Thanks!

Great question. On a long term scale, it’s very possible that we would do another startup — the freedom and feeling of self-generated value from doing a startup seems unmatched. The other advantage to doing it again is that you learn from the thing that didn’t go as well the first time. Also, as we heard many times and believe, persistence is really necessary for success in any entrepreneurship.

For the next few years though, there are a lot of other excellent opportunities in our personal lives, and there’s information value in trying these out. In fact, we feel there’s a component of exploring and entrepreneurship in choosing these alternatives. We additionally feel our ability to do a startup would be better if we had learned more about the technical fields. Many of the statistical manipulations we tested on Pollground that we had formulated ad hoc turned out to have pretty thorough theoretical background.

So in all, eventually, but for various reasons we don’t think immediately doing it for another summer is the best idea.

We certainly didn’t decide all at once to “work on Pollground during the holidays” preplanning to “go back to school”. It became clear after a few months that this startup, like the majority of most startups anywhere, had limited prospects of being a million-dollar-success story, so we decided to pause the startup and resume school. In fact, Pollground hasn’t closed down as still has open deals with other companies for further development.

Again, we found this article to be great overall, and just wanted to clarify that point.

I think it’s a cool idea and am excited to see that Paul that it was good enough to fund someone to do it. My idea was to release Hecl as *really free* free software – the Apache license will let people do even commercial derivative works on top of it, so there would be room to share a common base and then do interesting applications with it, or do a really slick delivery system, which Hecl doesn’t have at the moment. It does have a few commercial users though, which is ok with me as it will help the ‘ecosystem’ grow.