4 ms·

Hm, how did they get the initial funding? I want to do the same thing for Octave, for which I'm sure a similar market exists, but I have no idea where to get th

by jordigh 12y ago

Hm, how did they get the initial funding? I want to do the same thing for Octave, for which I'm sure a similar market exists, but I have no idea where to get the money to get started. This isn't a startup that just grows indefinitely. It's not a build once, sell infinitely often kind of thing. Each contract requires constant labour and upkeep. So how did they manage to attract a hedge fund? And are they losing any autonomy in that? Also, will this distract them by making them work on customer-specific software and installations instead of working on Julia itself?

RockyMcNuts 12y ago
yeah... raises a lot of questions, did they blog somewhere about what they're doing? which hedge fund? how is it going to help/change evolution of the platform?
- otoburb 12y ago
  Does it matter which hedge fund? According to the article, the hedge fund offered them a contract for what seems like an open-ended engagement while simultaneously encouraging the core developers to go out and raise funds. Seems like Julia Computing partners decided not to raise funds and instead are trying to bootstrap themselves as per the article quote: "The startup is currently completely bootstrapped and has about a dozen employees including the founders, with no immediate plans for raising funds." The term "startup", probably chosen by the publication and not by the consulting practice partners, is definitely confusing. However, since Shah also discussed potential products that the LLC would be trying to commercialize, the choice of words and resultant confusion is understandable. Stefan Karpinski lists himself as a founding partner as of 2013[1], so the idea has clearly been percolating in the back of the core developer team's heads for a while, and rightly so since how else can they sustain the development of the language full-time? [1] http://karpinski.org/resume/ http://karpinski.org/resume/
  - ViralBShah 12y ago
    Yup, Julia Computing has been around for all of last year, and it has been publicly known, but perhaps not widely, as I gather from the comments here. We talked about it at JuliaCon 2014. See: http://juliacon.org/2014/ http://juliacon.org/2014/ The terms are used a bit loosely. Commercial support is what I think of as a scalable product, which is different from consulting and training, which are services we provide. Having Julia Computing has meant that we can do Julia for a living, helping our customers who also love Julia. A win-win!
    - RockyMcNuts 11y ago
      If the 'NY hedge fund' can be publicly named / give an endorsement, it would drive adoption in other hedge funds and financial applications. It's a pretty small universe and surely one thing holding back adoption is confidence that it's production-ready, availability of a pool of people who use it, etc.
gjm11 12y ago
> how did they manage to attract a hedge fund? By developing a language that's well suited for work the hedge fund wanted to do, I expect. Imagine you're a hedge fund; you have quants building models using maybe Python and MATLAB, and maybe production software in C++. A language that offers MATLAB-like conciseness for array operations, Python-like decent language design generally, and not-so-far-from-C++-like execution speed is going to be very interesting. But it's still a newish language, not perfectly mature, and you're worried about running into bugs. You would prefer those bugs to get fixed, preferably quickly. Bankrolling the Julia team seems like it could be a pretty good move.
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
I'd suspect that an organization with the money to bring in a contractor is not too far removed from an organization with money to buy matlab licenses.

by jordigh 12y ago

RockyMcNuts 12y ago

yeah... raises a lot of questions, did they blog somewhere about what they're doing? which hedge fund? how is it going to help/change evolution of the platform?

otoburb 12y ago
Does it matter which hedge fund? According to the article, the hedge fund offered them a contract for what seems like an open-ended engagement while simultaneously encouraging the core developers to go out and raise funds. Seems like Julia Computing partners decided not to raise funds and instead are trying to bootstrap themselves as per the article quote: "The startup is currently completely bootstrapped and has about a dozen employees including the founders, with no immediate plans for raising funds." The term "startup", probably chosen by the publication and not by the consulting practice partners, is definitely confusing. However, since Shah also discussed potential products that the LLC would be trying to commercialize, the choice of words and resultant confusion is understandable. Stefan Karpinski lists himself as a founding partner as of 2013[1], so the idea has clearly been percolating in the back of the core developer team's heads for a while, and rightly so since how else can they sustain the development of the language full-time? [1] http://karpinski.org/resume/ http://karpinski.org/resume/
- ViralBShah 12y ago
  Yup, Julia Computing has been around for all of last year, and it has been publicly known, but perhaps not widely, as I gather from the comments here. We talked about it at JuliaCon 2014. See: http://juliacon.org/2014/ http://juliacon.org/2014/ The terms are used a bit loosely. Commercial support is what I think of as a scalable product, which is different from consulting and training, which are services we provide. Having Julia Computing has meant that we can do Julia for a living, helping our customers who also love Julia. A win-win!
  - RockyMcNuts 11y ago
    If the 'NY hedge fund' can be publicly named / give an endorsement, it would drive adoption in other hedge funds and financial applications. It's a pretty small universe and surely one thing holding back adoption is confidence that it's production-ready, availability of a pool of people who use it, etc.

gjm11 12y ago

> how did they manage to attract a hedge fund? By developing a language that's well suited for work the hedge fund wanted to do, I expect. Imagine you're a hedge fund; you have quants building models using maybe Python and MATLAB, and maybe production software in C++. A language that offers MATLAB-like conciseness for array operations, Python-like decent language design generally, and not-so-far-from-C++-like execution speed is going to be very interesting. But it's still a newish language, not perfectly mature, and you're worried about running into bugs. You would prefer those bugs to get fixed, preferably quickly. Bankrolling the Julia team seems like it could be a pretty good move.

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago

I'd suspect that an organization with the money to bring in a contractor is not too far removed from an organization with money to buy matlab licenses.