I believe that large tech companies are, on average, more efficient at converting talent into market cap value than small companies or startups are. They typically offer higher salaries, for one.
This may be true for market cap, but let’s be careful when translating this to do-goodery. E.g., wages don’t necessarily relate to productivity. Higher wages could also reflect higher rents, which seems plausibly self-reinforcing by drawing (and shelving) innovative talent from smaller firms. A quote from a recent paper by Akcigit and Goldschlag (2023) is suggestive:
“when an inventor is hired by an incumbent, compared to a young firm, their earnings increase by 12.6 percent and their innovative output declines by 6 to 11 percent.”
I don’t have a good grasp of the literature. Still, the impression I got hanging around economists interested in innovation during my PhD led me to believe the opposite: that smaller firms were more innovative than larger firms, and the increasing size of firms over the past few decades is a leading candidate for explaining the decline in productivity and innovation.
Speaking from my own experience working in a tiny research organisation, I wish I could have started as a researcher with the structure and guidance of a larger organization, but I really doubt I’d have pursued as important research if we hadn’t tried to challenge other, larger organizations. Do you feel differently with QURI?
I’m sure that large companies do monopolistic techniques to get unfair advantages.
I remember hearing about this literature before. I can’t help but be a bit suspicious.
If decentralization were so productive, wouldn’t huge companies notice this and take advantage of it? It would be very easy for large firms to reorganize so that there’s very little centralization. I’d be skeptical of the specific hypothesis, “large firms intentionally want their employees to be unproductive,” if that’s being suggested.
I’m similarly suspicious of the “6 to 11 percent” figure. It’s very easy for me to imagine that their innovations do better on some measures, like, “more likely to influence a lot of people later on, because of integrations.”
> I wish I could have started as a researcher with the structure and guidance of a larger organization, but I really doubt I’d have pursued as important research if we hadn’t tried to challenge other, larger organizations.
From the standpoint of funders, I’d expect that they would want the “really promising people” to be running and reforming the big institutions, instead of creating new institutions. My main points are for those in charge of things and at the margin. From the standpoint of an individual facing an organization that clearly doesn’t seem good to them—I agree it can easily make sense for them to figure its best making their own external organization.
(I’d also flag that many people I know who left companies to do independent work, did projects that really didn’t seem that great/scalable to me. I think it’s hard to tell.)
This may be true for market cap, but let’s be careful when translating this to do-goodery. E.g., wages don’t necessarily relate to productivity. Higher wages could also reflect higher rents, which seems plausibly self-reinforcing by drawing (and shelving) innovative talent from smaller firms. A quote from a recent paper by Akcigit and Goldschlag (2023) is suggestive:
I don’t have a good grasp of the literature. Still, the impression I got hanging around economists interested in innovation during my PhD led me to believe the opposite: that smaller firms were more innovative than larger firms, and the increasing size of firms over the past few decades is a leading candidate for explaining the decline in productivity and innovation.
Speaking from my own experience working in a tiny research organisation, I wish I could have started as a researcher with the structure and guidance of a larger organization, but I really doubt I’d have pursued as important research if we hadn’t tried to challenge other, larger organizations. Do you feel differently with QURI?
I’m sure that large companies do monopolistic techniques to get unfair advantages.
I remember hearing about this literature before. I can’t help but be a bit suspicious.
If decentralization were so productive, wouldn’t huge companies notice this and take advantage of it? It would be very easy for large firms to reorganize so that there’s very little centralization. I’d be skeptical of the specific hypothesis, “large firms intentionally want their employees to be unproductive,” if that’s being suggested.
I’m similarly suspicious of the “6 to 11 percent” figure. It’s very easy for me to imagine that their innovations do better on some measures, like, “more likely to influence a lot of people later on, because of integrations.”
> I wish I could have started as a researcher with the structure and guidance of a larger organization, but I really doubt I’d have pursued as important research if we hadn’t tried to challenge other, larger organizations.
From the standpoint of funders, I’d expect that they would want the “really promising people” to be running and reforming the big institutions, instead of creating new institutions. My main points are for those in charge of things and at the margin. From the standpoint of an individual facing an organization that clearly doesn’t seem good to them—I agree it can easily make sense for them to figure its best making their own external organization.
(I’d also flag that many people I know who left companies to do independent work, did projects that really didn’t seem that great/scalable to me. I think it’s hard to tell.)