

Should I give up? - anaphoric

Hello All,<p>I would appreciate very frank advice on what I should do with my start up, Anaphoric Systems 
(http://www.anaphoric.com).<p>The whole effort started as a research project several years ago, but when I was informed that I actually owned the system, I entered a business plan competition and then started to execute on the plan.<p>The problem is that I have been wearing two hats: 'researcher/educator' and 'entrepreneur'. This has led to conflicts of interest as well as diluted effectiveness. So basically I need to decide if I am going to 1.) quit my tenured position, move to a start-up hub, find a partner, get-funding, etc. or 2.) open source the whole project and treat it as a research project. (It's 18k lines of LISP). I suppose in case 2 I could always do something commercial if the system was of high impact.<p>I am leaning toward option 2, but I thought I should run my plan by the YC community first.<p>Regards,<p>Michael Minock
(http://www.cs.umu.se/~mjm)
======
cperciva
First, kudos to Umeå university for being forward-thinking enough to (gasp)
allow you to own your own work.

To answer your question: If I were in your position, I'd try to work an option
1.5 -- see if you can take an unpaid leave of absence for 4 months and spend
that time working on your startup. Most universities are happy to let their
faculty do this sort of thing, since they usually come back far more excited
about their research than when they left.

Spend those 4 months working on your startup full-time, and plan on deciding
at the start of the 4th month whether you're going to take your option 1 or
your option 2. I don't think you can really make a rational decision without
working on this full-time for at least a few months.

Re your startup: Have you considered putting it together with freebase? I
don't know how structured your input databases need to be; but since freebase
is basically wikipedia (EDIT: and apparently other data sources now, too)
parsed and converted into a database, being able to run natural language
queries against it could be very interesting...

~~~
anaphoric
Actually it's a law in Sweden called the "teacher exception"
('lärarundantagen') and it is not without controversy. But it was the business
development folks at Umeå who let me in on the secret and gave me a lot of
encouragement.

Yes I am considered taking a leave next Spring. It would be difficult to Swing
this Fall. And if I did take a leave, I would definitely move to a start-up
hub. I really agree with Paul on the need for that.

As for freebase, yes I had considered that earlier and indeed I should check
back. Alas a nice thing about having my system as an open-source system, would
be that I could get a masters student to do the integration with freebase as
part of a project...

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gibsonf1
We (StreamFocus - lisp based) are on our final UI upgrade push before
launching open beta in the next few weeks. We are missing search right now,
and would be very interested to license your system to work with us. Right now
we use traditional Mysql tables as well as a mysql triples table, but most of
the real work happens in lisp.

Are you interested?

~~~
anaphoric
Yes, I am interested.

I like your videos. Very well done. We can discuss via email. mjm@cs.umu.se is
probably the best mail to use.

~~~
gibsonf1
Excellent. You will be hearing from me. (We have to redo all the videos
because of the major improvements we've made to the system since then, but
thanks)

------
Shooter
I would first create a list of firms that have strategic interests in your
product area (DB and BI Vendors, DM service companies, Lisp consulting
firms/vendors, etc.) You might find a company that is willing to buy the
technology and/or offer another profitable arrangement. A joint venture,
perhaps.

Option 2 might be your only real option, but even then I would think you might
be able to use your work as a springboard into something more lucrative...?

~~~
anaphoric
If I do option #2, that is open-source the system under BSD, then I suppose
that would give me the option to fork the whole system later under a
commercial license if the system started to gain traction. Of course the risk
is that others would build up from the earlier version and essentially lock me
out. However I would be pleased to have made such an impact...

~~~
davidw
As long as you get copyright assignments from anyone sending you patches, you
retain the rights to change the license whenever you want, so even if you use
the GPL, you could release new versions under a proprietary license.

That said, if you really just 'give up' any commercial hopes, a BSD style
license is friendlier to companies who may want to do something with your
code, and, if they're smart, maybe even contribute something back.

~~~
ericb
Open sourcing is a mixed bag. The sad fact is that open sourcing will
generally limit the number of companies that will consider buying you by some
substantial amount. Could probably get the poster a cushy job at google,
though...

~~~
davidw
The idea was some sort of middle road between abandoning any hope of
commercial success, and doing it 100% as a classic proprietary software
business. I have no idea if it's feasible for his product though.

------
ericwaller
Please don't give up! I just tried your geography demo, and I'm no expert, but
I was very impressed.

