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Dotscience is shutting down
- lewq 6y agoCEO here. Happy to make introductions to the team for anyone who is hiring. We have valuable residual knowledge about building a product in the MLOps platform space and achieving product-market fit, and I hope that this might be helpful to someone else.
- wtvanhest 6y agoI cannot imagine shutting down a company with a team. Must be really hard. Your note was refreshingly succinct, with genuine thank yous to the people that helped. I don't have any advice or anything, just wanted to let you know that anyone that has ever tried something and failed understands how painful it is, and everyone else won't. Best of luck to you and your team as you all move forward.
- lewq 6y agoThank you
- streetcat1 6y agoThank you. So I am about to introduce a new product into this space, can you share how did you get your first 1-50 customers? Also, Can you share general details about your customer demographic? I.e. what verticals, company size, etc?
- lewq 6y agoDirect outreach on LinkedIn and conferences. Fintech & insurance tech was beachhead market, followed by finance.
- streetcat1 6y agoThank you for your answer. Another question: can you elaborate more on how did you price the product? Did you do A/B testing on the price? ask the first customers?
- lewq 6y agoWe priced too low at first, tried too high when we released our enterprise product, did some compares with other dev tooling in sales convos with early customers and then settled on something in the middle ($600/user/month) and stuck with that cuz it seemed to be working. If we'd been around for longer we would have done more pricing tests but getting the right features to unlock larger deals (more users) was higher priority at the end. Btw, the delivery model that had PMF was customer hosts it in their own cloud, we ship terraform
- streetcat1 6y agoThanks again for the info. This is what I thought about self-hosting. However, did customers raise concerns about hosting your code in their on perm clusters, For example, did they insist that you open source? Also, when you host the code on the customer cluster, how did you track usage? For example, was there a process within the customer site, that would send usage information to your site ? And, I would also imagine that every engagement is unique (not sure if this is correct), Hence, did you outsource the solutions engineering or that was done as part of the team?
- deforciant 6y agoHi, one of the engineers who created dotscience here. Customers didn't insist on open sourcing anything, we did have some open source components but I don't think they cared about that :) Regarding tracking usage - usually it was just many conversations with customers and having them on our Slack channel. Solutions engineering - mostly development team would be helping with writing anything specific that they need. On the SaaS side we had a lot more analytics, used segment, intercom and internal "audit events" to better understand what's happening.
- web007 6y agoCertainly have them check out the WiMLDS job board for positions that may fit their expertise, or contact SigOpt since they seem to be in the same space. I'm not affiliated with either, but know some good folks from both.
- ThePhysicist 6y agoSorry to hear this! Can you share what went wrong ? I’m really interested in the “DevOps for ML” space and I would love to hear what you think was the greatest difficulty or problem with your approach (if you are willing to share that).
- lewq 6y agoHappy to talk - please email me - luke@dotscience.com
- codegeek 6y agoWere you making money but wasn't enough for growth requirements based on existing funding or did you just not have a viable business model ?
- lewq 6y agoWe had early revenue and healthy pipeline, we just ran out of that crucial currency: investor patience.
- timhigins 6y agoYou'd make a lot of AI/ML developers happy by open sourcing as much as possible from your product. Leave a legacy, maybe the community will keep it going!
- lewq 6y agoI'd love to, genuinely, but I don't think it will be possible. https://github.com/dotmesh-io/dotmesh https://github.com/dotmesh-io/dotmesh is already open source though which is one key component of Dotscience.
- bagrow 6y agoThoughts on how the economic situation will affect machine learning and data science in industry more generally?
- tinyhouse 6y agoUber gave us a glimpse last week. I think they shut down a lot of the Uber AI projects and probably laid off many of their ML people.
- gk1 6y agoIf AI/ML was just part of R&D then it's likely to get downsized or cut as companies refocus on their core products. If AI/ML is or is meant to be powering the core products or services, eg at banks, retailers, and manufacturers, then those teams are actually more important than ever. Because ML usually reduces labor and overhead, so the faster they can get it into production the faster they'll lower their operating expenses. The challenge for dotscience was that there are so many players in this space that it's hard to stand out and win deals. See: https://zdnet3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2019/07/17/b17497a0-844e-42b7-9dde-9020902c0b46/resize/1200xauto/bb71fe6d39deaa6ae7f0d06ce64cc841/big-data-landscape-2019-v7.png https://zdnet3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2019/07/17/b17497a0-84... (These landscape charts are always made to look complicated on purpose, but the point is clear.)
