Discussion
kristianc: > One of our first customers is a staffing firm that searched for a scheduling solution for almost eight years. Their coordinators manage hundreds of candidate-client interviews where each side needs separate email threads, separate Zoom accounts to avoid double-booking links, and calendar invites connecting parties who never directly communicate. A client reschedules one interview and it cascades into four others. A candidate responds on SMS to a thread that started on email. Vela solved this in just 10 minutes of onboarding.My very strong advice would be to pick one of these use cases and niche hard. Multi channel, multi party scheduling isnt a problem anyone thinks they have (even if they actually do)Deputy cleaned up by going after rota scheduling for independent coffee shops. Logistics sounds like a great shout. Each have messy edge cases which you can develop a strong solution around but you'll get crushed trying to go horizontal in this space. Best of luck!
aleda145: Really cool! During my university years I had a lot of fun with scheduling 200 interviews for different 20 companies for a career fair.Created a problem statement and then solved it with Gurobi, repo here: (https://github.com/aleda145/interview-scheduling-kontaktsamt...)Agents feel like the perfect fit for the whole rescheduling loop that happens in the real world!Have you had to use an optimization solver yet? If so, which one?
pilooch: Hello! Not commenting on content or functionality. Scheduling in AI is a very dense field. An a past researcher in AI decision making, I got confused by the 'Scheduling solved' slogan. FYI recent AI for scheduling include GNNs and RL applied to NP and P-space problems that plague many industries. A larger scope I believe from vela's (rightful) target, a bit confusing IMO. Good luck with your endeavor, all scheduling problems are beautiful :)
aleda145: Also "vela" means "to be undecided" or "to go back and forth" in Swedish, great fit!
Gobhanu: wow what a wonderful coincidence
Gobhanu: very fair callout - and I can see how "scheduling solved" reads very differently to someone coming from the optimization/planning side of AI. You are right.Appreciate the note on the slogan, definetly thinking of revamping our landing page in the near future to speak more directly to our audience.
3rodents: I really like the framing of the case studies, the emphasis on Vela taking over their current process rather than requiring any change is very nice. That said, the case studies are interesting in that they reveal that the problems these clients were trying to solve aren’t really scheduling. The employment agency needs parties hidden on invites, the venture fund doesn’t want clients to have to click buttons. The “complex scheduling” doesn’t seem that complex at all, automated reminder calls and sms have been around since Twilio made it possible. I’m interested to see how things pan out for Vela, it feels more destined to be an agency that builds out enterprise scheduling systems for esoteric enterprises, than a scheduling software business. Although that’s not a bad business to be in!
aerhardt: I work in technology for Executive Search, which is often (way) lower volume than generalist recruitment, but scheduling is still an issue. Keeping an eye out on this - best of luck.