No, this is not a science fiction story, nor is it a new philosophy. It is the, unfortunately sad, story of the end of Causality Ltd., the company I helped launch around the innovative actor-based language Pony.

For those that are not familiar with the language, it originated in the work of Sylvan Clebsch, a Ph.D. student of my wife Sophia Drossopoulou at Imperial. Pony promises a highly scaleable architecture, (hundreds of thousands actors) with jitter-free garbage collection and a soundness proof. Benchmarks show its superiority to previous-generation languages such as Scala (Akka) or Erlang.

Together with Sebastian Blessing, we put together some friends-and-family funding, which was used to support a very tight technical group (Sylvan, Sebastian and Andy McNeil); this team developed a compiler for the language, which was duly launched in May 2015.

The interactions with the commercial (and security, as there are some demanding high-performance computing requirements in this field) domains proved very disappointing. We imagined that, with a much better mouse trap, a modicum of publicity would cause the world to come knocking at our door. After all, this is demonstrably superior technology, with a suitable academic pedigree and benchmarks to match. What happened instead is that door upon door was slammed shut. I freely admit that there were many failures on our side – yet all of these were on the exploitation side, not on the technical. Perhaps the most memorable rejection came from one of the big US investment banks, which was (and is) using Pony for a critical piece of their compliance system (monitoring thousands of transactions per second from a risk perspective). The 25-year-old in charge calmly explained that the support contract we were offering was of no interest because our company was too small; in the world of high finance obviously 0 > 3.

I had to pull the plug at the end of January, after burning up all of our friends’ and Greycon’s investment in Causality. Administratively closing down the company has been a lesson in humility.

Two aspects emerge, in my view, with credit from the story. One venture capitalist we talked to, Ed Stacey from IQ Capital, was amazingly knowledgeable and serious. The second is the incredibly generous tax regime in the UK for such startups: amongst our investors, our UK residents were able to obtain an initial 50% relief under the SEIS scheme and then can claim even further relief when the company closes down.

As to the lessons I draw, I do hope that there will be another opportunity that is as good as Pony technically where I will get the chance to apply them. But I am not too optimistic.