Startups Need to Keep Up With New Research
Startups can't afford to discover important research too late.
When you're building a startup, there is always more to do than there is time.
You have a roadmap, customers to understand, technical problems to solve, and a product to get into people's hands.
When you encounter a difficult technical problem, the natural reaction is to start researching it yourself: search Google, read documentation, look through GitHub, perhaps search arXiv, and then start experimenting.
But there is another possibility.
Someone else may already be working on the same problem.
They might be another startup on the other side of the world. It might be a university research group. It might be a research lab working on a problem that looks surprisingly similar to yours.
And they might publish what they have learned on arXiv.
Finding relevant research in time is key here.
If you know exactly what you're looking for, searching is relatively easy.
The difficult part is knowing what you should be looking for in the first place.
A paper published today might contain an approach that could save your team weeks of experimentation. But if you discover it three months later, after your team has already explored the same direction, you have gained knowledge, but lost the opportunity to use that knowledge when it mattered.
This is particularly important for startups working in rapidly evolving fields such as AI or Robotic.
New research is published every day. Nobody on your team can realistically read everything. And nobody should have to.
The goal is to discover the right ones early enough to make a difference.
Build on what the world has already learned
Understanding what others have learned, and combining that knowledge with your own experience to create something new is the key in era of fast moving forward.
Imagine telling a system what your team is building and what problems you're trying to solve.
Instead of remembering to search every morning, you could simply be made aware when something new is published that might matter to your work.
That changes the relationship with research.
You are no longer asking:
"What should I search for today?"
You are asking:
"What has changed in the world that could affect what we're building?"
This is where iReading Room comes in
iReading Room watches newly published research on arXiv and helps you discover what is relevant to the work you're doing.
You tell it what you're building.
It watches the stream of new research.
And when something relevant appears, you have the opportunity to discover it while it can still influence your thinking, your architecture, or your roadmap.
Because the competitive advantage isn't simply knowing more.
It's knowing something useful before you have already spent months discovering it yourself.