Entrepreneurship

 For most of the past three years, I have been engaged in a new adventure: trying to start a company. I was not, and am not, a natural for this endeavor as I am a scientist and not business-minded.

I left my former employer, Onto Innovation, in January 2022 to lead Euler Scientific and its efforts, primarily to develop a toolbox to enable the interpretability of neural networks, including a bound on the generalization error (or the difference between the neural network's prediction on the training data and the prediction on some unseen test dataset).

In 2023, we attempted to pivot, and in the winter of 2023, I shifted to focus on finding new employment (after releasing an alpha toolbox). Finally, in the summer of 2024, I have found a new position.

Looking back at my time as an entrepreneur, I really needed to be more customer-focused in 2022. I was focused on solving technical problems, which were great and required me to solve them, but I also needed to be focused on customers. Doing both required more time than I had available.

The other thing I needed, which I also really needed to find new positions (and to find positions in the past), is a good network. Most entrepreneurs, especially those focused on business-to-business sales, use their network to find their customers. My network is too international and academic to be useful in finding business-to-business sales.

Being an entrepreneur at this time is not right for me. Before I consider stepping out into entrepreneurship again, I think that I need to have a large network, not just ideas and technical ability (and even investors), to serve as a seed for business-to-business sales.