13 ms·

Should I Resign from My Full Professor Job to Work Fulltime on Cocalc?

250 points by occamschainsaw 8y ago

jchallis 8y ago
Most important question: what will minimize your future regrets?
yahrly 8y ago
No.
primitivesuave 8y ago
I worked at Wolfram Research and I have sideline knowledge of how hard it is to successfully commercialize a CAS. I personally would wait for NSF funding to improve (it is an unfortunate reality how funding is prioritized nowadays), and perhaps get resourceful about developing your system further in an academic setting- I’ve done similar work as a university student looking for a resume booster.
tptacek 8y ago
I wish I could come up with a more helpful comment, but, as someone with 1-3 terminal windows dedicated to Sage pretty much at all times on my machine: no, giving up a tenured professorship for Cocalc sounds like a bad plan.
jrochkind1 8y ago
> My third year of unpaid leave from UW is up. I have to decide whether to return to UW or resign. If I return, it turns out that I would have to have at least a 50% appointment. I currently have 50% of one year of teaching in “credits”, which means I wouldn’t be required to teach for the first year I go back as a 50% appointment. Moreover, the current department chair (John Palmieri) understands and appreciates Sage – he is among the top 10 all time contributors to the source code of Sage! > I have decided to resign. NO, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
- ssivark 8y ago
  > I have decided to resign. I’m worried about issues of intellectual property; it would be extremely unfair to my employees, investors and customers if I took a 50% UW position, and then later got sued by UW as a result. Having a 50% paid appointment at UW subjects one to a lot of legal jeopardy, which is precisely why I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years.
  - ABCLAW 8y ago
    This is a really easily solved legal issue. You draft up a quick little IP agreement that clarifies the desired state of affairs - problem solved. Resignation was not required, needed, and arguably made the legal risk worse. Oh well.
    - yasth 8y ago
      You assume they would sign it. That quick little agreement is likely to be a major point of contention.
      - williamstein 8y ago
        UW has tried overall to be as supportive as they can be within the parameters of Washington State law and University rules. I did get UW to sign something a few years ago, but it was clear that whatever work I did on CoCalc had to be on my own time, not using any UW resources. There's much more to why I resigned than just my fear of potential IP issues (note: the issues are not worse by resigning, because I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years, starting with a BSD-licensed codebase). An additional factor, which I didn't explain well, is that I would have to devote at least 50% time (so 20 hours a week) to work for UW, and this work would not be on CoCalc. Unfortunately, I have found that I am unable to do a good job working on CoCalc, if I have to spend 20 hours a week focused on other things. It's also impossible for me to respond to critical customer needs, server issues, etc., if I'm preparing to teach (or actually teaching) or in a committee meeting. For example, imagine that a 500-person course at UCLA has an exam coming up using CoCalc, and there is some issue with pushing out the exam to students, which I could easily fix if I could focus on it. I would feel terrible ignoring the UCLA course for a committee meeting or because I was teaching.
sjg007 8y ago
That you are asking this question.. then No. And you should bootstrap this with UW or carefully manage your obligations. There are many profs with a foot on both sides. I would not leave until you've achieved escape velocity.
valgor 8y ago
I know this isn't exactly related, but as someone interested in numerical analysis, what is the difference between working on Sage, Octave, and Julia?
- williamstein 8y ago
  Sage is primarily developed to support pure mathematics research (and undergrad teaching). Probably the main possibly unique thing Sage brings to numerical analysis is good support for arbitrary precision and interval arithmetic. Beyond that, Sage is written in Python, so it inherits the standard numerical functionality from that ecosystem, namely numpy, scipy, pandas, etc. Sage also has excellent support for Cython, since much of Sage is written in Cython (I even made up the name "Cython").
originaloctopus 8y ago
I took a number theory class from you almost 10 years ago, and it changed my life. So, thanks. :)
lmeyerov 8y ago
Brutal, but: Either: 1. Do it -- You're ok with this failing and being locked out of academia -- then go for it! Maybe, if it fails, you'd be happy joining cloudera or another placing building notebooks! 2. Do it -- You're on track for paying living wages, both for yourself and future employees, say within 6mo organically, or with outside investment (from your post... you're still before then). Maybe live abroad for a year to further cut down! 3. Go back for a year -- Let it grow a bit more, and push any income you'd have taken to others who are earlier in their career In both 'do it' scenarios, get ready to pivot/expand to areas that will do a better job of keeping food on the table for your employees families, and to keep failing at it until something works. If you can't stomache that, wait till you can hire someone who will, or keep it as a hobby. I normally wouldn't offer to chat w/ someone over the internet, but I'm close-ish to this space, and a stage or so ahead wrt commercialization, so would be happy to do so
alain94040 8y ago
The subtext I get from reading your question is that you are overwhelmed with the support issues. Problems can arise at any time, and need to be fixed within hours. That's not a way to run any kind of product. If you can solve that problem (lower expectations for support), then you should be able to go back to your 50% position and still make progress on CoCalc.
anbop 8y ago
Looking at the full scope of things here it seems like it would be batshit insane for this guy to resign his professorship (on the economic calculus). Of course if he hates every day at the university it’s different.
ridgeguy 8y ago
I view economics as the gating factor. If, as you posted downthread, you don't have lifetime financial security, don't drop your tenured job. This is like the preflight "put on your own oxygen mask before you assist others with theirs" instruction. IMHO, you'll be far less able to contribute if you're scrambling to pay basic expenses.
xparco 8y ago
Stick to the prole tenured job
