41–50 of 112 posts
Great story, and great choices made. The lesson in this to young people: you can either sell your time by the hour, or buy other's time and use that productively. The former is very finite, the latter scales.
That is true. I think a guy wrote a book about this in the 19th century.
Interesting story but what I don't get is this > Founders might get a wage to avoid personal financial stress How do you make a living as a founder if you don't get a wage? Is that really a norm? > but then also need skin in the game, typically by investing personally And also this. Does it assume that you will invest your savings or what exactly?
When you make the leap, you're basically living of off your savings. Until the startup has investors that agree to pay the founders a wage (to reduce personal financial stress so they can concentrate on the company) - or the startup is profitable - it's vital that your savings don't run out...
I understand the part where you invest your time and money to build the PoC but I can't imagine running a startup with VC-backed investment without paying out myself a wage. That seems crazy to me if true.
I love that GOFAI companies are also calling themselves AI, because seriously why not. If a pile of linear algebra (fittingly trained on The Pile) can be AI, then so can optimizers and solvers.
I haven’t tried Timefold but did try a ton of solvers (local and web) a few years ago when trying to optimize MRP schedule. One of the hardest parts was converting my business logic into constraints, especially date based calculations. Instead of explicit constraints, is there a way to provide a calculation that can be minmaxed? If every order has a due date, can I say +/- 3 days = 0, 7 early = 9999 (not allowed), 7+…
Somewhat related, I looked at a bunch of solvers for vehicle routing with time windows. One thing that surprised me was that the SaaS-based distance matrix calculations were prohibitively expensive. Google charged $0.01 per matrix element. How do folks normally get the distance matrix? I ended up just using the Mapbox Optimization API instead of using a solver.
Our maps service does do a bunch of additional optimizations (caching, incremental requests, ...) to assist any solver model we run that request maps information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you make the leap, you're basically living of off your savings. Until the startup has investors that agree to pay the founders a wage (to reduce personal financial stress so they can concentrate on the company) - or the startup is profitable - it's vital that your savings don't run out...
Are there investors who wouldn't agree to pay the founders a wage? I understand the part where you invest your time and money to build the PoC but I can't imagine running a startup with VC-backed investment without paying out myself a wage. That seems crazy to me if true.
If you've got an independently weathly founder then both parties typically prefer equity only.
Traditional seed investors may not agree anything beyond minimum wage. It depends though.
I haven’t tried Timefold but did try a ton of solvers (local and web) a few years ago when trying to optimize MRP schedule. One of the hardest parts was converting my business logic into constraints, especially date based calculations. Instead of explicit constraints, is there a way to provide a calculation that can be minmaxed? If every order has a due date, can I say +/- 3 days = 0, 7 early = 9999 (not allowed), 7+…
I didn't use Timefold but the predecessor Optaplanner, and I remember there were hard constraints which must always be true (eg one room can only be used for one meeting at a given time) and then there were soft constraints which were minimized (eg shorter distance is better) so an optimization problem can then be described with a set of those hard/soft contraints
Whats the name of the algorithm/concept used here? I used simulated annealing, old fashioned algorithm for a college timetable prototype and I'm wondering how this company is using an AI model.
Do note that the base algorithm (such as SA, TS or LA) is less than 5% of the work to get great results. We do a lot of additional things on top of that (incremental score calculation, smart neighborhood selection, multi threaded solving and many more).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there investors who wouldn't agree to pay the founders a wage? I understand the part where you invest your time and money to build the PoC but I can't imagine running a startup with VC-backed investment without paying out myself a wage. That seems crazy to me if true.
Very few VCs would not agree to a wage if the founder needed it. It probably wouldn't be as high as market rate though. If you've got an independently weathly founder then both parties typically prefer equity only. Traditional seed investors may not agree anything beyond minimum wage. It depends though.
Geoffrey is synonymous with OR/Constraints solvers in my mind. I once had to tackle an issue in this domain and wound up using OptaPlanner after weeks of research.
It had the most intuitive API and the best community support by far.
It's a bummer to hear that OptaPlanner was killed, but it sounds like ultimately it led to something greater, so there's a silver lining.
Wishing you the best in your future endeavors, Geoffrey!