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Comment by thecolorblue | Hacker News Reader

Interesting interview. My experience with start ups has been different than what he talks about at the end. My experience has been of using a modified version of the scientific method to accelerate product development. There is less peer review, and a focus on keeping the subject matter (the customer usually) close. Alan makes it sound like startups come up with an idea and push it into the market as fast as possible.

His quote is “research means you can change your mind”. Well, I change my mind all the time.

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His main point has always been that for significant breakthroughs, you start by searching for a problem that isn't even formulated yet. Solving the problems of your customers is the opposite of that. The impact of solving the "unformulated" problem may be so strong that it eliminates the need of solving the little particular problems. In that sense, office workers of the 1970s probably wanted better typewriters instead of GUIs.

Depends on your definition of "significant breakthrough". Technical breakthroughs are what Kay values, and that's OK. But to suggest they're the only kind of breakthroughs is myopic. Startups can, in their best incarnations, change human behavior and the way we interact with our world.

To call it purely technical is also myopic IMO... The GUI/typewriter change the previous post talks about is a paradigm shift much like in Kuhn's scientific revolution literature. Some neat aspects are paradigm shifts in like music production or other art, which is yes technical but achieves aesthetic end points and is about the human-tool relationship.

I'm struggling to find what's different in your description from Mr Kay's. I interpreted him as saying that start-ups focus on selling a thing to a customer and your description backs this up rather than challenges it. I'll accept that start-ups (the idealised ones I read about, because I mostly work in agencies and more established companies), research their market, but I don't think this is the kind of research he's talking about. I think he's talking about mining the depths of a problem or of a unexplored facet of nature - and start-ups don't have the time or budget for that.

I would wager your experience is an outlier.

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