Hydraulix989 8y ago
You have a 10% chance of success even if you are accepted into YCombinator (honest feedback: I wouldn’t invest in your company). Stay a professor, and don’t regret not wasting time as an entrepreneur. It’s overrated.
untangle 8y ago
I was going to counsel that you retain your tenure but I guess you've already decided to resign. (If so, why ask?) The rationale for my recommendation is largely captured in other comments so I'll be brief: Winter is coming (macroeconomically). And it sounds like cocalc lacks: a strong balance sheet, a scalable sales model, and a story that would interest outside investors. As such, I personally would view the company as lifestyle/earnings supplementation and not core sustenance. It is also synergistic with your day job.
aralisza 8y ago
Wow, I just went to the Cocalc website, and it's truly shocking. It seems like an interesting service, but terribly marketed. Do you have any designers? I know your service is targeted towards technically minded people, but it still needs to be able to market itself. Have you done any user testing on how people use your marketing website? Here is my experience so far: The first thing I see is a NINE minute long video. As a first time visitor who doesn't know anything about this service, that's too much time to invest. The second thing I see is that it supports a lot of stuff. Cool, but why is it better than what I have now? I see that I can share things privately. I can already do that. I can "time travel". Yes, version control is a thing. I can publish it online. Great, I already do that. These are the only thing I read because they are the only thing that's bold. To be honest, this is where I would have clicked away. It also doesn't help that the navigation is unusable at half-laptop screen width, let alone on mobile. Only after scouring your website do I realize that it's basically Google Docs but for math, which is cool! But this was not clear at all when first visiting your site. If you're interested in more feedback feel free to reach out.
alexdong 8y ago
I find it interesting that nobody has asked this question: what is your life situation? Do you have a family? House/mortgage? Health insurance? You mentioned that CoCalc hires some engineers, some hat’s the burn rate? What do you need to keep working on it? If you have got your baseline covered, William, i’d say go for it. Your heart is clearly on this path.
- williamstein 8y ago
  > Do you have a family? Only a spouse, who has an excellent job. > House/mortgage? Yes, I bought a detached house 12 years ago in Seattle. > Health insurance? Yes, through my spouse. > You mentioned that CoCalc hires some engineers, so that’s the burn rate? Yes, we employ 4 people (including me). If we employed three instead, we would not be losing money...
kevinventullo 8y ago
It seems to me that a more flexible university would be lucky to have you. "William Stein" was a household name among the number theorists I knew.
noisycircuit 8y ago
I am commenting because I have read parts of your algebraic number theory book and used Sage extensively. The book helped me but did not significantly change anything about my life. It is possible to learn the same topics by reading other books. I love many parts of Sage and it has changed what I am able to do. It seems like the options are tenure: a path where you make incremental progress on narrow problems with the benefit of low stress and an excellent standard of living. company: a path where you get to continue changing the world in a meaningful way. The cost is high stress and a less certain standard of living in your current city. You provide a lot of details about your situation but I don't think they are relevant. The details would only matter if the worst case outcome of either path was a life that you could not bear to live. Given your many accomplishments this is not a problem. I think people should try to minimize the regret in their lives rather than maximizing their average daily happiness. It sounds like you would regret not continuing to work on your company.
quotha 8y ago
Flip a coin, when it's in the air, you will know what side you hope it lands on.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- yathern 8y ago
  He's already decided, and is resigning, as per the end of the post.
adenadel 8y ago
I'm really disappointed (with my impression) that UW doesn't seem to appreciate what has been accomplished with Sage and the value of a major open source competitor to Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc. I hope William and Cocalc are tremendously successful.
- paulgb 8y ago
  To add to his accomplishments, Sage was a pioneer of the web-based client/server notebook model now popular in Jupyter. I'm not sure if Sage was THE first instance of this, but certainly one of the first.
  - orbifold 8y ago
    Well to be fair Mathematica had a client server notebook architecture since early on. Today it also supports a web fronted besides the now (QT based?) native client. The native client is way more powerful and performant than anything that Jupyter offers and can be extended in the client Language itself. IPython/Jupyter is a more or less direct copy of Mathematica's interaction pattern but as is often the case a poor imitation in many regards. As a comparison https://observablehq.com https://observablehq.com seems like a genuine novel take on the notebook pattern and is unsurprisingly a commercial effort with some open source components.
  - williamstein 8y ago
    Thanks! You're referring to the Sage notebook, and the key feature is that it is web-based with some collaboration support. I believe it was the first instance of this at the level of sophistication that it attained, which was significant given the web development tools available a decade ago. I started sagenb in 2006 after seeing a demo of a local OS X frontend for IPython. I did a huge amount of work on it, but there were also many students who did too (e.g., a 16-year old in the Philippines named Tim Dumol). The Sage notebook (and IPython) was very much inspired by Mathematica, Macsyma, and Emacs. Jupyter notebook was written a few years later, and has a more modern architecture (it used websockets). Jupyter has a much newer client called JupyterLab, which uses more modern Javascript tooling, including Typescript, WebPack, Phosphor, and so on. I've been working hard to make CoCalc fully support the Jupyter ecosystem, since I love the momentum behind it and how inclusive the community is. In particular, I wrote a new Jupyter client that supports realtime collaboration.
azhenley 8y ago
