[hn_throwaway_99]

> results of decades of incremental improvements.

Gurobi was only founded in 2008. I don't doubt the optimizer was the result of "decades of incremental improvements", but the actual implementation must have been started relatively recently.

[christina97]

It was founded by some of the key people behind CPLEX (another solver, founded in 1987). In fact, one of the cofounders of Gurobi was a cofounder of CPLEX prior. They brought decades of knowledge with them.

[7thaccount]

Yep. They were also able to catch up as CPLEX was bought out by IBM and I think they typically keeps a pretty small staff after an acquisition.