, and could inspire a lot of young people like me to join the field. But impressiveness can’t feed people. After 20 years, it is time to deliver. Synthetic biology totally can. But the incentives in academia have been misplaced. This is an applied field. We need to go understand what the world really needs, and do something serious to address such needs.
I’m sure I’ll get misunderstood here. Know that I am all for proof-of-concept studies as well. But for each idea we may need one or two such toy-like proofs, not 100. The energy to make the other 98 should be better spent solving problems. The time horizon can be short or long – that’s not the point. The point is knowing what problems need to be addressed, and work on things that are rigorously examined to be at least theoretically feasible and more competitive against alternatives. As they say, “math is free”(relatively), while the rest is not. Good solutions should be the product of different disciplines as well, and you should be serious enough to learn those new things. – Dear colleagues, this is my challenge to you. We can solve many problems. We just need to use our minds to work on the right problems.
Now let’s talk about doing applied research in academia (or similar big hierarchies) vs in startups. Of course I will be generalizing, and there are research groups that go against what the system pushes them to do, and do great science and engineering. I’ve been blessed to have worked in some of them. But the fact that they have to go against the flow means the system is misguided.
1) One “no” vs one “yes”.
Academia often functions like a big hierarchy, whether within the lab you work in, within the institute you work in, or when you apply for the limited number of grants. It thus has the features of giant hierarchies: you only need one “no” along a chain of command to kill a great new idea. (The same thing goes for most big corporations, with few exceptions where the leadership goes out of the way to keep innovation alive.)
In the startup world, you only need one “yes” to get going, because there are numerous opportunities for support. Even if a great idea isn’t recognized by 99% of the unenlightened, you only need the 1% who get it, and they will support you with money or time, which is all you need to get it going and prove the 99% wrong.
2) Solving real problems.
In academia these days, what matters is publishing colorful papers. What is considered good and colorful is judged by other academics. They like and approve what they like, especially papers that cite theirs and agree with theirs. All sounds great or at least fine, until you realize that all this has little to do with what the world needs. Consider a statistic cited by Hans Rosling: American academics scored among the worst on tests for global trends and conditions, worse than the general public, and worse than random chance. The implication is that you can’t expect academics to be solving worthy problems, since they don’t know what the worthy? problems are.
To do a startup and be successful, you need to make money, hopefully not just from investors but eventually from those who pay for your service or product. That means you have to provide what the world needs. Not only that, you need to be much, much better than what the world already has. Small improvements don’t matter. To be detached from the world’s needs means doom. Isn’t that exciting?
3) Digging vs broadening.
Along the line above, academia these days is much more about digging. There are many contributing factors, and I can think of a few:
A. The evaluation metric of publication pushes people to specialize and focus, because once you have a line of research going, you can start publishing like a paper mill, and you can become the “leading expert” in something, while switching to learn and do different things is costly in time and resources.
B. If you haven’t done something before, they don’t give you money to do it. (What’s called innovation again?)
C. If you try to publish something as an outsider, they won’t let you because you haven’t done the kind of analysis or used the proper jargon that insiders of a given field always did. So you’d better specialize and do what you are good at.
Regardless of the reason, it’s hard to imagine a Charles Darwin (or Francis Crick, …) surviving in today’s academia, when he studies so many different things but can’t be expected to publish professional papers on any of the birds or reptiles or rocks that he examines. Do we need Charles Darwins in today’s world? It is a resounding yes. It is a general recognition that breakthroughs happen at the intersection of disciplines, and the disciplines today are becoming way too divided. Thus we need many Charles Darwins. But we have an academic system, with what Charlie Munger would call “perverse metrics”, that kills such people.
Well, if you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to know the essentials of almost everything, both the human aspect and the technical aspect. Within the technical aspect, since you are guided by real-world problem solving, it’s a huge advantage to combine disciplines, because single-discipline solutions rarely work effectively for real-world problems which are always multi-faceted. So you’ll be motivated to create an organization where people aren’t stuck by what they are good at, but have to know the big picture. You’ll be exhilarated to find talents who know and can do many different things, or at least have the curiosity to be so.
4) Playing small vs big
The money you can get in academia is small. It won’t allow you to hire a big team of top talents, and it won’t allow you to build a factory.
In the startup world, if you have a good idea, you can get good money, enough for you to do real big things and actually try them out.