UW is a prestigious university and you already earned tenure. Even if you quit your job and the project fails, you're going to be just fine. Probably still a scary decision, but in my eyes you have already "made it". (I'm a tenure-track first year prof.)
- winter_blue 8y ago
  Is it really that easy to get tenure all over again, after a failed project/startup?
  - azhenley 8y ago
    Many, many schools would hire him with tenure if he decided to go back to academia. Or he could choose to go to industry and make plenty of money. Plenty of lucrative and fulfilling options.
    - zamfi 8y ago
      > Many, many schools would hire him with tenure if he decided to go back to academia. Pretty sure this is false.
      - ninguem2 8y ago
        I'd say this is true. It wouldn't be UW nor at the same salary he currently has but, idk, Texas Tech, North Dakota State or some such place would think he would be a high profile catch at least in the next two or three years.
    - neilv 8y ago
      Could you say more about how noted professor marketability would work in this case, in your field? My reasons for asking... I've heard mathematics academia has its own version of ageism. (In dotcoms, at least, it's easy to go from being a star who everyone wants to hire, to most people not caring.) Plus I wonder how it would be perceived: a history of seeming to want to do a startup rather than be a professor. And a university that wanted to be the new home of a prestige research&eduction open source software project would have to see whether the prior university's involvement would complicate things.
heinrichf 8y ago
Professor Stein is an active HN member by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=williamstein https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=williamstein
- keithnz 8y ago
  not only that, his actual post of this blog post is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19665027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19665027
SubiculumCode 8y ago
If you are a developmental neuroscientists then yes. I need your job. The job market is not great, as you'd know.
- ska 8y ago
  Should I reply to the title of a posting without reading it? No, I probably shouldn't.
throwaway5752 8y ago
Yes, you are absolutely correct in your decision to resign. It's - if I'm being honest here - painfully clear you are much more interested in your side project (from the prospective of UW) than your ostensible job. I think for your sake and theirs' you should resign and try to commercialize this, or you will fail at both. Either that or completely hand off or abandon the project.
- tashi 8y ago
  It's not inherently a side project, it only has to be one because his department doesn't view this work as a contribution to pure mathematics. Seems shortsighted for a field where progress is often measured in centuries.
broken_symlink 8y ago
Since he brought up he may have been in the wrong place being in the math department, did he ever actually try to switch to the CS department?
- jhbadger 8y ago
  In UW's case, that would be even more difficult than usual because of its organization. The mathematics department is in the College of Arts and Science and the CS department is in the engineering school. These are practically like separate universities within UW.
  - williamstein 8y ago
    Indeed -- CS is now the "Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering", so it's not just a department. I never tried to move to CS, and I have no idea if there would have been a path to do so. When I first got hired at UW in 2006, some faculty in the CS department were very supportive of Sage, even giving me some temporary office space in one of their old buildings.
    - broken_symlink 8y ago
      I would have tried to explore that option before leaving completely. I know two professors who have switched fields, one was physics professor who did work in string theory, switched to genomics and got position at a medical school. Another was a CS professor who actually went in to math. You sometimes see CS professors who have degrees in pure math just browsing different department's websites.
Areading314 8y ago
I saw Prof. Stein's talk at JupyterCon last year and was blown away by what he had accomplished with CoCalc. It was one of the best talks at the conference IMO. Very excited to see where CoCalc is headed and wish Prof. Stein all the best. Edit: here is the talk https://pyvideo.org/jupytercon-2018/real-time-collaboration-with-jupyter-notebooks-using-cocalc-william-stein-sagemath-inc.html https://pyvideo.org/jupytercon-2018/real-time-collaboration-...
- williamstein 8y ago
  Thanks! I'm currently working on realtime collaboration for ipywidgets, which is an interesting challenge.
- fspeech 8y ago
  Thanks for the link. Watching it I can't help but feel a little sad. Prof. Stein is a highly trained mathematician with a track record in establishing successful software projects like Sage that many people benefit tremendously from (watching the video I learned that he actually started Cython as well!). It says something about the state of affairs -- the general lack of awareness and interest in the development of math unless it benefits some business directly -- when he could not find the resource needed to develop the math software he loved the way he wanted to. Maybe he really enjoyed working on the sync protocols, text formats, backend databases and file systems etc needed to get CoCalc running smoothly. But I wonder if he had the resource he needed would he make the same choice? I say this as I have a son who is double majoring in CS and math. As a freshman he is already mostly done with upper division math (3 A+ in honors real and complex analysis) and is taking graduate math classes. Yet it seems prudent for him to at least put in the minimum effort to get his CS degree to keep his option open. Eventually it will be a hard choice down the road for him as well.
  - williamstein 8y ago
    > But I wonder if he had the resource he needed would he make the same choice? If I had the resources I needed, I definitely would not have made the same choice. Though I enjoy somewhat working on sync protocols, databases, etc., it is only a means to an end. Mathematics software is much deeper and more interesting me. If I had sufficient resources a few years ago, I absolutely would have instead built a team to work fulltime on Sage, similar to how John Cannon successfully built an amazing team around Magma, partly leveraging that Magma is closed source and commercial -- https://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/ https://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/.