~~~
anaphoric
Thanks for the encouragement... being impressed with the demo is ultimately
what matters.

A serious problem I have however is that this geography database isn't so
interesting. Who is really going to learn anything from this rather low
quality database? What I am looking for is some database that is: 1.) complex
enough to preclude standard forms interfaces and 2.) contains information
worth asking about. Not an easy task to identify, obtain such data sources.

I was thinking maybe a sports scores database or something...

~~~
utnick
baseball statistics could be good.. there are a lot of baseball stats nerds

who had the most stolen bases from 1935 to 1955? how many people have had back
to back 5 hit games?

~~~
anaphoric
Yes. These are exactly the kind of questions that the system can support.
There is a big baseball database out there that I played around with earlier
(<http://baseball1.com/>). It's only for non-commercial activities the last I
checked.

~~~
utnick
You should check with a lawyer, but I am pretty sure that mlb statistics are
public domain, just copy the database.

------
maxklein
Don't do it. If your system is good enough, there will be demand for it, and
you'll KNOW when the time is right to quit. Otherwise, you're taking a
needless risk - you can have the same benefits without the risk just by making
some clever decisions and delegating properly.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'm not saying you're wrong...but there are some things about starting a new
company that cannot be delegated. Like the strength of your own focus on one
single goal.

It may not be the right time for him to make the leap, but there is always a
right time to make the leap (or give up on the business or on entrepreneurship
in general). Since he's asked us here, and seems to have put a lot of thought
into it, I suspect he is now at that point. Thus it is not a "needless risk".
It may be exactly the risk that needs to be taken, and it may be exactly the
right time to take it.

Entrepreneurship _does_ involve putting some skin in the game. It's not
optional and you generally can't be a regular guy with a regular job, and
_also_ a big entrepreneurial success. At some point, you have to decide what
you want, and go after it with vengeance.

~~~
anaphoric
Yes I am at that point... The problem is that I am now finally getting
reasonable academic success. A lot of people want to collaborate on papers,
projects, etc. And I must say these are some of the best researchers in the
field. The only thing I am certain of is that I will be working on this NLI
problems for many years to come. The question is which side of the fence will
I land on. I can not keep riding the fence for much longer ... or, who knows,
maybe I can ;-)

~~~
SwellJoe
Philip Greenspun might be a good subject of an afternoon of reading for you.
He went from academia to startup and back to academia. He's been pretty
successful in both fields.

Randy Pausch, of "The Last Lecture" fame, talked about the subject in that
lecture. Though he was coming at it from a slightly different perspective:
become an Imagineer, which was a lifelong dream, or go back to teaching...he
chose teaching. Working for Disney is not quite the same as starting a
startup, though I imagine for some folks it would be the same kind of personal
satisfaction...that of building something real.

I don't know that they've ever answered specifically why they made the
decisions they made, but it couldn't hurt to get a feel for their thoughts.

Two other quick points, before I become a preachy bore:

1\. If you're getting success in academia, you will probably also be able to
get success in other fields, if you apply the same passion and excitement. The
question shouldn't be "what will make me most successful?", it should be "what
will make me most satisfied with my life?" As you get older, you'll recognize
this more and more clearly...better to spot the trend early. Success will
usually follow.

2\. Academia, at least in technical fields, does not generally frown on
success in the "real world". Success in business can be as good for your
academic career as the papers you would have written and the research you
would have done during that time. Again, follow your satisfaction and your
excitement.

3\. (I know I said 2...I discovered this one just now.) You will never be in a
better position to take risks than you are now. As you age you collect
responsibilities: Family, kids, parents needing care, mortgage payments, etc.
These responsibilities are the things you can't risk to pursue your
dreams...so, when you're older, you can't put as much in the game. You can
still start a startup, or change careers, at any age, and experience certainly
has benefits, but when it comes to risk, younger is better. Without family and
kids, the risk is practically nil.

------
davidw
I don't know the details of the system you've created, but you could use a
'restrictive' open source license like the GPL, and offer a dual licensing
strategy, where people who want to use it in commercial systems pay to get a
compatible license. That only works if it's a library though, rather than an
independent system.

Another idea might be to find a partner first, and let that person handle most
of the business, and just concentrate on the technical aspects of it.

Good luck!

~~~
anaphoric
The system calls several GPL based components (SPASS, aspell, ...) but does
not extend any thing under GPL.

