In short, LSD is winding down.
If you ask people what contributed to 2008, you seldom get consistent answers; some say enthusiasm, some say bad modeling, some even say a denial that the system was ever going to fall apart. Likewise, if you were to ask what led to this outcome, there ought not to be a single learning or reason for what happened.
Contents
- A moment of gratitude
- The brief on what went right
- The brief on what went wrong
- What this means for LSD
- What’s next?
A moment of gratitude
None of the work from the past year would have been possible were it not for the amazing team along the way (Pranav, Andrea, and Roscoe) or investors (South Park Commons and Daydream Ventures).
We were one of 23 accepted teams of over 4600 applicants to the accelerator we participated in. As such, we have been nothing short of fortunate and lucky to get the experience we did.
While I could raise my hands in the air and cynically remark that “those who fund accelerators are out of ideas and those who join accelerators are out of money”, I wanted to put some writing together to highlight what’s happened, what’s happening, and what’s to happen.
The brief on what went right
Before mulling over the negatives, I think it could be useful to point at some of the wins that were had. For starters, we worked on the first venture backed programming language in years. Working on a startup, let alone a novel language, is nothing short of a difficult challenge but there were some things we did adequately:
- A few hackathon wins
- A music parody
- Beating Anthropic to a functionality they eventually created in their own product
- A python package with over 50k downloads
- A SQL that went from a standard syntax to a turing complete one inspired by Google
- More than 100,000 queries performed
The brief on what went wrong
As mentioned in what went “right”, we were working on a novel programming language which may have been where problems started. While one must appreciate R’s citation driven distribution, it’s far from easy to execute on the value of a new language.
From wrangling more complexity than necessary (see screenshot below from the core database and language)
To waiting too long to lift LSD features up into the JavaScript ecosystem, we ended up somewhat Mighty’ing ourselves by building an overtly complex solution at a time that may have not been right.
Perhaps now, it’ll be clearer that venture backing and programming languages don’t mix too well.
What this means for LSD
We’re currently going through the motions of shutting down the database that’s served through lsd.so as well as hard deleting any data related to users.
What’s next?
Without speaking directly on behalf of the others who were a part of this journey (who’ve all gone to other startups), I’ll be soon joining Palantir to work on infrastructure.
Rather than shift from a programming language to support a idealistic cause, I’ll be shifting from a programming language to support the cause that’s granted me opportunity despite being a disabled refugee; namely the West.