formalsystem 8y ago
TBH I feel like there's very little risk with quitting to work on a project that already has users. It seems like he's a good enough programmer that he could always find a job at a big tech company, make a bunch of money and then quit once he has enough saved up. And that's assuming he doesn't find any paid users or get any source of funding which again is hard but not impossible or that unlikely given that he already has a product with users. I think he'll be just fine and I wish him the best.
- dman 8y ago
  Job market for programmers will not always be what it is today.
  - formalsystem 8y ago
    Curious what's your reasoning behind this? If anything I see programmer jobs as one of the only professions that will survive the next couple of decades.
  - andrewnc 8y ago
    That's true. I bet we'll see many more different sorts of jobs open up as tech increases in complexity.
ptero 8y ago
This is a hard question to answer, but here are a few thoughts: 1. Resigning from a tenured position likely means taking a one-way street. The exception is a well-known scientist that can easily switch tenure to 2-3 other school today. In many fields competition for tenure is brutal and once you leave you may have some disadvantages in re-entry against a bunch of post-docs. "Only losers leave academia" is still a widely held mindset. All this does not mean not to resign; just be aware. 2. Do you still need money? The fact that the company is not ramen profitable in 7 years (including last 3 years of dedicated effort) means it may not be a source of income for a while. If you are not set for life, how long can you afford to not work? Will you be OK in industry (some professors thrive there some are completely miserable with a manager who tells them what to do and imposes deadlines)? Unless you are set for life I would seriously consider your 50% option -- you get another year to fully dedicate to your startup without teaching a single day and still maintain tenure. In a year, re-evaluate. My 2c.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  > The fact that the company is not ramen profitable in 7 years (including last 3 years of dedicated effort) means it may not be a source of income for a while. This is always a flag for me for something that needs to be investigated. Personally I think the idea the guy took to stick with CoCalc was interesting but at the same time he should really really consider hiring a CFO, someone who really understands where the money comes in and how it goes out. Such a person could tell him exactly how much "lifetime value" is needed from each customer in order to make the company a going concern. Sometimes that number is "impossible" in that it is way more than one believes they could get for the product. When that happens, you have to take a serious look at whether or not you're looking at a hobby or a business. It is always difficult to see these sorts of discussions after they have been had, especially when there was information that could have been developed earlier on that would have informed the decision, but it is not uncommon.
  - joycian 8y ago
    From what I have gathered from mathematician friends, they are catching on to CoCalc. I for one think it has promise. Especially with the dominance of Python in CS department intro classes, a Sage-based math environment for math classes (e.g. abstract algebra / group theory) seems sensible. Once those programmes start adopting it, you are good to go.
raphlinus 8y ago
This post resonated with me strongly. Yes, resigning sounds like the obvious best choice. I hope it works out well! I can certainly understand why Prof. Stein doesn't want to trash his colleagues, but I'll come out and say it: if academia wasn't completely dysfunctional, it would find a way to support this work. For my own work (which is nowhere nearly as academically relevant as CoCalc and Sage) I'm planning on doing it myself without worrying too much about funding. I can use a combination of savings, random consulting gigs, Patreon, etc. I can imagine doing more "company" kinds of things, but only to the extent it supports the work. This is not an easy problem, and again I wish Prof. Stein well.
- selimthegrim 8y ago
  If Jim Simons wouldn’t play ball it’s hardly only academia that’s implicated
  - raphlinus 8y ago
    This is true. The philanthropy scene is probably one of the few areas that has even more screwed-up incentives than academia.
  - hopler 8y ago
    Jim Simons doesn't understand open source and open access, because the source of his $15Billion net worth (proprietary hedge fund strategy) depends on him not understanding it. And also perhaps because he doesn't understand software very well. He could have made Magma free for everyone, but instead he bought a license only for his chosen elites to use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175563
daly 8y ago
As lead developer on Axiom, an open source computer algebra system, I can fully appreciate his funding problem. One problem is that open source software can't really handle grants. Government grants require accounting to handle receipts, and follow all of the rules. We need a couple "open source accounting" people who can handle managing grants (just like a school's bursar's office). I have tried to find a funding stream for nearly 20 years, without success. I am currently doing computer algebra research as a visiting scholar. That is an unpaid position. Perhaps you can remain connected to the department as a visiting scholar. If there is some way I can help, please let me know.
- onedognight 8y ago
  I’m not sure if SPI has supported member projects with receiving government grants specifically, but they are setup to provide shared resources like accounting for open source projects. https://www.spi-inc.org/ https://www.spi-inc.org/
- xvilka 8y ago
  Organizations like Open Collective[1] can help to handle this. P.S. What do you think about moving the site to GitHub Pages instead[2] (and overall modernization of it). [1] https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/ [2] https://github.com/daly/axiom/issues/13 https://github.com/daly/axiom/issues/13
- williamstein 8y ago
  > Perhaps you can remain connected to the department as a visiting scholar. I will, though as an "adjunct". It's of course unpaid, but makes it technically possible to do some things with the university (e.g., be on a Ph.D. thesis committee).
- cf 8y ago
  I know this isn't the most appropriate place to ask, but what are the main feature gaps between commercial computer algebra systems like Mathematica/Maple and systems like Axiom/Sympy?
  - 8y ago

