“Why did Guesstimate/Squiggle as for-profit not work out?” I’ve been asked this question a bunch of times before, happy to give some quick thoughts here. Most of my answer is here.
If it were the case that it seemed very easy to make these as startups, and ideally in which there were some clear cofounders who could handle the business side, I think the for-profit side would have been more promising.
In my case: 1. I realized this was a niche/small space, that getting a large market would likely mean having to pivot. 2. I wasn’t sure what might take off. I think Squiggle has a lot going for it, but am not sure if the value proposition is strong enough for a large company now, especially as LLMs have been getting much more powerful (changing the trade-offs around decision tools). 3. My main goal was helping effective altruist / rationalist researchers, and I suspected that focusing much more on commercialization would have hurt that. 4. Related to (3), I just found myself much more motivated to go after altruists/nonprofits than to go after standard enterprise deals
“Why did Guesstimate/Squiggle as for-profit not work out?”
I’ve been asked this question a bunch of times before, happy to give some quick thoughts here. Most of my answer is here.
If it were the case that it seemed very easy to make these as startups, and ideally in which there were some clear cofounders who could handle the business side, I think the for-profit side would have been more promising.
In my case:
1. I realized this was a niche/small space, that getting a large market would likely mean having to pivot.
2. I wasn’t sure what might take off. I think Squiggle has a lot going for it, but am not sure if the value proposition is strong enough for a large company now, especially as LLMs have been getting much more powerful (changing the trade-offs around decision tools).
3. My main goal was helping effective altruist / rationalist researchers, and I suspected that focusing much more on commercialization would have hurt that.
4. Related to (3), I just found myself much more motivated to go after altruists/nonprofits than to go after standard enterprise deals