Ask HN: If you turn research into business, could you share your story/insights?
People often say that other than academia, math PhDs also do ML research at FAANG and similar companies, like the recent famous OpenAI, with the opportunities of doing interesting research and publishing. While doing research work at big companies with lots of data and resources is fun, I am also interested in exploring starting my own "startup" / software business in the future (possibly after getting phd in math), with focus on optimization, graph theory, and algorithms (Graph Neural Networks, aka GNN, seems to be popular right now).
There are many successful and famous companies that built upon the work of mathematicians, to name a few:
1. Matlab/MathWorks was built on the PhD thesis of Cleve Moler, focusing on linear algebra programming.
2. Mathematica was developed by Stephen Wolfram and others, due to the conflicts over SMP with Caltech.
3. Gurobi was founded by three mathematicians, Gu, Rothberg, and Bixby, hence the name. Its flagship product is obviously the solver/optimizer for linear programming and math optimization.
4. The story behind SageMath and CoCalc is also interesting: http://wstein.org/talks/2016-06-sage-bp/bp.pdf
5. A new Chinese company Cardinal Operations [1] was founded by computer scientists with focus on applications of operation research.
6. Google and the PageRank algorithm
So I am curious that for researchers (especially mathematicians) here who founded startups/companies after getting your degree (regardless of Bachelor, Masters, or PhD), especially those who commercialize your research, how did you achieve this and did you do applied math in your research? Does cutting-edge research results help your business in some technical ways?
Thank you.
[1]: https://www.shanshu.ai/