jchallis 8y ago

Most important question: what will minimize your future regrets?

yahrly 8y ago

No.

primitivesuave 8y ago

I worked at Wolfram Research and I have sideline knowledge of how hard it is to successfully commercialize a CAS. I personally would wait for NSF funding to improve (it is an unfortunate reality how funding is prioritized nowadays), and perhaps get resourceful about developing your system further in an academic setting- I’ve done similar work as a university student looking for a resume booster.

tptacek 8y ago

I wish I could come up with a more helpful comment, but, as someone with 1-3 terminal windows dedicated to Sage pretty much at all times on my machine: no, giving up a tenured professorship for Cocalc sounds like a bad plan.

jrochkind1 8y ago

> My third year of unpaid leave from UW is up. I have to decide whether to return to UW or resign. If I return, it turns out that I would have to have at least a 50% appointment. I currently have 50% of one year of teaching in “credits”, which means I wouldn’t be required to teach for the first year I go back as a 50% appointment. Moreover, the current department chair (John Palmieri) understands and appreciates Sage – he is among the top 10 all time contributors to the source code of Sage! > I have decided to resign. NO, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?

ssivark 8y ago
> I have decided to resign. I’m worried about issues of intellectual property; it would be extremely unfair to my employees, investors and customers if I took a 50% UW position, and then later got sued by UW as a result. Having a 50% paid appointment at UW subjects one to a lot of legal jeopardy, which is precisely why I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years.
- ABCLAW 8y ago
  This is a really easily solved legal issue. You draft up a quick little IP agreement that clarifies the desired state of affairs - problem solved. Resignation was not required, needed, and arguably made the legal risk worse. Oh well.
  - yasth 8y ago
    You assume they would sign it. That quick little agreement is likely to be a major point of contention.
    - williamstein 8y ago
      UW has tried overall to be as supportive as they can be within the parameters of Washington State law and University rules. I did get UW to sign something a few years ago, but it was clear that whatever work I did on CoCalc had to be on my own time, not using any UW resources. There's much more to why I resigned than just my fear of potential IP issues (note: the issues are not worse by resigning, because I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years, starting with a BSD-licensed codebase). An additional factor, which I didn't explain well, is that I would have to devote at least 50% time (so 20 hours a week) to work for UW, and this work would not be on CoCalc. Unfortunately, I have found that I am unable to do a good job working on CoCalc, if I have to spend 20 hours a week focused on other things. It's also impossible for me to respond to critical customer needs, server issues, etc., if I'm preparing to teach (or actually teaching) or in a committee meeting. For example, imagine that a 500-person course at UCLA has an exam coming up using CoCalc, and there is some issue with pushing out the exam to students, which I could easily fix if I could focus on it. I would feel terrible ignoring the UCLA course for a committee meeting or because I was teaching.

sjg007 8y ago

That you are asking this question.. then No. And you should bootstrap this with UW or carefully manage your obligations. There are many profs with a foot on both sides. I would not leave until you've achieved escape velocity.

valgor 8y ago

I know this isn't exactly related, but as someone interested in numerical analysis, what is the difference between working on Sage, Octave, and Julia?

williamstein 8y ago
Sage is primarily developed to support pure mathematics research (and undergrad teaching). Probably the main possibly unique thing Sage brings to numerical analysis is good support for arbitrary precision and interval arithmetic. Beyond that, Sage is written in Python, so it inherits the standard numerical functionality from that ecosystem, namely numpy, scipy, pandas, etc. Sage also has excellent support for Cython, since much of Sage is written in Cython (I even made up the name "Cython").

originaloctopus 8y ago

I took a number theory class from you almost 10 years ago, and it changed my life. So, thanks. :)

lmeyerov 8y ago

Brutal, but: Either: 1. Do it -- You're ok with this failing and being locked out of academia -- then go for it! Maybe, if it fails, you'd be happy joining cloudera or another placing building notebooks! 2. Do it -- You're on track for paying living wages, both for yourself and future employees, say within 6mo organically, or with outside investment (from your post... you're still before then). Maybe live abroad for a year to further cut down! 3. Go back for a year -- Let it grow a bit more, and push any income you'd have taken to others who are earlier in their career In both 'do it' scenarios, get ready to pivot/expand to areas that will do a better job of keeping food on the table for your employees families, and to keep failing at it until something works. If you can't stomache that, wait till you can hire someone who will, or keep it as a hobby. I normally wouldn't offer to chat w/ someone over the internet, but I'm close-ish to this space, and a stage or so ahead wrt commercialization, so would be happy to do so

alain94040 8y ago

The subtext I get from reading your question is that you are overwhelmed with the support issues. Problems can arise at any time, and need to be fixed within hours. That's not a way to run any kind of product. If you can solve that problem (lower expectations for support), then you should be able to go back to your 50% position and still make progress on CoCalc.

anbop 8y ago

Looking at the full scope of things here it seems like it would be batshit insane for this guy to resign his professorship (on the economic calculus). Of course if he hates every day at the university it’s different.

