Should I give up?

First, kudos to Umeå university for being forward-thinking enough to (gasp) allow you to own your own work.<p>To answer your question: If I were in your position, I'd try to work an option 1.5 -- see if you can take an unpaid leave of absence for 4 months and spend that time working on your startup. Most universities are happy to let their faculty do this sort of thing, since they usually come back far more excited about their research than when they left.<p>Spend those 4 months working on your startup full-time, and plan on deciding at the start of the 4th month whether you're going to take your option 1 or your option 2. I don't think you can really make a rational decision without working on this full-time for at least a few months.<p>Re your startup: Have you considered putting it together with freebase? I don't know how structured your input databases need to be; but since freebase is basically wikipedia (EDIT: and apparently other data sources now, too) parsed and converted into a database, being able to run natural language queries against it could be very interesting...

We (StreamFocus - lisp based) are on our final UI upgrade push before launching open beta in the next few weeks. We are missing search right now, and would be very interested to license your system to work with us. Right now we use traditional Mysql tables as well as a mysql triples table, but most of the real work happens in lisp.<p>Are you interested?

I would first create a list of firms that have strategic interests in your product area (DB and BI Vendors, DM service companies, Lisp consulting firms/vendors, etc.) You might find a company that is willing to buy the technology and/or offer another profitable arrangement. A joint venture, perhaps.<p>Option 2 might be your only real option, but even then I would think you might be able to use your work as a springboard into something more lucrative...?

Please don't give up! I just tried your geography demo, and I'm no expert, but I was very impressed.

Don't do it. If your system is good enough, there will be demand for it, and you'll KNOW when the time is right to quit. Otherwise, you're taking a needless risk - you can have the same benefits without the risk just by making some clever decisions and delegating properly.

I don't know the details of the system you've created, but you could use a 'restrictive' open source license like the GPL, and offer a dual licensing strategy, where people who want to use it in commercial systems pay to get a compatible license. That only works if it's a library though, rather than an independent system.<p>Another idea might be to find a partner first, and let that person handle most of the business, and just concentrate on the technical aspects of it.<p>Good luck!

We can't answer that for you... but we can tell you a bit about our own situation.<p>Personally, I've been running my own (much simpler) VPS hosting startup (<a href="http://prgmr.com" rel="nofollow">http://prgmr.com</a>) for more than two years. I'm on my second Porsche worth of personal money plowed into the thing (ok, second Porsche boxter... I'm probably still on my first, you know, real Porsche.)<p>I dono. I mean, my company breaks even these days... most of what I've gotten out of it is experience and contacts (and those are worth something... my bill rate as a consultant verges on ridiculous, and I have a book deal. Pretty good for a Midwestern hick with no formal education.) I don't regret doing it, but if I had a chance to do it over I'd focus more on being more public (blogging, documenting, etc...) and less on the actual business.<p>If I could 'open source' my project, I think that would magnify the benefits (that is, credibility and contacts) But you can't really 'open source' an ISP, which is essentially what I am.<p>So yeah, personally I'd advise you to go for option #2, unless you can get significant investment from someone else.<p>But then, you sound like you started from a different position than I did. It's possible that because I had so little when I started the credibility is worth a lot more to me than it is worth to you.<p>Also, I have my own conflict of interest... your project sounds pretty cool, and I'd like to be able to use that technology for my own projects, or use products built by other people using that technology. Open-sourcing it is likely the best way to get the tech out to the masses.

I know this quandary well though I was a post-doc when I took the plunge.<p>Why does it have to be #1 or the other? Could you see about taking a one-year leave of absence from your tenured position? Seems that if you're successful you'll generate a lot of good publicity for your university. Furthermore, you could try to find a visiting relationship with a university at one of the hubs. For you it would be a good way to meet people and your current university could see you're still serious about the academy even if you only "visit" a minority of your time.

How close are you to getting sabbatical? (Does your university even offer it?) Several professors in my department (including my adviser) have used their sabbatical on startups.