5) Valuing big names vs good ideas
If you’ve been in academia for long enough, you know that names worth way more than ideas there. When you get your Nobel Prize in your 70s, people will start to throw money at you, even though you’ve long lost the energy to innovate and do big new things. If you are young and have a great idea, no one cares about what you are saying. Well, some might, if you convince them hard enough, and then they might also take it away as theirs because they have the resources, and you don’t (abstracted from true stories).
If you are doing a startup, the culture is geared toward unrecognized good ideas and high-potential people. People in this realm have been educated often enough by the biggest successes, which were often founded by smart and tenacious people between 20 and 30 years old.
6) Playing others’ games vs creating your own system
In corporations, and many research institutions, promotion is usually done by being a good and tame surbodinate. Best not be a trouble-maker by creating inconveniences such as trying to change things for the better or implementing something new.
To do a startup, you get to design your own system – how it works, what is valued. If you are fed up about avoiding inconveniences, you might have your teammates each make a list of 5 big problems every two weeks, and try to fix them (the problems, not the teammates). Those who bring up inconvenient problems are valued rather than silenced.
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Reflection 5. To those who are considering being an entrepreneur
To those who are considering doing a startup: don’t do it.?
You’ll hear this a lot. You ought to. I did. I’m giving the same to you. To any sane person who wants to have an easy and pleasant life, it won't be worth it. But if you are one of those crazy ones that, no matter how many people advise you against it, you just can’t live with not giving it your all just to give it a shot for a great and unique idea, because you’ve tried and failed to prove that it’s not infeasible, then maybe you are crazy enough to be an entrepreneur.?
1) Whether you have a great idea. The answer needs to be yes before you start a startup. Otherwise you’ll be burning others’ or your savings and time, which isn’t a responsible thing to do. Just to remind you of something I learned from folks like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman: small improvements like some percentages are not enough to warrant a startup. It’s better to leave such improvements to the incumbent corporations, and they will do it much better than you. To have a successful startup, you’d better have something that’s one or some orders of magnitude better, or addresses a (fundamental) need that no one is addressing. Otherwise, find a job for now, and there’s always a chance to encounter a great idea that you can’t find an ideal environment to implement other than a startup.?
2) If you do have a great idea, whether you are ready to be tested. Startup means a lot of work, and a lot of uncertainty. You are doing something that never existed before. All you have is something you see in your mind, and you have to get other people to see it too, so that they give you their time or money. Then imagine how many departments a corporation has, and imagine performing all these functions by yourself or whoever is working with you, but mostly yourself since you are leading it. You have to have the mental map and path of everything. You do things that have a higher chance of failure than success. Can you take it??
You actually can. Most people can. But it’s very helpful to know what you are getting into, so that the surprise factor is lower when you do get maximally tested.?
In my recent LinkedIn post, I made a long list of achievements made in the six months after the ideation of the venture. It only captures 0.01% of the moments. Most of my waking moments in these six months were spent on learning, thinking, and doing. And there were so many different things to do. Through the years I have had several periods where I had to work crazy-hard, but these months were at a different scale. My recent monthly plans have more than 60 aspects of things in 12 categories to do or keep track of, and they often needed to be amended with a new list as the list grew and some stuff got done. The 0.01% is all I could show for it. I’m not in any special situation. – From what I hear, that’s generally the case for founders. If you think doing a startup is full of glory, you are definitely mistaken. It’s about being the underdog, for a looong time.?
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Reflection 6. How to view “failures”.?
See “failures” as steps of the game. The world doesn’t care about failures. It only sees what works. You shouldn’t care about failures either. As Jensen Huang says, remember the lessons, but not the failures.?
Some things not working is part of reality. If you don’t live with that, you won’t have a chance to get to the things that do work. If sifting through sand is the way to find gold, would you do nothing just because 99% of what you go through is sand? And should you count the sand, or the gold? The sand is what people call “failures”, which may be better called as “steps to gather information”. Learn from sand, see what they are like, so that you know what to avoid, and achieve a higher success rate as time goes on. Also rethink your game so that maybe you find the way to go through rocks to find gold nuggets.?
To those who are on the entrepreneurial journey: don’t give up. You haven’t failed if you don’t declare defeat. There are endless opportunities, as long as you have something solid. As I wrote above, try to prove your idea infeasible, and see if you fail to do so. If they are feasible, the rest is to design a path or paths, figure out the risks, and see if you can handle those risks or costs. If the reward way outweighs the costs, then bear with the cost, no matter how tough they may seem. As long as they don’t kill you, they are just temporary feelings.?