ridgeguy 8y ago

I view economics as the gating factor. If, as you posted downthread, you don't have lifetime financial security, don't drop your tenured job. This is like the preflight "put on your own oxygen mask before you assist others with theirs" instruction. IMHO, you'll be far less able to contribute if you're scrambling to pay basic expenses.

xparco 8y ago

Stick to the prole tenured job

Hydraulix989 8y ago

You have a 10% chance of success even if you are accepted into YCombinator (honest feedback: I wouldn’t invest in your company). Stay a professor, and don’t regret not wasting time as an entrepreneur. It’s overrated.

untangle 8y ago

I was going to counsel that you retain your tenure but I guess you've already decided to resign. (If so, why ask?) The rationale for my recommendation is largely captured in other comments so I'll be brief: Winter is coming (macroeconomically). And it sounds like cocalc lacks: a strong balance sheet, a scalable sales model, and a story that would interest outside investors. As such, I personally would view the company as lifestyle/earnings supplementation and not core sustenance. It is also synergistic with your day job.

aralisza 8y ago

Wow, I just went to the Cocalc website, and it's truly shocking. It seems like an interesting service, but terribly marketed. Do you have any designers? I know your service is targeted towards technically minded people, but it still needs to be able to market itself. Have you done any user testing on how people use your marketing website? Here is my experience so far: The first thing I see is a NINE minute long video. As a first time visitor who doesn't know anything about this service, that's too much time to invest. The second thing I see is that it supports a lot of stuff. Cool, but why is it better than what I have now? I see that I can share things privately. I can already do that. I can "time travel". Yes, version control is a thing. I can publish it online. Great, I already do that. These are the only thing I read because they are the only thing that's bold. To be honest, this is where I would have clicked away. It also doesn't help that the navigation is unusable at half-laptop screen width, let alone on mobile. Only after scouring your website do I realize that it's basically Google Docs but for math, which is cool! But this was not clear at all when first visiting your site. If you're interested in more feedback feel free to reach out.

alexdong 8y ago

I find it interesting that nobody has asked this question: what is your life situation? Do you have a family? House/mortgage? Health insurance? You mentioned that CoCalc hires some engineers, some hat’s the burn rate? What do you need to keep working on it? If you have got your baseline covered, William, i’d say go for it. Your heart is clearly on this path.

williamstein 8y ago
> Do you have a family? Only a spouse, who has an excellent job. > House/mortgage? Yes, I bought a detached house 12 years ago in Seattle. > Health insurance? Yes, through my spouse. > You mentioned that CoCalc hires some engineers, so that’s the burn rate? Yes, we employ 4 people (including me). If we employed three instead, we would not be losing money...

kevinventullo 8y ago

It seems to me that a more flexible university would be lucky to have you. "William Stein" was a household name among the number theorists I knew.

noisycircuit 8y ago

I am commenting because I have read parts of your algebraic number theory book and used Sage extensively. The book helped me but did not significantly change anything about my life. It is possible to learn the same topics by reading other books. I love many parts of Sage and it has changed what I am able to do. It seems like the options are tenure: a path where you make incremental progress on narrow problems with the benefit of low stress and an excellent standard of living. company: a path where you get to continue changing the world in a meaningful way. The cost is high stress and a less certain standard of living in your current city. You provide a lot of details about your situation but I don't think they are relevant. The details would only matter if the worst case outcome of either path was a life that you could not bear to live. Given your many accomplishments this is not a problem. I think people should try to minimize the regret in their lives rather than maximizing their average daily happiness. It sounds like you would regret not continuing to work on your company.

quotha 8y ago

Flip a coin, when it's in the air, you will know what side you hope it lands on.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
yathern 8y ago
He's already decided, and is resigning, as per the end of the post.

adenadel 8y ago

I'm really disappointed (with my impression) that UW doesn't seem to appreciate what has been accomplished with Sage and the value of a major open source competitor to Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, etc. I hope William and Cocalc are tremendously successful.

paulgb 8y ago
To add to his accomplishments, Sage was a pioneer of the web-based client/server notebook model now popular in Jupyter. I'm not sure if Sage was THE first instance of this, but certainly one of the first.
- orbifold 8y ago
  Well to be fair Mathematica had a client server notebook architecture since early on. Today it also supports a web fronted besides the now (QT based?) native client. The native client is way more powerful and performant than anything that Jupyter offers and can be extended in the client Language itself. IPython/Jupyter is a more or less direct copy of Mathematica's interaction pattern but as is often the case a poor imitation in many regards. As a comparison https://observablehq.com https://observablehq.com seems like a genuine novel take on the notebook pattern and is unsurprisingly a commercial effort with some open source components.
- williamstein 8y ago
  Thanks! You're referring to the Sage notebook, and the key feature is that it is web-based with some collaboration support. I believe it was the first instance of this at the level of sophistication that it attained, which was significant given the web development tools available a decade ago. I started sagenb in 2006 after seeing a demo of a local OS X frontend for IPython. I did a huge amount of work on it, but there were also many students who did too (e.g., a 16-year old in the Philippines named Tim Dumol). The Sage notebook (and IPython) was very much inspired by Mathematica, Macsyma, and Emacs. Jupyter notebook was written a few years later, and has a more modern architecture (it used websockets). Jupyter has a much newer client called JupyterLab, which uses more modern Javascript tooling, including Typescript, WebPack, Phosphor, and so on. I've been working hard to make CoCalc fully support the Jupyter ecosystem, since I love the momentum behind it and how inclusive the community is. In particular, I wrote a new Jupyter client that supports realtime collaboration.