- ljvmiranda 6y agoHow will this affect the MLOps Community Webinars? Afaik dotscience plays a big role supporting it. It’s a good and vibrant community, and I’m learning a lot from the webinars as a practitioner. It’d be sad to see if it goes as well
- danthebaker 6y agoThe community and webinars will still live! :-) Demetrios (https://dots.ci/demetrios/linkedin https://dots.ci/demetrios/linkedin) will continue to coordinate this.
- tsieling 6y agoI appreciate how this was handled on the homepage: direct and looking out for your team.
- jorams 6y ago> on the homepage What do you mean by this? I don't see any indication of them shutting down on the homepage, only on the blog.
- mikeyouse 6y agoI got this popup from their homepage: > Dotscience > Thanks for checking out dotscience, unfortunately due to the current situation we have had to close our doors and are no longer operating. You may however enjoy checking out the MLOps community to find out more about all the tooling and best practices happening right now in this ever changing landscape. > Here are some relevant links to the MLOps community: Slack, Youtube, Weekly meetups.
- jorams 6y agoHuh, that's interesting. I even tried a private browsing window without any form of blocking, but I don't get a popup at all.
- Wistar 6y agoI got the pop-up but only on the first visit to the home page. Subsequent visits or a refresh do not trigger the pop-up. Firefox on Win. Noscript set to temporarily allow all.
- nojito 6y agoIt's really revealing that such amazing companies on paper...just don't make money at all and have to resort constantly to outside money to stay alive.
- gk1 6y agoOne thing I learned from working with startups in the space (and other B2B verticals): There is little correlation between how nice the site looks and how well the company is doing as a business. In the consumer space: maybe. But not in enterprise software.
- fxtentacle 6y agoYour comment is worded in a slightly mean way, but I don't disagree. I work on autonomous 3D navigation. Clicking on their "Autonomous Vehicles" solution I see: - model management solutions - enormous quantities of data Well, I have docker containers for my data, and docker containers for the underlying TensorFlow versions, and docker containers for model source code that went into large-scale training. All of that is coordinated using a git repo which has some shell scripts to execute the correct model with matching data on a compatible TF image. So if someone says "I need you to re-run last week's model", I check out the script from that time and run it on an empty server. I honestly don't get what MLOps is or why I would need it.
- antonvs 6y agoHow many other ML people do you work with? Do they all use the same system? Are you only working with Tensorflow and no other tools? Generally things like MLOps are targeted at providing systems for people that either don't know how, or don't have the time, to set something up themselves, especially when the data science team is more than just one or two people, and when they're using a range of tools that need to interoperate in various ways. Something like Kubeflow, for example, does a lot more than what you describe.
- fxtentacle 6y ago2 others, and yes, everyone has access to the central git repo and to our shared private Docker repository. And no, we use TensorFlow and Chainer, but both are python frameworks. Plus Numpy, of course. I like that KubeFlow has an introduction video, but I find it quite odd, too. They talk a lot about how they will make things simpler, but then I learn that I'll need to run Kubernetes on my laptop, my servers, and potentially the cloud. Plus they use irritating marketing phrases like "you can just focus on your model" or "let KubeFlow handle the abstraction of running on X". Most deep learning models nowadays are memory-limited, so improving the model may well mean optimizing GPU memory usage. And after trying to port a working model from Ubuntu + 1080 TI to Google Cloud + V100 and/or Google Cloud TPU, I distrust anyone who would treat those significant hardware differences as "just an abstraction". So at the very least, I'll need to enforce consistent GPUs and Operating Systems among all servers, just to make things run OK everywhere.
- lewq 6y agoBtw https://mlops.community https://mlops.community (which we started) will live on, Demetrios, Chris and Dan are kindly keeping it running ️ If you're interested in MLOps, come and join our weekly 9am PT / 5pm UK Wednesday online meetups - it's a great community and it's growing quickly - and now it's vendor neutral too :)
- kinghuang 6y agoOh, man. That's really unforunate. How will this affect dotmesh?
- lewq 6y agoDotmesh will remain open source and as the original author I'm happy to help maintain it. Are you using it or interested in using it?
- kinghuang 6y agoInterested in using it. I've kept an eye on dotscience and dotmesh for quite some time. At work, we've only very recently ramped up Data Science and ML to a point where tools like these would be really helpful. I loved all the demos of dotscience I've seen at conferences. I'm saddened that we'll never get to try it, but glad to see that dotmesh will live on!
- rafikicoln 6y agoI would love to help out keeping dothub alive. I had a few issues getting it to run but I think it is super cool! :)) I also filed a similar bug in github regarding open sourcing dothub.