Jul 6, 2018 · 1h 13m · y-combinator
Fermat's Library Cofounders João Batalha and Luís Batalha · Y Combinator
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this Y Combinator interview, Fermat's Library co-founders João and Luís Batalha discuss building open tools for scientific paper annotation, reforming academic peer review and open access, and expanding public engagement with technical research.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 3.9 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 0.0 The partners pushing back 0.5
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:04:40 Debating whether linear growth can support a venture-backed startup
Luís and João question whether an open platform like arXiv could ever survive as a commercial for-profit company with linear submission growth, gently countering standard venture assumptions.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 1:04:55 Host pushes back on non-venture business viabilityThe host firmly rejects the notion that companies lacking exponential growth cannot raise capital or become sustainable businesses.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 23:06 Simpson's paradox wage breakdownJoão systematically demonstrates how median wages dropped across every individual educational cohort while rising in aggregate, clearly educating the host on Simpson's paradox.
The partners hold their own ▶ 16:57 Host articulates duplicate failure cost in academic biologyThe host demonstrates deep analytical grasp by detailing his Cambridge friend's concurrent duplicate failures to substantiate systemic flaws in academic publishing incentives.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founders' Backgrounds and Initial Content Growth | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | The host asks open-ended questions about Fermat's Library's inception and early traction. The guests educate the host on open science, the Polymath project, and how Terence Tao solved the Erdos discrepancy via a blog comment. | |
| arXiv Discoverability and the Fermat Chrome Extension | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | The host draws on a Peter Attia podcast discussing data scrubbing on arXiv to ask about paper discoverability. The guests explain how their Chrome extension integrates annotations and references directly onto preprint drafts. | |
| Evaluating Paper Quality and Potential Rating Systems | 4 | 3 | 0 | 1 | The host presses on how quality can be evaluated without traditional peer review, proposing concepts like forking. The guests discuss user survey feedback and potential multi-factor rating mechanisms. | |
| Negative Results, P-Value Hacking, and Publication Incentives | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | The host demonstrates domain familiarity by highlighting academic disincentives around negative results, sharing an anecdote of a Cambridge PhD friend duplicating failed experiments. The guests explain p-value hacking and statistical significance verification. | |
| Twitter Questions: Unexpected Papers and Statistical Paradoxes | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | The host reads Twitter questions regarding unusual papers. João delivers an educational explanation of sleep mortality studies, the hot hand fallacy in basketball, and Simpson's paradox with wage distribution data. | |
| Historic Science Papers versus Modern Writing Length | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | The guests describe historic physics breakthroughs published in single-page formats. The host introduces a literary comparison to David Foster Wallace to probe why modern papers have lengthened. | |
| Twitter Questions: Elements of Impactful Science Writing | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | The guests detail how Freeman Dyson's synthesis paper on quantum electrodynamics had more impact than discovery papers due to clear writing. The host concurs that clarity of communication is the decisive factor. | |
| Metrics of Scientific Value and Mass-Appeal Content | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | The host challenges the guests on balancing high-impact accessible content like Charlie Munger transcripts against dense technical science. The guests agree that citation counts are an imperfect proxy for true value. | |
| Speed of Publishing versus Rigorous Peer Review | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | The host asks about the tension between fast open publishing and rigorous peer review in fields like machine learning. João reflects on the extensive research required to annotate complex papers. | |
| Annotating Books, Educational Textbooks, and Retaining Knowledge | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 | The host shares personal techniques from his English major background, detailing an index card note-taking system and critique of Kindle highlights. The guests share classical mechanics textbook examples and the annotated Portuguese epic poem Os Lusiadas. | |
| Value of External Explainer Annotations and Managing Side Projects | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | João recounts consulting Vitalik Buterin on the Ethereum whitepaper to show why external annotators frequently write clearer explanations than authors. The host commends turning intellectual hobbies into structured side projects. | |
| Public Enthusiasm for Science and Long-Term Platform Growth | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | The guests discuss a 14-year-old Russian student producing a novel math proof inspired by Fermat annotations and emphasize the viral demand for bite-sized scientific knowledge on Twitter. The host adds the example of Dan Carlin's multi-hour history podcasts succeeding against industry assumptions. | |
| Business Sustainability, Open Access Movement, and Global Paywalls | 5 | 5 | 0 | 1 | The host asks about business sustainability and pushes back on the assumption that non-venture growth curves cannot achieve profitability. The guests contrast frictionless access on MIT Wi-Fi with global research paywall barriers. |
Statements from this episode (23)
João Batalha: Fermat's Library enables browser-based annotations with LaTeX and Markdown
“Fermat is a platform for annotating papers. And so if you want to think about it, you imagine a PDF view in your browser, and then you have annotations on the side that support LaTeX, And markdown, and so you can add annotations in parts of papers that you thi…”
João Batalha: Dense academic papers produce valuable user notes to decipher steps
“We thought there was a lot of content that, that you end up producing while you're trying to read a paper, which can be the most, like, the most dense piece of content that a human can read sometimes, right? The language can be incredibly spartan, and sometime…”
João Batalha: Fermat's Library's first paper was the Bitcoin whitepaper
“We start, our first paper was the Bitcoin paper.”