azhenley 8y ago

UW is a prestigious university and you already earned tenure. Even if you quit your job and the project fails, you're going to be just fine. Probably still a scary decision, but in my eyes you have already "made it". (I'm a tenure-track first year prof.)

winter_blue 8y ago
Is it really that easy to get tenure all over again, after a failed project/startup?
- azhenley 8y ago
  Many, many schools would hire him with tenure if he decided to go back to academia. Or he could choose to go to industry and make plenty of money. Plenty of lucrative and fulfilling options.
  - zamfi 8y ago
    > Many, many schools would hire him with tenure if he decided to go back to academia. Pretty sure this is false.
    - ninguem2 8y ago
      I'd say this is true. It wouldn't be UW nor at the same salary he currently has but, idk, Texas Tech, North Dakota State or some such place would think he would be a high profile catch at least in the next two or three years.
  - neilv 8y ago
    Could you say more about how noted professor marketability would work in this case, in your field? My reasons for asking... I've heard mathematics academia has its own version of ageism. (In dotcoms, at least, it's easy to go from being a star who everyone wants to hire, to most people not caring.) Plus I wonder how it would be perceived: a history of seeming to want to do a startup rather than be a professor. And a university that wanted to be the new home of a prestige research&eduction open source software project would have to see whether the prior university's involvement would complicate things.

heinrichf 8y ago

Professor Stein is an active HN member by the way: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=williamstein https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=williamstein

keithnz 8y ago
not only that, his actual post of this blog post is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19665027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19665027

SubiculumCode 8y ago

If you are a developmental neuroscientists then yes. I need your job. The job market is not great, as you'd know.

ska 8y ago
Should I reply to the title of a posting without reading it? No, I probably shouldn't.

throwaway5752 8y ago

Yes, you are absolutely correct in your decision to resign. It's - if I'm being honest here - painfully clear you are much more interested in your side project (from the prospective of UW) than your ostensible job. I think for your sake and theirs' you should resign and try to commercialize this, or you will fail at both. Either that or completely hand off or abandon the project.

tashi 8y ago
It's not inherently a side project, it only has to be one because his department doesn't view this work as a contribution to pure mathematics. Seems shortsighted for a field where progress is often measured in centuries.

broken_symlink 8y ago

Since he brought up he may have been in the wrong place being in the math department, did he ever actually try to switch to the CS department?

jhbadger 8y ago
In UW's case, that would be even more difficult than usual because of its organization. The mathematics department is in the College of Arts and Science and the CS department is in the engineering school. These are practically like separate universities within UW.
- williamstein 8y ago
  Indeed -- CS is now the "Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering", so it's not just a department. I never tried to move to CS, and I have no idea if there would have been a path to do so. When I first got hired at UW in 2006, some faculty in the CS department were very supportive of Sage, even giving me some temporary office space in one of their old buildings.
  - broken_symlink 8y ago
    I would have tried to explore that option before leaving completely. I know two professors who have switched fields, one was physics professor who did work in string theory, switched to genomics and got position at a medical school. Another was a CS professor who actually went in to math. You sometimes see CS professors who have degrees in pure math just browsing different department's websites.

Areading314 8y ago

I saw Prof. Stein's talk at JupyterCon last year and was blown away by what he had accomplished with CoCalc. It was one of the best talks at the conference IMO. Very excited to see where CoCalc is headed and wish Prof. Stein all the best. Edit: here is the talk https://pyvideo.org/jupytercon-2018/real-time-collaboration-with-jupyter-notebooks-using-cocalc-william-stein-sagemath-inc.html https://pyvideo.org/jupytercon-2018/real-time-collaboration-...

williamstein 8y ago
Thanks! I'm currently working on realtime collaboration for ipywidgets, which is an interesting challenge.
fspeech 8y ago
Thanks for the link. Watching it I can't help but feel a little sad. Prof. Stein is a highly trained mathematician with a track record in establishing successful software projects like Sage that many people benefit tremendously from (watching the video I learned that he actually started Cython as well!). It says something about the state of affairs -- the general lack of awareness and interest in the development of math unless it benefits some business directly -- when he could not find the resource needed to develop the math software he loved the way he wanted to. Maybe he really enjoyed working on the sync protocols, text formats, backend databases and file systems etc needed to get CoCalc running smoothly. But I wonder if he had the resource he needed would he make the same choice? I say this as I have a son who is double majoring in CS and math. As a freshman he is already mostly done with upper division math (3 A+ in honors real and complex analysis) and is taking graduate math classes. Yet it seems prudent for him to at least put in the minimum effort to get his CS degree to keep his option open. Eventually it will be a hard choice down the road for him as well.
- williamstein 8y ago
  > But I wonder if he had the resource he needed would he make the same choice? If I had the resources I needed, I definitely would not have made the same choice. Though I enjoy somewhat working on sync protocols, databases, etc., it is only a means to an end. Mathematics software is much deeper and more interesting me. If I had sufficient resources a few years ago, I absolutely would have instead built a team to work fulltime on Sage, similar to how John Cannon successfully built an amazing team around Magma, partly leveraging that Magma is closed source and commercial -- https://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/ https://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/.

