I spent entire 2013 building a startup in AI, specifically in NLP. I had well-defined business applications in mind. (I had already deprioritized over ten ide

I spent entire 2013 building a startup in AI, specifically in NLP. I had well-defined business applications in mind. (I had already deprioritized over ten ideas after discussing with various people including potential customers, and chose to focus on the NLP ones.) I was ahead of the times in vision, and right in technical direction (deep neural networks plus more). But I was not confident and not comfortable in raising money. Some friends were willing to give seed funding, after seeing a startup in a domain I had deprioritized emerge with a successful exit. I did not accept the offer. There was one person helping me as a technical co-founder. I needed a business person to join as a co-founder, however, no one I wanted from my circles was willing to take the plunge. A friend casually connected me to a VC. I did not even know that the person I was going to meet was a VC. I reviewed the applications with him. He liked the proposals and said he could get me customers the moment the product is ready. I did not even discuss raising money. Behind the scenes, I was facing a significant personal challenge. I underestimated the amount of time needed for training data preparation. More time was going on that instead of algorithm development. Starting in 2014, a former colleague offered me a contract job in computer vision (even though I had no prior experience in computer vision), which I took to support the startup. That not only consumed me fully, but was very interesting and challenging in its own right. The NLP startup work ended up on the backseat. My computer vision work was briefly covered by an independent blog writer here: https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/03/29/243161/qualcomm-wants-your-smartphone-to-have-energy-efficient-eyes/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/03/29/243161/qualcomm-... I was left with a feeling that had I raised money and thereby gone more strongly towards the startup work, I could have been at the forefront of modern AI with deep neural networks. To summarize, I failed because of the personal challenge which is in fact continuing till date and has severely demotivated me, and because of my reluctance to risk someone else's money. Aside: Having learnt computer vision afresh on this contract job, I later implemented simplified versions of several classical computer vision algorithms in Microsoft Excel, using a series of one-liner formulas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357374