Luís Batalha: A blog comment unlocked Terence Tao's Erdős discrepancy proof
“Terence Tau the Fields Medalist, was trying to solve the problem, and he put it on his blog that he was trying a certain approach to solve the problem, and then there was this guy from Germany that just wrote a comment there, like the size of a tweet, and he s…”
Luís Batalha: Machine learning moves too fast to wait for academic journals
“Archive is, is super important because the papers are, the new papers are coming out at such a high rate that people don't wait before the papers go to journals, before they start working on top of it and using the stuff that other people discover.”
Luís Batalha: Fermat's growth strategy starts with solving arXiv pain points
“Our idea was initially we wanted really to convince people to install the Chrome extension. And so let's solve the hair on fire problems that they are describing here. And then once we have people using the Chrome extension and then we can expand into like ope…”
Fermat's Library considered tools to flag p-value hacking via API or extension
“We've thought of doing something with Fermat there, either via some API where you could, like, send us the DOI of a paper, and we would send you, like, some information regarding the p-value or something, or with the Chrome extension where where you'd see that…”
Batalha: Publishing negative research results could be incredibly useful to scientists
“You might need to change things dramatically in order to get people to start publishing negative results, which are, like, could be incredibly useful. For other researchers.”
Luís Batalha: Historic physics discovery papers were only one or two pages
“In the sixties and all, like, through the 20th century, All these discoveries and all these papers were mostly like one, two pages. And yeah, like the, it's so fun. It's, and also fairly simple to read. But the discovery of the Neutron, it's like maybe one col…”
João Batalha: Academic papers will not return to shorter formats
“It's definitely not going back, it seems. Like you don't really see the, a trend anywhere of shorter papers”
Luís Batalha: Initial discovery papers are not always the most impactful
“One of the things that we noticed, or at least I noticed from reading papers is that sometimes it's not like the discovery paper that is the most impactful paper.”
João Batalha: Accessible scientific writing enables cross-disciplinary discovery
“You always benefit if you can make it as clear and accessible as possible because you never know, like the audience that is going to be, end up reading your paper. You can, you, of course you can expect that the people in your field are going to read it, but s…”
Luís Batalha: Citation metrics misalign incentives for accessible scientific writing
“If the metric is just number of citations, sometimes it's not aligned to making the paper understandable and comprehensible to a large audience.”
João Batalha: Major scientific discoveries often spread without accumulating high paper citations
“Sometimes very important well, this is more specific for certain fields, very important concepts or discoveries never really get published in one paper that then gets a ton of citations, or it, that knowledge gets spread, In some other way. And so there are, y…”
João Batalha: Academic peer review requires significant reform to match modern workflows
“The system nowadays, it's, does not seem to be perfect for the way things work nowadays, and we would love to see either via format or some other platform to try to tackle that, and try to do something to make the peer review a better system, or to change it s…”
Luís Batalha: Educational textbooks should be open-sourced and updated incrementally
“It would make sense for books to be annotated and also be open source so that in that sense you would just you know, commit a new chapter a new explanation for that and keep all the other chapters and then just change that bit. Instead of having to write a new…”
João Batalha: Inline context dramatically increases reader follow-through versus searching
“And sometimes that content does exist, but the, being able to find it easily, having, having that, like, in your fingertips, Fingertips can make the whole difference, right? Where even if you, yeah, maybe you could do, spend like a minute, like searching on Go…”
João Batalha: Paper authors often make poor annotators due to internalized knowledge
“What's interesting is that well, the authors of the paper sometimes, you know, they are not going to know where people are going to struggle understanding the paper, oftentimes.
I remember when I was annotating the Ethereum white paper, right?
Written by Vita…”
Luís Batalha: Paper authors find answering questions easier than annotating
“Every time we talk with an author, I think it's easier for them to answer questions about their papers than to annotate the paper.”
Luís Batalha: Explaining technical papers expands the audience and invites more questions
“The more you annotate a paper, there are more people there are that are at the edge of starting to understand what the paper is about. So you start getting more and more questions because the circle expands, and then you just have more people that are, like, s…”
João Batalha: arXiv grew linearly, not exponentially, despite huge impact
“If you look at the graph of submissions for Archive, it's completely almost linear. It's, there's no startup exponential, artistic growth. It's like, completely linear, but it's arguably one of the things that has had the most or that has impacted the making o…”
Luís Batalha: Open journals can match Science and Nature in prestige
“And I think it's totally possible that these open journals get to a point where they have you know, a reputation like science or nature. As long as you convince people to, you know, publish their papers on these journals, it's, there's nothing about science or…”
Luís Batalha: Famous tenured scientists are required to legitimize open journals
“It's probably the way to get these open, open journals to be as popular as nature or science is to convince Really, people that already have a tenure are really famous scientists to publish on those journals. You already have your position. You already have yo…”