formalsystem 8y ago

TBH I feel like there's very little risk with quitting to work on a project that already has users. It seems like he's a good enough programmer that he could always find a job at a big tech company, make a bunch of money and then quit once he has enough saved up. And that's assuming he doesn't find any paid users or get any source of funding which again is hard but not impossible or that unlikely given that he already has a product with users. I think he'll be just fine and I wish him the best.

dman 8y ago
Job market for programmers will not always be what it is today.
- formalsystem 8y ago
  Curious what's your reasoning behind this? If anything I see programmer jobs as one of the only professions that will survive the next couple of decades.
- andrewnc 8y ago
  That's true. I bet we'll see many more different sorts of jobs open up as tech increases in complexity.

ptero 8y ago

This is a hard question to answer, but here are a few thoughts: 1. Resigning from a tenured position likely means taking a one-way street. The exception is a well-known scientist that can easily switch tenure to 2-3 other school today. In many fields competition for tenure is brutal and once you leave you may have some disadvantages in re-entry against a bunch of post-docs. "Only losers leave academia" is still a widely held mindset. All this does not mean not to resign; just be aware. 2. Do you still need money? The fact that the company is not ramen profitable in 7 years (including last 3 years of dedicated effort) means it may not be a source of income for a while. If you are not set for life, how long can you afford to not work? Will you be OK in industry (some professors thrive there some are completely miserable with a manager who tells them what to do and imposes deadlines)? Unless you are set for life I would seriously consider your 50% option -- you get another year to fully dedicate to your startup without teaching a single day and still maintain tenure. In a year, re-evaluate. My 2c.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
> The fact that the company is not ramen profitable in 7 years (including last 3 years of dedicated effort) means it may not be a source of income for a while. This is always a flag for me for something that needs to be investigated. Personally I think the idea the guy took to stick with CoCalc was interesting but at the same time he should really really consider hiring a CFO, someone who really understands where the money comes in and how it goes out. Such a person could tell him exactly how much "lifetime value" is needed from each customer in order to make the company a going concern. Sometimes that number is "impossible" in that it is way more than one believes they could get for the product. When that happens, you have to take a serious look at whether or not you're looking at a hobby or a business. It is always difficult to see these sorts of discussions after they have been had, especially when there was information that could have been developed earlier on that would have informed the decision, but it is not uncommon.
- joycian 8y ago
  From what I have gathered from mathematician friends, they are catching on to CoCalc. I for one think it has promise. Especially with the dominance of Python in CS department intro classes, a Sage-based math environment for math classes (e.g. abstract algebra / group theory) seems sensible. Once those programmes start adopting it, you are good to go.

raphlinus 8y ago

This post resonated with me strongly. Yes, resigning sounds like the obvious best choice. I hope it works out well! I can certainly understand why Prof. Stein doesn't want to trash his colleagues, but I'll come out and say it: if academia wasn't completely dysfunctional, it would find a way to support this work. For my own work (which is nowhere nearly as academically relevant as CoCalc and Sage) I'm planning on doing it myself without worrying too much about funding. I can use a combination of savings, random consulting gigs, Patreon, etc. I can imagine doing more "company" kinds of things, but only to the extent it supports the work. This is not an easy problem, and again I wish Prof. Stein well.

selimthegrim 8y ago
If Jim Simons wouldn’t play ball it’s hardly only academia that’s implicated
- raphlinus 8y ago
  This is true. The philanthropy scene is probably one of the few areas that has even more screwed-up incentives than academia.
- hopler 8y ago
  Jim Simons doesn't understand open source and open access, because the source of his $15Billion net worth (proprietary hedge fund strategy) depends on him not understanding it. And also perhaps because he doesn't understand software very well. He could have made Magma free for everyone, but instead he bought a license only for his chosen elites to use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10175563

daly 8y ago

As lead developer on Axiom, an open source computer algebra system, I can fully appreciate his funding problem. One problem is that open source software can't really handle grants. Government grants require accounting to handle receipts, and follow all of the rules. We need a couple "open source accounting" people who can handle managing grants (just like a school's bursar's office). I have tried to find a funding stream for nearly 20 years, without success. I am currently doing computer algebra research as a visiting scholar. That is an unpaid position. Perhaps you can remain connected to the department as a visiting scholar. If there is some way I can help, please let me know.

onedognight 8y ago
I’m not sure if SPI has supported member projects with receiving government grants specifically, but they are setup to provide shared resources like accounting for open source projects. https://www.spi-inc.org/ https://www.spi-inc.org/
xvilka 8y ago
Organizations like Open Collective[1] can help to handle this. P.S. What do you think about moving the site to GitHub Pages instead[2] (and overall modernization of it). [1] https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/ [2] https://github.com/daly/axiom/issues/13 https://github.com/daly/axiom/issues/13
williamstein 8y ago
> Perhaps you can remain connected to the department as a visiting scholar. I will, though as an "adjunct". It's of course unpaid, but makes it technically possible to do some things with the university (e.g., be on a Ph.D. thesis committee).
cf 8y ago
I know this isn't the most appropriate place to ask, but what are the main feature gaps between commercial computer algebra systems like Mathematica/Maple and systems like Axiom/Sympy?
- 8y ago