I was thinking that if I open-source it I would put it under a very open
license (e.g. BSD) and assume/hope that anyone that extended it would make
contact with me for help/advice.

------
lsc
We can't answer that for you... but we can tell you a bit about our own
situation.

Personally, I've been running my own (much simpler) VPS hosting startup
(<http://prgmr.com>) for more than two years. I'm on my second Porsche worth
of personal money plowed into the thing (ok, second Porsche boxter... I'm
probably still on my first, you know, real Porsche.)

I dono. I mean, my company breaks even these days... most of what I've gotten
out of it is experience and contacts (and those are worth something... my bill
rate as a consultant verges on ridiculous, and I have a book deal. Pretty good
for a Midwestern hick with no formal education.) I don't regret doing it, but
if I had a chance to do it over I'd focus more on being more public (blogging,
documenting, etc...) and less on the actual business.

If I could 'open source' my project, I think that would magnify the benefits
(that is, credibility and contacts) But you can't really 'open source' an ISP,
which is essentially what I am.

So yeah, personally I'd advise you to go for option #2, unless you can get
significant investment from someone else.

But then, you sound like you started from a different position than I did.
It's possible that because I had so little when I started the credibility is
worth a lot more to me than it is worth to you.

Also, I have my own conflict of interest... your project sounds pretty cool,
and I'd like to be able to use that technology for my own projects, or use
products built by other people using that technology. Open-sourcing it is
likely the best way to get the tech out to the masses.

------
robg
I know this quandary well though I was a post-doc when I took the plunge.

Why does it have to be #1 or the other? Could you see about taking a one-year
leave of absence from your tenured position? Seems that if you're successful
you'll generate a lot of good publicity for your university. Furthermore, you
could try to find a visiting relationship with a university at one of the
hubs. For you it would be a good way to meet people and your current
university could see you're still serious about the academy even if you only
"visit" a minority of your time.

------
scott_s
How close are you to getting sabbatical? (Does your university even offer it?)
Several professors in my department (including my adviser) have used their
sabbatical on startups.

~~~
anaphoric
Unfortunately sabbaticals aren't part of the Swedish system... Still I am sure
I could swing a non-paid leave starting in January or so. Perhaps even in
November. But not in September/October! I am already down for teaching AI.

------
pedalpete
Michael, Neither of the options you have provided would equate to 'giving up'.
So I would give a definate NO to giving up.

Treating your project as a research project does not equate to giving up.

I don't know enough about this market/competitors/technology/market size, etc
to define what you should do going forward.

The question I think you should be asking is 'is this a viable business'.

I suspect most of the YC community who are telling you to go for it! are
potentially speaking from a start-up attitude of 'live the dream' etc. etc.
They may be right, but not every business is a good business.

Your technology might be the best out there, I just don't know. Personally, I
wasn't blown-away by the demos, but I'm not saying that to be harsh, just that
from my perspective, I'm not seeing your competitive advantage. You've put a
bunch of work into this, and it may be the best in the market and able to make
a significant contribution to the world.

Does your university have a business school, or entrepreneurs club or
something? Maybe you could get somebody there to help with defining the market
and business planning.

------
peterhi
Not wanting to be a wet blanket on this party but this system has a looong way
to go. Too many of the queries I made either gave me dumb error messages or
decided to answer a different question.

Try and search for the shortest river. No dice. Given that it knows about
second, third and the like I tried to rephrase this as "last longest river".
All I got back was the longest river, it dropped 'last'. It knows average but
not mean. It reports 'average length of a river' as 1117.2391304347826087.
That's a great deal of precision for something without a unit of measure. What
is this in: meters, kilometres, centimetres, feet, inches, miles? Given that
the data is from America I would expect this to be in miles but I suspect that
it is probably in kilometres.

Has this really taken 18k lines of code?

Stay put and knock this thing into shape on the universities dime then start
your own company.

~~~
anaphoric
Hi Peter,

> this system has a looong way to go

yes it does... Natural language interfaces are a very hard area. Lots of
failed attempts (e.g. MS EnglishQuery). This in fact is what attracted me to
the area. If as a researcher I can help make NLIs more robust/usable, then
that would be a 'result'.

> Has this really taken 18k lines of code?

