Comment by wg0
2 years ago
Yeah maybe handful of them. That too are also mostly lunatic ideas with little grounding in solid serious rigorous academic and scientific research with no feasible functioning product in sight or something financially viable on the horizon. It's not that they already have a research outcome that they need to "productize" with manufacturing and distribution channels.
Things like Neura Link, Carbon capture, fusion and such.
Most or close to 98% are just building an "app" or an app with a website such as yelp but for dogs, dogs but for cats or other tools that other founders should buy such as sales and leads management etc etc.
Mostly - meaningless.
You're coming off as very biased. My startup was certainly grounded in research and rigor, I even spoke with academics at universities about the work. In many ways, my project was productizing some state of the art CRDT research by applying it to a domain that is in dire need of solutions - information security.
Most founders I met were doing similarly well-founded work. You're thinking about a tiny fraction of the VC market - the moonshot startups that make the news. Most people are raising money around very reasonable ideas, of course, since VCs obviously have to minimize risk for some of their investments.
I'm glad that you're working on something solid. You're not I'm addressing to. Rather the opposite. You are (or were) building something that has rigorous formally documented academic work.
> You're thinking about a tiny fraction of the VC market - the moonshot startups that make the news.
Exactly, that's why I implied that it's a very very small number. May be less than a fraction.
CRDTs would be interesting area to watch. :)
> Exactly, that's why I implied that it's a very very small number.
Perhaps I misread, it sounded like the opposite.
Wild post. No trolling: What is the cross section of CRDT and info sec? Usually, "CRDT" is like catnip on HN. And, yes, I am a major fanboi/fangurl of CRDT. The first time I ever watched a networed text editor with "simultaneously" blinking cursors where two humans were editing in parallel was mind blowing. It opens your mind to many other collaborative editing ideas.
I work in the SIEM space, which basically involves ingesting massive amounts of data (relatively speaking). A single customer can ingest terabytes a day, or even 10s to 100s of terabytes of data a day. And you want to run near-arbitrary realtime analytics on it + batch analytics on it. It's a fun, difficult problem.
My product's big thing was to extract the data from logs and into a graph data structure. The thing is that I've just taken "huge amount of scale + nice, immutable log" and turned it into "huge amount of scale + evil, mutable graph". Building a massive-scale graph datastructure that can be mutated over time is... hard. Like, "hope you've been keeping up on your academic papers" hard.
One of the key optimizations I leveraged was to represent the graph as a CRDT. Every Node has a `merge` function that follows CRDT semantics.
This allows me to collapse states together in a way that converges.
Security queries have some interesting properties:
1. They often care about thresholds, meaning that they inherently work well with a lattice (once a you've hit a "bad" state you will always want to investigate that state - this is unlike, say, operations where if it "recovers" you can ignore it)
2. They almost always filter out data
These two properties combine nicely. It means that if our alert is a threshold, and our data only 'grows' in one direction (thanks CRDTs), we can reject queries using stale data and not worry about invalidating any caches.