I think the model of commercial R&D lab would often suit alignment work better than a “classical” startup company. Conjecture and AE Studio come to mind. Answer.AI, founded by Jeremy Howard (of Fast.ai and Kaggle) and Eric Ries (Lean Startup) elaborates on this business and organisational model here: https://www.answer.ai/posts/2023-12-12-launch.html.
Note though that a fundamental part of this is that we at AE Studio do intend eventually to incubate as part of our skunkworks program alignment-driven startups.
We’ve seen that we can take excellent people, have them grow on client projects for some amount of time, get better at stuff they don’t even realize they need to get better at in a very high-accountability way, and then be well positioned to found startups we incubate internally.
We’ve not turned attention to internally-incubated startups for alignment specifically yet but hope to by later this year or early next.
Meanwhile, there are not many orgs like us, and for various reasons it’s easier to start a startup than to start something doing what we do.
If you think you can start something like what we do, I’d generally recommend it. You’re probably more likely to succeed doing something more focused though to start.
Also, to start, we flailed a bit till we figured out we should get good at one thing at a time before doing more and more.
I think the model of commercial R&D lab would often suit alignment work better than a “classical” startup company. Conjecture and AE Studio come to mind. Answer.AI, founded by Jeremy Howard (of Fast.ai and Kaggle) and Eric Ries (Lean Startup) elaborates on this business and organisational model here: https://www.answer.ai/posts/2023-12-12-launch.html.
Yes, excellent point, and thanks for the callout.
Note though that a fundamental part of this is that we at AE Studio do intend eventually to incubate as part of our skunkworks program alignment-driven startups.
We’ve seen that we can take excellent people, have them grow on client projects for some amount of time, get better at stuff they don’t even realize they need to get better at in a very high-accountability way, and then be well positioned to found startups we incubate internally.
We’ve not turned attention to internally-incubated startups for alignment specifically yet but hope to by later this year or early next.
Meanwhile, there are not many orgs like us, and for various reasons it’s easier to start a startup than to start something doing what we do.
If you think you can start something like what we do, I’d generally recommend it. You’re probably more likely to succeed doing something more focused though to start.
Also, to start, we flailed a bit till we figured out we should get good at one thing at a time before doing more and more.