Actually that is an approximate figure and includes test routines, comments,
etc. Plus what is a line of lisp code? A large amount of code is to support
non-linguist authoring of the interface. So in fact I was able to patch the
system for "shortest river" and "mean" in a jiffy.

> Stay put and knock this thing into shape

Yes that's what I will probably do. I toned down Anaphoric's web-site and will
work with this system from more of a research perspective. I will try my best
to avoid open sourcing it, but in the end circumstances may compel that
move...

------
herdrick
Very nice design. But:

"Server Down on localhost:9009 Please visit again in a couple of hours."

~~~
anaphoric
OK, yes, someone's query busted the system down. But it's up again now.

------
giardini
How certain are you about your presumed choices?

You ask us to choose either 1 or 2, yet we have no idea what situation and/or
persons brought you to this apparent fork in the road. I suspect there may be
a 3rd, 4th, &etc paths that prove better. Nor do I see 1 and 2 as mutually
exclusive as you state. Many, if not most, researcher/educators are
simultaneously entrepreneurs. And giving up tenure may prove costly,
especially in the long run.

Perhaps tell us more about the conflicts of interest that have arisen. I sense
that they involve other peoples wishes or meddling, which are usually best
ignored or stepped on.

------
gtani
one todo, I think, clarify your website for the obvious questions, so people
don't have to download the demo and watch screencasts to get something out of
it:

\- what is the benefit of your algorithm and code over Lucene/SOLR?
quantifiable metrics, e.g.precision/recall-wise? What natural languages does
it parse/work best in?

\- what kind of analysis, in layman's terms (Layman: somebody who's
implmeented Lucene, sphinx, the search engine, not CMU sphinx, MySQL fulltext
search, not an NLP researcher) From the company name, i would assume anaphor
resolution is included, or something related, named entity resolution.

------
trevelyan
Michael,

My suggestion is that you use your salary to hire someone to work fulltime on
the project. You are presumably in a good position to find a smart employee
who is interested in your work and will be able to contribute within a short
period of time.

If you cannot make headway in the market with two developers/proponents, it
seems unlikely you will succeed alone. Not all of the work needs to be
technical - there's no reason you can't hire someone and have them handle
marketing/sales.

------
sonink
This is neat stuff.

Actually we (reviewgist.com) could also do with something like this. Infact,
we spent some time working on a similar system for our needs, but anticipating
a dis-proportionate consumer response dropped it. But if you go through our
site, you would know exactly what I am talking about.

Also to answer your question, imo go with 1.

------
abijlani
This is very interesting technology something our startup like many others
could use it. Server licensing is always tricky. I would say go with number 2
and in the meantime build a commercial product around the technology. Since
you understand this technology the best it wouldn't be hard for you to build a
shopping engine based on CatchPhrase.

------
bigbang
I tried a few queries and I was really impressed. Seems to me like some real
value for the IP there and wouldn't recommend going opensource unless you
already patented it(Europe but I think doesnt have software patents right?)

------
comatose_kid
This is really neat. Especially the idea of allowing users to modify the
database. How would one add data to the demo to indicate that Cambridge, MA
and Silicon Valley are the best places to start a tech startup?

------
wassupmr
IMHO option 1 is the way to go if you don't have a family

~~~
anaphoric
Well I am divorced and don't have kids, so the world is my oyster ;-)

------
prakash
Step 1: Do #1 as you mention

Step 2: Quit and start your startup

Step 3: If things don't work out, then go to your step #2, and move onto other
jobs

------
omouse
I'd go for option 1. It seems like a solid system and it does have value. I
would love for my city's library system to use it for example.

------
tom234
Michael, I suggest this:

1\. Don't spend any huge money on this project until it picks up
significantly.

2\. treat this as a hobby, which means don't lose sleep over it.

3\. focus on your work that makes money if money is a factor

4\. take it easy. leave the company as it is.

5\. try to make this not be written in LISP. that is a lot of lines of code.
convert it.

6\. Keep everything going the same time. don't quit your job.

~~~
omouse
Wow, this is horrible advice.

1\. You have to take risks sometimes. He's done good work and it's worth
putting some cash behind it (if necessary).

2\. It's not a hobby. It's a business or a research project. In either case,
it's a serious thing.

3\. This project could be a money-maker in two ways: corporate sponsors for a
research project, or corporate clients for a business product.

4\. I agree with the take it easy part, but not the other part.

5\. That's a joke right?

6\. That's also a joke right?

