Lot of puffery in this describing constraint and actual messy problems that you are all most likely just being thrown into the context for an llm agent... None of the case studies demonstrate complex scheduling at all and are just all individual serial threads. buffers, preferences and options are all simple. The hard part of scheduling is when you have multiple pending invites or invitations that have to resolve and track it down, if someone asks for a meeting on a day that you currently already have a pending invite for, and how far away that day is, and how important the relationship is etc...
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!
Absolutely! That's how we view scheduling as a problem as well. Much larger than finding times on calendars and more about coordination of systems and people.
I work in tech 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.
> 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). They wake up thinking they have 40 truck driver shifts to fill tomorrow.
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!
Was actually chatting with a large industrial staffing firm and they were saying the same thing that it was super painful to schedule 1000s of workers for drug tests and then shifts too!
Hey! Fellow YCer (S24) here. Super cool idea. Depending on how b2c you want to be, one area to maybe consider would be surgeries. Scheduling rooms for surgeries is quite challenging, and has a cost component associated with it which makes the problem even harder. Especially since, as you can imagine, it's not at all obvious how long a procedure will necessarily take, and other procedures may need to start at a certain time.
Thank you! That's very interesting and something we are going to double click on. Are you referring to scheduling within a hospital or across hospitals?
have built in this space which led me to develop a minizinc mcp server [0] for scheduling bocce tournaments [1]. scheduling with constraints is a np hard problem and it makes sense people struggle. tools exist to solve this problem but they are complex and hard to use for non technical folks, and even technical folks. am hoping a tool like this can bridge the gap and would like to bring it to your awareness if you aren't already thinking about the problem this way :)
edit: after reading a bit more of description looks like yall are taking a similar approach, kudos!
This is awesome! Completely agree: modeling each real life scenario as a constraint satisfaction problem is tricky in and of itself (especially with the diversity of non-intersecting constraints we encounter) and something we are actively working on. Using LLMs as a layer above has made it much more tractable. Curious how the bocce scheduling has fared in real world scenarios. How was the performance?
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 :)
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.
Lot of puffery in this describing constraint and actual messy problems that you are all most likely just being thrown into the context for an llm agent... None of the case studies demonstrate complex scheduling at all and are just all individual serial threads. buffers, preferences and options are all simple. The hard part of scheduling is when you have multiple pending invites or invitations that have to resolve and track it down, if someone asks for a meeting on a day that you currently already have a pending invite for, and how far away that day is, and how important the relationship is etc...
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!
Absolutely! That's how we view scheduling as a problem as well. Much larger than finding times on calendars and more about coordination of systems and people.
I work in tech 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.
> 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). They wake up thinking they have 40 truck driver shifts to fill tomorrow.
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!
Thank you for the advice - really appreciate it.
Was actually chatting with a large industrial staffing firm and they were saying the same thing that it was super painful to schedule 1000s of workers for drug tests and then shifts too!
Hey! Fellow YCer (S24) here. Super cool idea. Depending on how b2c you want to be, one area to maybe consider would be surgeries. Scheduling rooms for surgeries is quite challenging, and has a cost component associated with it which makes the problem even harder. Especially since, as you can imagine, it's not at all obvious how long a procedure will necessarily take, and other procedures may need to start at a certain time.
Thank you! That's very interesting and something we are going to double click on. Are you referring to scheduling within a hospital or across hospitals?
Good catch. Cancer treatment scheduling is hard as well as mixes need tombe prepared in advance and cancelles appointments are hard to fill.
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?
Also "vela" means "to be undecided" or "to go back and forth" in Swedish, great fit!
wow what a wonderful coincidence
have built in this space which led me to develop a minizinc mcp server [0] for scheduling bocce tournaments [1]. scheduling with constraints is a np hard problem and it makes sense people struggle. tools exist to solve this problem but they are complex and hard to use for non technical folks, and even technical folks. am hoping a tool like this can bridge the gap and would like to bring it to your awareness if you aren't already thinking about the problem this way :)
edit: after reading a bit more of description looks like yall are taking a similar approach, kudos!
[0] https://github.com/r33drichards/minizinc-mcp
[1] https://github.com/r33drichards/bocce-scheduler
This is awesome! Completely agree: modeling each real life scenario as a constraint satisfaction problem is tricky in and of itself (especially with the diversity of non-intersecting constraints we encounter) and something we are actively working on. Using LLMs as a layer above has made it much more tractable. Curious how the bocce scheduling has fared in real world scenarios. How was the performance?
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 :)
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.