SixFaceCloud is a platform to bridge the gap between quantitative analysts and financial sector Java programmers. I would be lying if I said this wasn’t all over my head, but luckily we touched base with founder Andrew Kuznetsov to find out more about his new financial analyitcs system and how Russian’s handle frustration.
How’d you come up with the name for your company?
What’s the very first thing you do at work everyday?
A cup of coffee early in the morning. Then we have a 15-minutes meeting where we share project task status, what we have done and what’s next.
How many people did you start the company with and how many people work for you now?
The project was started with three engineeers. Then we lost one and now only two members are in the team.
Remember the early days starting up? Maybe you can share one anecdote that describe the struggle you went through?
Early days went without much struggle to my surprise. We built a prototype quite quickly. We had some minor confrontation over interfaces in the framework, but managed to resolve this. There was some discussions what language/IDE to select for our DSL. We did some research with Scala, Idea MPS and Eclipse xText. xText won this competition and we have build Eclipse plugins providing our DSL option.
I remember the situation when we launched our GPU samples first time on a notebook powered with OpenCL/CUDA compatible video card. This always caused video driver termination and a black screen. Then we understood that we had a “killer application”.
How do you handle frustration? When/how was the last time you dealt with frustration?
Seriously, we don’t waste time on frustration. Select new future and start implementing. Update presentation and go to next investor.
There are a lot of opportunities in the world – we don’t worry if we miss one.
What’s your office environment like?
We are sitting in a standard office building with very standard furniture. Certainly, we want to have a creative environment like Google have. Once we overcome clients’ shortage we’ll move to a better place.
How do you balance work and family?
I have three kids, wife and a dog and my partner does not even have a wife! This is hard.
Sometimes I wish there was 48 hours in a day…. and all guys were obliged to have a wife and at least 1 child.
How do you picture your company in 5 years?
We’ll have development centers in Russia and sales offices in London, Frankfurt, New York and Tokyo.
Our major office looks like the one of Google and we have triple-digit growth rate.
Who or what inspires YOU? Role models? Quotes? Running? Video games? Snack food?
How’d you fund this venture?
Self-funding so far. Money is running out…we need VC investment!
Got any great bootstrapping tips for the lean startups out there?
From our own mistakes – do a prototype and try to sell first. Or find an investor. Don’t spend much time on ‘polishing’ your app.
Start contacting potential clients and investors early and go to everybody you can reach.
What would you be doing if you had one year off and $500,000 to spend?
Travel with my family – beautiful places around the world
Do you consider yourself a successful entrepreneur right now? If not, what’s it gonna take to make you feel successful?
No, I don’t. For entrepreneurial side of me it is important to see how things you invent start spreading – more and more people use your tools to solve their tasks.
Dogs or cats?
Dogs. I have a french bulldog, so before you buy, I recommend reading this.
iOS or Android?
Android. Probably it’s coming from “Paranoid Android” song by Radiohead.
Number 1 country you’ve always wanted to visit but haven’t yet?
Italy. I will go there once my youngster grows a little.
What’s the greatest thing about SixFaceCloud?
Works like a charm! And everything is hand-made by us. It’s fascinating to see how GPU-powered EC2 instances crunch heavy tasks.
