Hey folks the other skymind founder here. - 1 piece of inspiration I want to throw out there. Many open source startups pre built their product to commercializ

Hey folks the other skymind founder here. - 1 piece of inspiration I want to throw out there. Many open source startups pre built their product to commercialize before the company. (red hat -> linux, hadoop -> cloudera) . We ended up doing both at the same time (do not do this unless you want to tear your hair out). When it started it was actually just the 2 of us with me writing all the code. The thing that made it work: We put it out there and got user feedback and paid very close attention to users. A lot of machine learning startups have their "secret algorithm that's actually just using an open source python based deep learning toolkit for their mvp" . For these product based deep learning startups, there isn't much actual deep learning going on. Half of the appeal here is focusing on a specific domain and accumulating data and expetise/partners in that domain. We did the opposite by "giving it away". This is ultimately what culminated in our support first culture as well as the bulk of our engineering hiring. Having our customers,users, and engineering team co located has been a blessing in disguise. Lastly: You should also write a book while doing a startup. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035343.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035343.do If there's any particular questions on any of these things happy to answer.