4 ms·

Ehhh, I am not sure that this is truly the issue with your presentation. If it is truly "we can do X just like FamousApplication(tm), except we are in the brow

by apalmer 14y ago

Ehhh, I am not sure that this is truly the issue with your presentation. If it is truly "we can do X just like FamousApplication(tm), except we are in the browser and we can be profitable charging 10% as much as FamousApplication(tm)", that is pretty compelling. That is not something that is really difficult to sell if you can truly deliver and be profitable at that price point. I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud, without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential investors about.

apalmer 14y ago
looked at your product, it appears to be quite literally octave in the cloud. Serious question, How can this scale to tens of thousands of users simultaneously using it? It is entirely possible that this is no where near as performance intensive as I am assuming it to be. Second question, Whats to stop a competitor from doing the same thing your doing at half the price? It seems like it would be relatively trivial for another company to take input matlab programs from a browser, shell out to octave, and then return the results via the http response, and make it look pretty on the client. There may be a whole lot more going on, but from the outside looking in it appears like there is no moat, any technically decent company could enter this niche and do the same exact thing your doing with minimal effort. Those two questions you have to answer i think rather than whether or not this is a 'solution' or a 'something'
- shubb 14y ago
  The product right now looks pretty crude, but it also looks like a very early stage prototype. If they had say 5 good engineers on this for a year, I suspect it would look very much more compelling. To do that, you need funding, hence the ycombinator interview.
x43b 14y ago
"I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud, without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential investors about." I am an engineer (not CE/CS) who uses Matlab, so I am probably missing something fundamental. However, I am curious why you think server side Matlab requires order of magnitude more efficient solutions to current Matlab. Even as a poor college student I used to SSH into my personal desktop running Matlab and it ran acceptably. At work I will remote into another system running Matlab without issue. Sure if you are doing heavy plot manipulation it may get a bit laggy depending on the situation, but why would mathematical algorithms need to be rewritten unless you mean graphical?
- apalmer 14y ago
  I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great! If you cant though, then there is some kinda balancing act that the OP has to optimize, how many matlab sessions can simultaneously be hosted on one of the OPs VMs in the cloud at what cost? Since most of the cloud infrastructure providers seem to charge an arm and a leg for CPU, and I am assuming (maybe incorrectly) that this service will be CPU heavy, as an investor I would have to be convinced that this team has some technique for bringing down these costs... either they would have to have better algorithms, or perhaps some interesting grid architecture that drastically reduces CPU time and hence costs, or something. I am making assumptions here, but I think these are standard assumptions, these are the kind of assumptions you have to convince a investor you have a solution for. It may be as simple as saying, we can service 10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs, I have no clue what the numbers work out to, but they would have to at least show how this can scale profitably.
  - x43b 14y ago

by apalmer 14y ago

apalmer 14y ago

looked at your product, it appears to be quite literally octave in the cloud. Serious question, How can this scale to tens of thousands of users simultaneously using it? It is entirely possible that this is no where near as performance intensive as I am assuming it to be. Second question, Whats to stop a competitor from doing the same thing your doing at half the price? It seems like it would be relatively trivial for another company to take input matlab programs from a browser, shell out to octave, and then return the results via the http response, and make it look pretty on the client. There may be a whole lot more going on, but from the outside looking in it appears like there is no moat, any technically decent company could enter this niche and do the same exact thing your doing with minimal effort. Those two questions you have to answer i think rather than whether or not this is a 'solution' or a 'something'

shubb 14y ago
The product right now looks pretty crude, but it also looks like a very early stage prototype. If they had say 5 good engineers on this for a year, I suspect it would look very much more compelling. To do that, you need funding, hence the ycombinator interview.

x43b 14y ago

"I am not sure how it is possible you can replace a computationally expensive client side application like MatLAB with something that runs in the cloud, without discovering order of magnitude more efficient solutions for a wide array of well know mathematical algorithms. If you have discovered such then you can pretty much write your own check, if not there is no way you can scale as a service. Thats what I would think you have to convince potential investors about." I am an engineer (not CE/CS) who uses Matlab, so I am probably missing something fundamental. However, I am curious why you think server side Matlab requires order of magnitude more efficient solutions to current Matlab. Even as a poor college student I used to SSH into my personal desktop running Matlab and it ran acceptably. At work I will remote into another system running Matlab without issue. Sure if you are doing heavy plot manipulation it may get a bit laggy depending on the situation, but why would mathematical algorithms need to be rewritten unless you mean graphical?

apalmer 14y ago
I am basing it on the assumption that you cant pragmatically do 100 matlab sessions on a single server or VM. While a single Matlab session may run great on a server you are SSHed into, i dont think you can run 100 matlab sessions on a single VM or server without problems. Maybe you can in which case great! If you cant though, then there is some kinda balancing act that the OP has to optimize, how many matlab sessions can simultaneously be hosted on one of the OPs VMs in the cloud at what cost? Since most of the cloud infrastructure providers seem to charge an arm and a leg for CPU, and I am assuming (maybe incorrectly) that this service will be CPU heavy, as an investor I would have to be convinced that this team has some technique for bringing down these costs... either they would have to have better algorithms, or perhaps some interesting grid architecture that drastically reduces CPU time and hence costs, or something. I am making assumptions here, but I think these are standard assumptions, these are the kind of assumptions you have to convince a investor you have a solution for. It may be as simple as saying, we can service 10,000 simultaneous users on 10 VMs, I have no clue what the numbers work out to, but they would have to at least show how this can scale profitably.
- x43b 14y ago