#15: Travis Oliphant: Creating, Evolving, & Funding Open-Source Software

Travis Oliphant is the Founder & CEO of Quansight : a company that bridges open-source communities and innovative companies by growing talent, building technology, and discovering new products. For years Travis has been an indispensable contributor toward data science's open-source movement through so many different outlets: Founder, Director, & Former CEO @ Anaconda, Inc : a free and open source distribution of over 250 popular data science packages for Python and R, used by over 6 million users. Founder, Chairman of the Board @ NumFOCUS Foundation : the world-renowned open-source community promoting open code development and reproducible scientific research. President @ Enthought : a software company best known for the early development and maintenance of the SciPy stack . Creator of NumPy, SciPy, Numba, & XND : all invaluable open-source Python libraries Before founding Continuum Analytics (later renamed to Anaconda) in 2012, Travis received a Ph.D. from the Mayo Clinic , B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University , and spent nearly a decade thereafter as an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU before phasing out of academia to focus on creating open-source software to support industry. Naturally, our conversation focused on his work with creating, evolving, and funding open-source software, covering topics like: How growing up in a bad neighborhood and being raised Mormon led him to an early fascination with computers and a laser-focus on helping people What led him to take a leap from the stability of a 10-year academic career to trying to support a family while working on free software Why open-source software has been such a centerpiece throughout his career, the inflection points he's experienced over the past 20 years Why community-based, open-source models have been severely underfunded, how Travis has managed to "monetize open source" with his newest company, Quansight. The open-source community's recent shift "away from 'local co-op' and toward 'big agriculture'", the challenges Travis is seeing pop-up The story behind how he first wrote the Numpy library (all by himself!) over 4-5 months of 60-70 hour workweeks before others started to see any potential All of the amazing open-source projects he and his team need support with from brilliant data scientists like you :) Enjoy the show! Show Notes: Travis' LinkedIn: Travis' Twitter: AJ's Twitter:

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#15: Travis Oliphant: Creating, Evolving, & Funding Open-Source Software is an episode from Data Journeys by AJ Goldstein.

This episode is 01:05:32 long.

This episode was published on Jul 16, 2018.

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