
Research-Driven Startups - fogus
http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/7/2/research-driven-startups.html
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Maro
Our company is research-driven in the sense that is based on me reading a lot
of papers on distributed systems and algorithms (eg. Google papers, Lamport
papers), and extracting a design concept from those for our first product
(Keyspace). To give back, I write a paper for each product we release or
algorithm we invent, and we're an open-source company.

It's working so far, we have bootstrapped ourselves to a nice profitable
level, we just rented our first office, and are working on our next-gen
database product, which will be scalable not just replicated.

(Btw. we're in Budapest and we're looking for a C/C++ programmer.)

~~~
bradfordcross
Maro, thanks for sharing your example.

I presume this is you? <http://scalien.com/keyspace/>

Awesome stuff.

~~~
Maro
Yes, that's me.

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gfodor
This post is spot on. At my company, the amount of amazing stuff we can build
basically had the top blow off once we were finally able to access our dataset
using map reduce. In an afternoon, we can build something that previously was
inconceivable due to the large data transformations necessary to build it.

~~~
bradfordcross
I love to hear this. What are you working on and can you share an example or
two of some of the new stuff you are able to do?

~~~
gfodor
I'm at Etsy, we have a new experimental search tool up at:

<http://www.etsy.com/explorer>

It's server is in clojure but is powered by a massive tag analysis job using
cascading. I'll be writing a blog post about this in due time once it matures.

Our "suggested shops" feature is now powered by elastic map reduce and
_matlab_ to perform matrix factorization, believe it or not. And, we're
working on improved search algorithms. Being able to re-index the whole site
in 15 minutes makes iterating and improving the algorithm quickly more
possible.

More on our setup here:

[http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/02/24/analyzing-etsys-
data-...](http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2010/02/24/analyzing-etsys-data-with-
hadoop-and-cascading/)

We're going to be writing a lot more about this, and hopefully opening up some
of our tooling beyond the JRuby DSL for Cascading we already have.

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jallmann
Sounds a bit backwards to me in some respects.

Some companies ask, "What product can we build with this technology?"

Good companies ask, "What technology does this product need?"

Great companies ask, "What product will this customer buy?"

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bradfordcross
Is Apple is a "great company"? They are a research-driven company that builds
great products. Products drive research.

From the post: "Solving problems with products, build on research, driven by
processing data

problem <\- product <\- intelligence <\- research <\- information <\-
processing <\- data"

Product is the top of the food chain.

~~~
tansey
How is Apple a research-driven company like what the author was describing? I
suppose you could argue they are researching new designs for technologies, but
really that's it. They don't tackle new conceptual challenges like Google did
with automated page ranking, for instance.

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neilc
I think Apple is very strongly research-driven with respect to materials
science and industrial design: the basic design of the iPhone / multitouch
interface, the unibody design of recent MacBook Pros, the stainless steel
antenna in the iPhone 4, and so forth.

~~~
strlen
Don't forget NeXT. I never considered owning Mac until OS X (that is, until I
got a functional UNIX OS). Prior to OS X they were for graphic designers and
people wanting a better typewriter, I stuck to Sun workstations (before the
Ultra-5, past that point, the switch to PCI bus and IDE drives, they
essentially became slow commodity machines) and Linux PCs.

NeXT was probably even more technology driven than the startups Bradford
describes: formed around an operating system, hardware, OOP and a programming
language. Sun was much the same way, but unfortunately they devolved to the
extreme of making science projects rather than products.

