I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers.

Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief).

So I’ve been thinking about the ways they’re the same, because maybe there is something to learn about qualities of really effective people in general.

The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” In general, no one reflects on this question enough, but the best people do it the most, and have the best ‘problem taste’, which is some combination of learning to think independently, reason about the future, and identify attack vectors. (This from John Schulman is worth reading: http://joschu.net/blog/opinionated-guide-ml-research.html).

They have a laser focus on the next step in front of them combined with long-term vision. Most people only have one or the other.

They are extremely persistent and willing to work hard. As far as I can tell, there is no high-probability way to be very successful without this, and you should be suspicious of people who tell you otherwise unless you’d be happy having their career (and be especially suspicious if they worked hard themselves).

They have a bias towards action and trying things, and they’re clear-eyed and honest about what is working and what isn’t (importantly, this goes both ways—I’m amazed by how many people will see something working and then not pursue it). 

They are creative idea-generators—a lot of the ideas may be terrible, but there is never a shortage.

They really value autonomy and have a hard time with rules that they don’t think make sense. They are definitely not lemmings.

Their motivations are often more complex than they seem—specifically, they are frequently very driven by genuine curiosity.

Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks. 

Science remains the only way out of the COVID-19 crisis. Dramatically improving clinical trials, which are usually time-consuming and cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, is one of the highest-leverage ways to get out of it faster.  

The goal of this project, in collaboration with TrialSpark and Dr. Mark Fishman, is to offer much better clinical trial support to COVID-19 projects than anything that currently exists.

Project Covalence’s platform, powered by TrialSpark, is uniquely optimized to support COVID-19 trials, which are ideally run in community settings or at the patient’s home to reduce the burden placed on hospitals and health systems. Project Covalence is well-positioned to tackle the operational and logistical challenges involved in launching such trials, and supports trial execution, 21 CFR Part 11 compliant remote data collection, telemedicine, biostatistics, sample kits for at-home specimen collection, and protocol writing. 

Researchers across academia and industry can leverage this shared infrastructure to rapidly launch their clinical trials. To facilitate coordination between studies, we will also be creating master protocols for platform studies to enable shared control arms and adaptive trial designs.

If you’re interested in getting involved or have a trial that needs support, please get in touch at ProjectCovalence@trialspark.com or visit www.projectcovalence.com.

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup.

But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work. Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup.

YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. It turns out that good founders have lots of ideas about everything, so if you want to be a founder and can’t get an idea for a company, you should probably work on getting good at idea generation first.

How do you do that?

It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. You want to be around people who have a good feel for the future, will entertain improbable plans, are optimistic, are smart in a creative way, and have a very high idea flux. These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think. 

The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves.

Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future.

You want to be able to project yourself 20 years into the future, and then think backwards from there. Trust yourself—20 years is a long time; it’s ok if your ideas about it seem pretty radical. 

Another way to do this is to think about the most important tectonic shifts happening right now. How is the world changing in fundamental ways? Can you identify a leading edge of change and an opportunity that it unlocks? The mobile phone explosion from 2008-2012 is the most recent significant example of this—we are overdue for another!

In such a tectonic shift, the world changes so fast that the big incumbents usually get beaten by fast-moving and focused startups. (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.)

Any time you can think of something that is possible this year and wasn’t possible last year, you should pay attention. You may have the seed of a great startup idea. This is especially true if next year will be too late.

When you can say “I am sure this is going to happen, I’m just not sure if we’ll be the ones to do it”, that’s a good sign. Uber was like this for me—after the first time I used it, it was clear we weren’t going to be calling cabs for that much longer, but I wasn’t sure that Uber was going to win the space.

A good question to ask yourself early in the process of thinking about an idea is “could this be huge if it worked?” There are many good ideas in the world, but few of them have the inherent advantages that can make a startup massively successful. Most businesses don’t generate a valuable accumulating advantage as they scale. Think early about why an idea might have that property. It’s obvious for Facebook or Airbnb, but it often exists in more subtle ways.

It’s also important to think about what you’re well-suited for. This is hard to do with pure introspection; ideally you can ask a mentor or some people you’ve worked with what you’re particularly good at. I’ve come to believe that founder/company fit is as important as product/market fit.

Finally, a good test for an idea is if you can articulate why most people think it’s a bad idea, but you understand what makes it good.

This is from my notes for a talk I gave at a YC event in China in 2018. Thanks to Eric Migicovsky for encouraging me to post it!

I wrote it when I thought mostly about startups; now I think mostly about AI development. I am struck by how much of it applies, particularly paragraphs 5-9.

Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. 

Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation.

I wish that the federal government were doing much more—it would be great to see even a few percent of the recent stimulus bill go to funding R+D.  But they don’t seem to be funding enough science, and although I think concerns about the private sector and philanthropy doing what the government is supposed to be doing are somewhat valid, there isn’t a great alternative right now.

On the positive side, I have never seen a field focused on one problem with such ferocity before.  The response of biotech companies and research labs is amazing, and the speed they are operating at seems to have increased by more than 10x.  It’s the best of the spirit of innovation, and it’s inspiring to see what these companies and research labs are doing.

Scientists can get us out of this.  What they need are money and connections.

Investors and donors—this is where we can help.  Please consider shifting some of your focus and capital to scientific efforts addressing the pandemic.  (And future pandemics too—I think this will be a before-and-after moment in the world, and until we can defend against new viruses quickly, things are going to be different.)

The learning curve is quick, and there are a lot of experts willing to help you with diligence.  It feels good to do something that might be useful, it’s interesting to do something totally new, and it will make you more optimistic.

If you make it known to your network that you want to fund efforts working on COVID-19, you’ll get flooded with opportunities.  And it’s always good to invest where the best founders are congregating.

I’m trying to fund startups/projects helping with COVID-19, because it’s basically the one thing I know how to do that can help.  I think we will soon have enough testing capacity, so now I’d like to start funding more startups working on:

1. Producing a lot of ventilators or masks/gowns very quickly.  This will require a lot of repurposing and creativity but thankfully is an engineering problem not a scientific ones.
2. Screening existing drugs for effectiveness.
3. Novel approaches to vaccines (i.e., not doing what the big pharma companies are already doing).
4. Novel therapeutics that the big pharma companies are unlikely to work on.

We tried this public spreadsheet but it didn't work that well; please email me instead.

Also, if anyone knows of a contract research company that can run a viral challenge against SARS-CoV-2 in a humanized ACE2 animal model, that would help a startup I’m working with.  Please reach out!

Although I still hope things will go differently, the experts I’ve spoken to think we are likely to face a global tragedy—hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.

I hope that society views this as a warning for the future.  Covid-19 is bad, but only a warm-up.  I think it’s unlikely that this is the worst new pandemic (human-created or otherwise) we’ll see in our lifetimes.  We need to be ready to deal with it much better next time.

In the meantime, young healthy people should try to avoid getting Covid-19 for as long as possible.  It’s true that it doesn’t seem to be very bad for young people, but more people getting it—particularly people who don’t get sick enough to stay home—will accelerate the spread, and this virus seems quite bad for old people and people with pre-existing conditions.

I expect society will shift to a new normal pretty fast.  Some of these elements—e.g., much less business travel, much less handshaking, much more handwashing—I expect to just stick.  Some others—e.g., people working from home all of the time—I expect to not stick. 

The economic disruption is still probably under-appreciated and will remind us that our systems are more fragile than we think.  For example, I do not think the recent plunge in US Treasury yields is explained by Covid-19 alone, but rather a reminder of cascading effects that can happen in a complex system.