Michael, Neither of the options you have provided would equate to 'giving up'. So I would give a definate NO to giving up.<p>Treating your project as a research project does not equate to giving up.<p>I don't know enough about this market/competitors/technology/market size, etc to define what you should do going forward.<p>The question I think you should be asking is 'is this a viable business'.<p>I suspect most of the YC community who are telling you to go for it! are potentially speaking from a start-up attitude of 'live the dream' etc. etc. They may be right, but not every business is a good business.<p>Your technology might be the best out there, I just don't know. Personally, I wasn't blown-away by the demos, but I'm not saying that to be harsh, just that from my perspective, I'm not seeing your competitive advantage. You've put a bunch of work into this, and it may be the best in the market and able to make a significant contribution to the world.<p>Does your university have a business school, or entrepreneurs club or something? Maybe you could get somebody there to help with defining the market and business planning.

Not wanting to be a wet blanket on this party but this system has a looong way to go. Too many of the queries I made either gave me dumb error messages or decided to answer a different question.<p>Try and search for the shortest river. No dice. Given that it knows about second, third and the like I tried to rephrase this as "last longest river". All I got back was the longest river, it dropped 'last'. It knows average but not mean. It reports 'average length of a river' as 1117.2391304347826087. That's a great deal of precision for something without a unit of measure. What is this in: meters, kilometres, centimetres, feet, inches, miles? Given that the data is from America I would expect this to be in miles but I suspect that it is probably in kilometres.<p>Has this really taken 18k lines of code?<p>Stay put and knock this thing into shape on the universities dime then start your own company.

Very nice design. But:<p>"Server Down on localhost:9009 Please visit again in a couple of hours."

How certain are you about your presumed choices?<p>You ask us to choose either 1 or 2, yet we have no idea what situation and/or persons brought you to this apparent fork in the road. I suspect there may be a 3rd, 4th, &#38;etc paths that prove better. Nor do I see 1 and 2 as mutually exclusive as you state. Many, if not most, researcher/educators are simultaneously entrepreneurs. And giving up tenure may prove costly, especially in the long run.<p>Perhaps tell us more about the conflicts of interest that have arisen. I sense that they involve other peoples wishes or meddling, which are usually best ignored or stepped on.

one todo, I think, clarify your website for the obvious questions, so people don't have to download the demo and watch screencasts to get something out of it:<p>- what is the benefit of your algorithm and code over Lucene/SOLR? quantifiable metrics, e.g.precision/recall-wise? What natural languages does it parse/work best in?<p>- what kind of analysis, in layman's terms (Layman: somebody who's implmeented Lucene, sphinx, the search engine, not CMU sphinx, MySQL fulltext search, not an NLP researcher) From the company name, i would assume anaphor resolution is included, or something related, named entity resolution.

Michael,<p>My suggestion is that you use your salary to hire someone to work fulltime on the project. You are presumably in a good position to find a smart employee who is interested in your work and will be able to contribute within a short period of time.<p>If you cannot make headway in the market with two developers/proponents, it seems unlikely you will succeed alone. Not all of the work needs to be technical - there's no reason you can't hire someone and have them handle marketing/sales.

This is neat stuff.<p>Actually we (reviewgist.com) could also do with something like this. Infact, we spent some time working on a similar system for our needs, but anticipating a dis-proportionate consumer response dropped it. But if you go through our site, you would know exactly what I am talking about.<p>Also to answer your question, imo go with 1.

This is very interesting technology something our startup like many others could use it. Server licensing is always tricky. I would say go with number 2 and in the meantime build a commercial product around the technology. Since you understand this technology the best it wouldn't be hard for you to build a shopping engine based on CatchPhrase.

I tried a few queries and I was really impressed. Seems to me like some real value for the IP there and wouldn't recommend going opensource unless you already patented it(Europe but I think doesnt have software patents right?)

This is really neat. Especially the idea of allowing users to modify the database. How would one add data to the demo to indicate that Cambridge, MA and Silicon Valley are the best places to start a tech startup?

IMHO option 1 is the way to go if you don't have a family

Step 1: Do #1 as you mention<p>Step 2: Quit and start your startup<p>Step 3: If things don't work out, then go to your step #2, and move onto other jobs

I'd go for option 1. It seems like a solid system and it does have value. I would love for my city's library system to use it for example.

Michael, I suggest this:<p>1. Don't spend any huge money on this project until it picks up significantly.<p>2. treat this as a hobby, which means don't lose sleep over it.<p>3. focus on your work that makes money if money is a factor<p>4. take it easy. leave the company as it is.<p>5. try to make this not be written in LISP. that is a lot of lines of code. convert it.<p>6. Keep everything going the same time. don't quit your job.