I would be interesting if you could describe how it exactly works. Can you give us a little more color on that?
1. You mentioned that this only a marketplace between lenders and startups. Does a startup create a kind of brochure describing their idea trying to lure in lenders (like kickstarter or other crowdfunding/lending sites)? Or does the startup just fills out a form and then you decide about the loan? In this case, how do the lenders decide if the want to give this startup money?
2. Who decides if a startup gets money?
3. What exactly is your part in this process? Do you quantify the risk, so lenders can only give money to startups in a certain risk category?
4. What happens if the startup fails? Who has lost money? You or the third-party lenders?
Sure, 1. Here is a link (https://docsend.com/view/gtxd9jwdgs3izb8m) to the explainer for the bridge to Demo loan.
2. All companies presenting on Demo Day are automatically qualified. Later stage companies are underwritten on a case-by-case basis by the 8vdX team.
3. Yes, we act as underwriters and originate companies that we strongly believe will be able to raise their Series A rounds.
4. Investors invest at a portfolio level for each batch therefore there is an expected failure rate built in to the return assumptions
That sounds really interesting! Can you give a few more details how you use Graphviz? How does it give such a great advantage "to do in a couple of hours what typically would take client staff months."
Did I understand it correctly that you use it to discover patterns? Are these patterns discovered by just using the layout engines? Arent' other tools, e.g. networkx in Python or cytoscape in javascript easier to use interactively in a REPL? What is the typical workflow (maybe plot, find interesting pattern, change query/data in a loop)?
I'm really interested in how Graphviz can be so great. I am currently working with the other mentioned tools for visualization purposes.
Really simply, I typically use Neo4j, but if I have flat homegenous data, I just use Graphviz because the dot markup format lends itself to parsing easily in awk command lines. The times I have used networkx was when I needed a graph abstraction layer to reason about another graph query, so networkx wasn't used as a persistent graph store, but more of an intermediate data structure for orchestrating multiple service and api calls, like a low rent graphql. I'm a crap developer, but the graphs were what i needed to piece the logic together coherently.
One example of clients taking months is mapping counterparties to agreements. Let's say you have inherited a division that has file share full of contracts and you want to understand the line of business. You get the counterparties out of the contracts and find all the paths for obligations between entities within the division and their counterparties. The graphviz/dot layout gives you a map of all those parties in a single slide and shows clusters, instead of a 3 lb. document with a paragraph for each of them that would have cost a massive amount of consulting time, or interviewing several people to get their narrative understanding of how the business worked, the graph provides an objective map.
You could just use D3js, but for me the dot markup was faster on the command line than structuring json.
The idea is if you can formulate a conceptual, narrative ontology of an organization, you can create a grammar of things and relationships, and then you can plug data (contract counterparties) into that model and form a fairly complete map.
Another recent use case was enterprise vulnerability scan data over a very full /16 address block, allocated across multiple divisions under different management hierarchies with thousands of hosts. By linking the host ownership data to projects and an org chart with the types of vulnerabilities, I could demonstrate in a couple of slides what the highest impact patching strategy would be. Again, graphviz for sketching up the ontology, then Neo to do the lifting.
On a much simpler scale that was more graphviz/dot oriented, I did some work for a startup where I worked with the executive team who had acquired a codebase and talent, and created an ontology of their pipeline customers, their stated needs, implied product features, platform dependencies, our service interfaces, their code bases, and demonstrated the flow of how work on the code bases flowed through to impact revenue. This ultimately got represented as a Sankey diagram, but it was graphviz/dot I used to sketch up the initial ontology.
Have you tried gephi? It's not exactly an alternative to graphviz (eg. you can't cluster nodes) but it handles much larger graphs and has a bit more flexibility in layout. It has plugins for both dot and neo4j input.
Wow that looks cool. It reminds me of what Orange.app was for regular data viz, this Gephi is for graphs.
It's pretty notable that the coolest data viz is for discovery, whereas most managers just need to know whether the line has gone up or down. I'm thinking there may be a fundamentally different cognitive orientation to whether one is hunting for opportunity or managing a resource.
Pretty exciting stuff! This looks really interesting. I have a similar with setup hosts in the cloud, in the office, at home, and on UAVs with cellular internet. It was important that the hosts 'see' each other and it works on IP level in any direction.
When I set it up, I have chosen ZeroTier instead of WireGuard. It does the following: (a) Hosts discovery and initiating handshake between clients with the help of a server from ZeroTier, (b) NAT hole punching, (c) pushing centrally managed routes to hosts, (d) network ACL rules. I primarily have chosen it because it is easy to setup by anyone (e) and I do not have to manage a server (f).
- Can you tell a little bit how Graviti compares to it. I guess WireGuard itself does not have the features (a) to (f). I guess the Netmake server replaces the ZeroTier servers and provides some of these features.
- Are you inclined to install Netmaker client on any host or use one node in a LAN as a router?
- Is this more geared to servers/professional managed hosts or also for laptops?
For my usecase with ZeroTier I found the following currenlty missing features useful:
- Easy setup of a node as a router (or virtual switch) to connect a local network to the virtual one without installing it on all devices (hardware like GPS receiver do not allow to install new software). Of course, you can do it with the normal Linux tools.
- Installing it only inside a Docker container and not on the host. But I guess that will not be possible because it has to live in the kernel.
For your points:
a) We handle host discovery via the Netmaker server
b) We do NAT hole punching with our own implementation on the server
c) Yup, we do this too
d) No ACL's yet, but this is coming in the Enterprise version
e-f) We don't have a SaaS version at this point, but server deployment takes about 5 minutes, can be run on a $5/mo VPS, and uptime has been production level in our tests.
Router is obviously preferable when routing to LAN but is harder to support. If it's FreeBSD or OpenWRT, go router, but otherwise a client on a Linux node works fine as a router.
This is definitely geared more towards servers/VM's etc, but does work on Laptops as well. We have Windows support and you can even loop in your phones.
We do actually have a docker image for the client. We're not strictly tied to the kernel version of WireGuard, and you can use userspace wherever it is a necessity.
That is a very interesting idea. As far as I understand, you generate the information purely read only.
Column statistics: Sample data randomly and calculate estimator from that.
Data Lineage/usage: From the queries (and 'similar' stuff like materialized views. It seems like that currenltly have only lineage on table level, i.e. which table depends on which tables. Do you plan to implement data lineage on column level, i.e. which column depends on which column? This sounds challenging and very interesting.
I tried to watch the demo video on your website, but it was too small and maximizing the video is disabled (Firefox). So I had to click through to youtube. I'm not sure if this is intended.
1. You mentioned that this only a marketplace between lenders and startups. Does a startup create a kind of brochure describing their idea trying to lure in lenders (like kickstarter or other crowdfunding/lending sites)? Or does the startup just fills out a form and then you decide about the loan? In this case, how do the lenders decide if the want to give this startup money?
2. Who decides if a startup gets money?
3. What exactly is your part in this process? Do you quantify the risk, so lenders can only give money to startups in a certain risk category?
4. What happens if the startup fails? Who has lost money? You or the third-party lenders?