Response to Vijay Pande (Stanford Professor and investor at Andreessen Horowitz) comment here.

Hi Vijay, Mostapha here.

I have a clarification, a question and a side-note.

Clarification:

In the spirit of transparency, he is making claims against our free, open source project while making an argument for his paid service

My service Startcrowd is not competing against your DeepChem product. Simply because Startcrowd does not provide a software product, it’s an anti-hype consulting service.

For example, a Pharma company can decide to pay, just to be told that they don’t really need the DeepChem bloatware, and that plain TensorFlow is enough at the moment.

If it can save their time, they won’t care about paying. Order form here.

Question:

In your comment, you wrote:

DeepChem is an open source academic project, not a commercial piece of software. Nobody is “locked in” any more than they are to NumPy or SciPy

Why did you choose NumPy or SciPy to explain this analogy? Why not citing a more relevant example: the deep learning library TensorFlow? (on the top of which DeepChem is built)

TensorFlow is also an open-source project maintained by Google (which is a commercial entity, but does it matter? Is your other employer Andreessen Horowitz a charity?).

Why not citing TensorFlow? My answer is: because Google is leveraging TensorFlow to promote their Google Cloud platform, which is pretty expensive to use (and which has a strong vendor lock-in, by design: migration to another cloud provider is complicated,…).

It’s a variation of the Gillette razor-blade model. Give them the razor (TensorFlow), sell them the blades (Google Cloud Platform). See also this Forbes article by Janakiram MSV:

From the monetization strategy viewpoint, is DeepChem different from TensorFlow?

I don’t think so. I predict that Andreessen Horowitz will invest in a drug discovery Cloud platform, managed by DeepChem. Drug discovery is a very computer-intensive task, cloud computing is an appropriate choice.

Vijay, what are your answers? Or should I ask Marc Andreessen ? Marc, I will appreciate references to your Mozilla/Netscape strategies.

Side-note

I invited Mostafa to contribute to MoleculeNet to address his concerns and he declined.

Yes, I didn’t have the leisure to patch your selective laziness. I have a business to run. And you too. You are not even able to address your conflict of interest in the industry. It is a big contradiction with the spirit of transparency of the open-source community. It confirms my choice.