I do realize that I’m also saying “don’t give up” to our competitors. And we do have competitors since we are not creating a new market. And I mean it. We are aiming to solve the grand challenge, and would be happy to see anyone crack it with any approach. At some point it may become clear to everyone that our approach is the best. But I don’t intend to kill. You definitely have strengths that we don’t have, and as long as you fit our standard, we should join forces. The problem we are solving is grand enough to warrant a much bigger force formed by combining different strengths. (It goes the other way around as well, of course, though it doesn’t look likely for now.)
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Reflection 7. Hypes vs the real thing
We have some external validations now. We will have more. Eventually, they are means to a goal, but they are not the goals. What eventually matters is whether we’ve led the way to some things on the market that replace the current ways with sustainable ways, likely through replacing a substantial portion of fossil fuels.?
Hype is a neutral word to me, and it means people having faith in a vision that hasn’t been materialized. A vision can be under-hyped, just-right-hyped, or over-hyped. People can be convinced of something that doesn’t work, and they can refuse to be convinced by something hugely impactful until post hoc. Having some hype is helpful, because having zero hype means no one will provide any resource to realize the vision. But it is important to understand that hype is never the goal.?
Hypes for a general field come and go in 5-10 year cycles. We don’t plan to count on hypes to survive, and when the hype isn’t there, it does nothing for whether we go forward or where we are going. It would only affect how fast we can go. Hypes are human constructs that don’t change the physics and chemistry of the world: climate is changing, fossil fuels are being burnt, and biology can provide some of the biggest solutions (a statement based on logical projections).?
What I mean is that, we don’t plan to do things for the sole benefit of colorful effects. The customers we are serving are not investors, but the problems in the world that we are solving. I’ve seen startups that go public amid over-hype and collect cash by selling high, before having a viable business. Of course that means having the investors of the general public bearing the cost in the aftermath. That’s unethical to me. At the very least, a company should have positive operational profit, even if all the profit is reinvested into scaling for bigger impact. This is my pledge. Some may say that this can get me in trouble, but I think not doing this is the real problem.?
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Appendix 1. Enzidia’s culture
(Given our learning mindset, nothing is set in stone, and we can update what’s written here if there are more reasonable things)
A. Enzidia’s core values:?
Truth, Mission, Learning.?
Having these three values as our core means they take precedence over other good things not listed here. For example, being nice is also a good thing, but if the principle of surface-level niceness makes one confused about whether to be truthful and clear, we take truth and clarity 100 out of 100 times.
B. The principles Enzidia runs on
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Appendix 2. Selected books and resources I benefited from
-- The people involved in the resources above span a wide spectrum of ideologies. Just in case I need to point out: ideology is not the point. If the only impression you have about any of them is the bits and pieces you've heard, you probably don't know how some of them built big miracles from nothing, and the kind of thinking they had to use in order to be effective in the real world. It is amazing how such wisdom converges into very simple principles for approaching reality.
-- These books and resources are largely based on empirical data (experimental, historical, personal), or long-term life stories, except for a philosophical resource. The long formats makes it possible to convey systematic thinking on a certain topic, which is a world better than the bits and pieces we get through news or clips.
-- The knowledge and wisdom have been gathered, in fact hard-earned into our common repertoire, and I find it wasteful if we don't continuously try to assimilate the best into how we approach our life and the future.
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Appendix 3. If you are interested in contributing your force to Enzidia
We don’t have funding to support new members yet, but we are expecting to get enough to support at least a few within the first year. That’s why right now is the time to get in touch, if you want to explore joining the force. We don’t like relying on first impressions through interviews, but much prefer knowing each other more thoroughly.?
The opportunities you’ll get:?
What we are looking for:?
At this stage, our focus is on scouting for potential long-term partners who could carry a major part of the company on their shoulders.?
Must —
Good to have —
You are one of the most ___ you know in any of the following categories:
&?The remote chance to live around Copenhagen: according to a recent study, in-person teams are much more innovative than remote teams. That aligns with our intuition. Of course, 1) this move only needs to be made after strong mutual commitment, and 2) we never say never on such issues.?
Technical skills —
Skills we need for later stage or at part-time basis—?
The number of your papers and where they are published are among the things we care the least about. That said, if you’ve written something yourself, we’d be happy to read it.
How to get in touch:?
A letter with no length limit, to lay out what you want to do, your why, what you’ve done, what you are good at, why you are good, how you work, how we should work with you. In any format.
Yours,
Jinbei
Jan. 9, 2024