At the 48th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2022), which will be held in Sydney (Australia) during 5-9 September 2022, I will be moderating a database startups panel in which all the panelists and I will be present in person in Sydney. To my knowledge, this will be the second time such a panel will be hosted in a research-oriented database conference. The first time was at the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2020) which was held virtually in June 2020. I moderated that panel also. That panel got a lot of positive feedback. The description of that panel is at https://bit.ly/SIG20sp and the video recording of it is at https://bit.ly/DBStPa
I
would like to give here all interested parties some details about the
upcoming VLDB 2022 panel which is modeled after the one in SIGMOD
2020. I would like to invite numerous people to attend the panel in
person in Sydney or tune into the webcast of the panel. Tell your
friends also about this panel by sharing this note on your social
media feeds.
The
panelists, most of whom I have known for a long time, are a set of
people with different backgrounds in terms of their geographic
locations, research careers, startup experiences, maturity of their
past and present startups, etc. Please look up the profiles of the
panelists by clicking on the hot links and by reading the biodata
given in https://bit.ly/StPaVL to
find out more about them.
Panel Title: Startups Founded by Database Researchers
Date
and Time:
6 September 2022 (Tuesday), 13:30-15:00 (Sydney Time)
Moderator:
C. Mohan (Tsinghua University)
Panelists:
Anand Deshpande (Persistent Systems, India)
Vincent Gramoli (University of Sydney and Redbelly Network, Australia)
Mark Raasveldt (DuckDB Labs and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, The Netherlands)
Cyrus Shahabi (University of Southern California, USA)
The
format of the panel will be the following:
The first part will be the initial remarks by each of us (5 minutes per person). These will introduce the panelists and their startups. The questions posed by me below will also be addressed to an extent in those introductory remarks.
Then the 7 of us will discuss the already prepared questions and more questions that arise based on the contents of the introductory remarks and live discussions among the panelists.
Next,
we will take up questions posed by the audience. I welcome inputs
on questions to be posed by me. You can reach me via my email ID
on my home page.
Here are the initial set of questions that I am asking the panelists to address in their initial remarks and during the subsequent discussions:
1. Has your academic background helped or hurt you in your entrepreneurship?
2.
What
role
has your base of operation had on how successful you could hope to be
with your startup – funding, staffing, acquiring customers?
3. If you were to restart your startup activity now, what would you do differently?
4. If you have had a successful exit, what were the significant factors that contributed to it? If you had an unsuccessful exit, what were the causes?
5. How did you balance your startup and concurrent academic activities, if any?
6. Does the experience of working earlier in an established company help in being more successful later at a startup – from your own direct experience or from the experience of your collaborators?
7. How cooperative were your universities, funding agencies, … in your commercialization efforts if your startup was an off-shoot of a university research project?
8. If your co-founder/collaborator was at a totally different experience level, how did your interactions go? Full of friction or smoother than anticipated?
9. What role, if any, open-source software has played in your efforts?
10. Can the VLDB community help you in anyway?
11. Did your company pivot significantly from the original goals you had when you started? If yes, why and how did you figure out what direction to pivot in? In retrospect, how did things turn out? Any regrets?