I can't deny, you gave me a few good laughs:
> Then they will offer me a term sheet where I go from owning 100% to owning 0% with a vesting schedule with some chance of getting back to maiybe 40% ownership if I don't get fired except it is in the fiduciary interest and responsibility of the board member investor to FIRE me so that I don't get my stock vested.
> I give a presentation to the BoD about a small, new direction or initiative for the business, based on some applied math, complete with theorems and proofs, one of the best sources of credibility, and several of the BoD members get physically ill and rush to the restrooms. Then the BoD leaves, convenes in a local bar, has a dozen rounds of drinks, and votes me out of the CEO slot.
> Those Sand Hill Road people just don't belong on the bridge of my ship; they are NOT qualified; they are a severe threat to the ship.
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not. Are you yanking my chain?
I know; it's possible to set up a corporation so that I have investors but control all the voting stock so that, then, really, the BoD can't fire me. But doing that would be a constant fight; I would be inviting into my company some potential enemies and would spend a huge fraction of my time, money, and energy fighting them. They would be there for themselves and trying to take from me. Easy solution: Don't invite them into the company. They don't want me now, and when they do I won't want them.
I'm going to stay a sole, solo founder.
Some people in business have been successful doing that. I know some, and one of them, whom I don't know, is sitting in the White House now. Indeed, from the time I spent in yacht clubs, nearly all the members did that -- sole, solo founders, a family company, private company, no VC/PE or other outside investors, no public corporation.
My point about how much people hate math lectures with theorems and proofs is exactly correct.
Then the scenario of the BoD rushing to the toilets and convening in a bar, getting drunk, and firing me is only a slight exaggeration for what would likely happen.
E.g., I'd be like that guy in Scion Capital in the book and movie The Big Short and Billy Beane in the book and movie Money Ball. They were both right and for the right reasons, but they nearly got shot down by skeptics. Indeed, the skeptics or their skepticism was the cause of much of the opportunities.
My views of Sand Hill Road versus DoD, NSF, NIH, NASA, DoE is literally, rock solidly true. DoD, etc. will invest in some applied math and mathematical physics, e.g., the US Navy's version of GPS (I worked in that group for a while), and Sand Hill Road just will not; they won't even consider original, powerful, valuable, advanced applied math. I have hundreds of e-mail messages proving that.
You seem to have wanted an "elevator pitch". Okay:
As has been clear going way back in information retrieval, key words do well in only about 1/3rd of the content on the Internet, searches people want to do, and results they want to find. I'm going for the other 2/3rds. Sufficient for this, I've derived some original applied math based on some advanced, pure math prerequisites, written the production quality code, and am rushing to go live. The math makes powerful progress on the challenging problem of the meaning of the content. The work stands to be of intense interest to nearly everyone in the world with access to the Internet via any device from a smartphone up to a high end workstation. First I will target users in the US and then Europe and then target the rest of the world as there are revenue opportunities.
That's just what I've done and am doing. Nothing could be more simple or true.
The main issue is the math, but the set of people in a position to understand the math and with confidence to see its power is really tiny. Even among the best trained Ph.D. mathematicians, the prerequisites are not well known.
From my Ph.D. work, but NOT from my time at IBM's Watson lab, I know some people with the prerequisites. When I did original work building on those prerequisites, those people liked my work right away. When I went to publish, my work was published right away. Now should I explain my original work, those people would think for a few days and then say something like "Nice. Right, that should work.". I was confident in my research then, and I'm equally confident now.
Much of the confidence comes from theorems and proofs -- I've always liked those because they have saved my skin many times since no math teacher or prof has ever been able to find anything wrong with my correct proofs, and after I had started to learn the material, my proofs were correct. Maybe the teachers/profs hated me; it was clear that some of them did; maybe they wanted to laugh at me, and too often did, like you do and like the people in those two movies did; but they can't find anything wrong with my proofs. If I were not confident, then I wouldn't be doing this.
I got into math and science partly because in high school the teachers had to give me A's in math and science. In English and history, the best I could do was get social promotion. In college I saw that math and science looked far and away like the best subjects for a good career. Early in my career, in applied math and computing on national security problems near DC, I saw more value in math and did a lot of independent study of both pure and applied math. Then I got a Ph.D. in applied math with a lot in pure math -- some of my publications can be regarded as both pure and applied.
For competition, just for the prerequisites, people would have to study and learn brilliant work in math going back 200+ years or reinvent that material. The studying is too hard for all but a tiny fraction of the population and reinventing is much harder, essentially impossible. The people Sand Hill Road likes to back haven't studied the material, won't, and certainly won't reinvent it. Then they'd be faced with my original work. Nope: I don't expect competition.
That's just the way the project is. Seems entirely reasonable to me. But you want to laugh at it. Hmm ....
So you'll scrape lots of web data, run it through your 'meaning algorithm' and then provide a search bar to search said data? So, like your idea is like Google, but it understands english sentences close to like a human would? Did I understand that correctly?
Much of the prose was intended to be funny.
> So, like your idea is like Google, but it understands english sentences close to like a human would? Did I understand that correctly?
I'll just stay with the description I gave.
It was not clear that you were actually asking a question or wanting an "elevator pitch".
For my "abilities", your statement is patronizing and an unjustified insult. My abilities are just fine, thank you.
Your guess at what my startup is doing is not good. What I am doing is much better than anything that could be or follow from your guess.
Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, the crucial core is some original applied math based on some advanced pure math prerequisites. It really is. That's the truth. The work is from some of my studies in my Ph.D. in pure/applied math and more studies and then my original work. This is just literally true, not hype. It's TRUE. That few startups are doing such things is not my problem but some of my opportunity. But one result is that the only people with even a shot at evaluating or understanding the core technology are well trained mathematicians. That's just true, and as such I have no better way to put it.
That the startup also uses some computing does not mean that Sand Hill Road or academic computer science is qualified to evaluate or understand the technology. More generally, Sand Hill Road and academic computer science just do not cover, even significantly cover, all the technology that can use computing and be valuable for a startup. In particular, there is applied math, and that is much more broad and deep than Sand Hill Road or academic computer science; such people just have no chance of understanding the work because they don't have the prerequisites and just will not reinvent them. I've been clear on this.
With some of the other news on HN now, I should insert, as I have in my more polished descriptions, that my search engine is to be "safe for work". It should also be safe for kids and be family-friendly.
Yes, I'm going for the other 2/3rds of search, but the whole of search I'm considering has no porn, etc.
Finding content based on meaning should be one of the best contributions to culture and civilization, and I hope the site does that.
And the site stands to have some of the best protections for user privacy on the Internet: E.g., the engine does not set, read, write, or use HTTP cookies. User Internet history is not collected or used: Two users who use the site the same way at essentially the same time will get the same results.
The site has nothing to do with natural language processing, the semantic Web, the interest graph, neural nets, etc.
In no significant way is the technology accessible to the Sand Hill Road community, no more than to some unknown tribe deep in the Amazon; they have the same on the prerequisites -- nothing.
