Yes I'm aware of that. In my experience, the companies I worked for that are functioning properly is typically more than 60% effort dedicated to sales. It's about business development, partnering. But to me it's still a problem of the chicken and the egg. Because I'm also seeing tremendous obstacles in sales when the underlying product isn't a good one.
Yeah, you would need to cut the middleman in on the deal somehow, or sideline them in an unobtrusive way (for example, set up or join industry-specific consortiums that will own the combined training data sets rather than you, but you help define the standards for that data).
Interesting read, thanks. Although in my life as a developer, I tend to avoid relying on seemingly open-source project that has a well-funded company behind. The "open source as a weapon" idea is probably more suitable for big corporations. And few people consider controlling an intermediary (like data) as "control". If I own the data, I'd rather choose a "real open-source project" to consume it, not something that could end up charging me a fortune in the future. Without the foundation software work, data is nothing. It can't be easy to get people onboard.
