[hef19898]

The topic you are tackling is a very hard one, but you have figured that one already. Good thing is, you have both a solid and relevant background.

A general thought, which might be important in the future. This kind of optimization tools work best at scale, I would go even as far as saying only at scale. And that can make a MVP a hard thing. I have seen people try something similar without the necessary scale, or rather density as routes were spread out over to large a region. And it didn't work out that good.

What I didn't get, but then might be just me, is who your customers are. Developers or users? If it's the latter I could provide some operational insight.

[ryan-nextmv]

Good points! We've definitely seen delivery networks flail under certain conditions, like lack of density. Our hope is that by making both optimization and simulation more accessible to software engineers, we can help organizations understand and preempt problems like that.

Which brings up the answer to your question: We're targeting developers. Companies that build integer programming solvers and similar tech have great tools for PhDs in Operations Research who have a lot of mathematical sophistication. We think there is an underserved market of software engineers who can benefit from different technology.

[hef19898]

Makes sense. One of my previous employers tried to develop the tools in-house, as a sideline of the operational business of running transportation (of people, in busses, like groups of people renting the whole bus). Development was guided by a guy with a media background, developers where people fresh from University. Results were predictable. Some sophisticated tool kit would have been great!

[ryan-nextmv]

Sounds familiar!

One thing that's struck us is the lack of accessibility of optimization tools to software engineers. I worked as a developer long before I ever got into OR. When I switched over to being an analyst, it felt like there was an invisible divide between the two worlds.

A great success of the Data Science movement over the last decade seems to be making statistics and visualization easier for and more widely adopted by tech. We think optimization and simulation are about to go through the same thing.

[hef19898]

Let's hope so!