# Research in Startups The advice of "move fast, ship, quickly iterate" may not be all that conducive for doing genuine research. It can lead you think quite shallowly about the ideas you are exploring. For instance, an idea may come up, you may try it, and you may learn something, and then you may repeat. However, there is never a sense of building a theory of what the problem is and what it would mean to solve it. Instead you simply build a **theory of action**. A theory of action as opposed to a theory of change is, imagine you're in your current position, and eventually want to get to some goal state, a theory of action is you look around you and you say, “_Well, what can I do? What can I build? What do I see as possible?_”. This can lead you to try things that are straightforward. A **theory of change** is to look at the endpoint to try to work backwards. The metaphor is imperfect because in research, you don't exactly know what the endpoint is and you certainly don't know how to work backwards. It's difficult to have ideas by means of building an MVP very rapidly. Now, if you have an idea that you think is interesting, it is good to test it rapidly. Anyone working in an industry for a while will become accustomed to that culture—its processes, its norms, its values, its tacit knowledge. Much of this is incredibly valuable, of course, but these ideas can also represent constraints. There are some important impedances here between tech industry culture and research culture. In particular, tech culture is calibrated to a much faster pace. This can lead to impatience or early abandonment when confronting problems which require a researcher’s pace. A “huge project” for a Silicon Valley tech person may be a year or two long; a “huge project” for a researcher may last a decade. Persistence with a difficult problem may require tens of hours for a tech person and hundreds of hours for a researcher. It’s not that the tech people are constitutionally lazy or something like that: in that industry, it’s usually a bad idea to spend many hundreds of hours thinking about a single problem. But foundational insights often do require more patient, focused thought than tech culture would support, so people from tech culture may struggle to sit with a fundamental problem for the time required to make progress. More broadly: [San Francisco tech culture makes research hard](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z3DJpNZe7vVd9fsjNGU4S86). Personally, coming from the tech industry, I’ve noticed that my expectations around the pace of progress are seriously miscalibrated for many research problems. I’ll feel like I’ve been banging my head against a question forever, but it’s only been a few tens of hours—that’s nothing in this space! If I continue expecting results at the rate I’ve been expecting them, I suspect that I’ll both miss the results I’m looking for and also drive myself nuts. An important aspiration for me is to get much more comfortable slowing down. One related special case: [Inappropriate time pressures often harm creative work](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z9TuEpnqEtLdy2TWWVicLsU) --- Date: 20240707 Links to: Tags: References: * [Andy Matuschak - Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, & Why Books Don’t Work — Dwarkesh Podcast — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+b53NqXV2s/1:41:59)