I’ve recently started talking to potential investors for a Julia PaaS/SaaS product - built with Julia for Julia users.
Obviously, such an endeavor is highly dependent on Julia’s growth and adoption so this comes up every time. Is there any or can we set up a repo for up to date Julia metrics, pitch decks, etc?
In terms of metrics, I’m thinking Julia downloads, Juno downloads, major milestones like adoption in big banks, universities, etc? Maybe @viralbshah can share some of their fundraising materials and experience from Julia Computing?
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I would be interested in this for similar reasons. Shall we team up? 
The official newsletter has a lot of this kind of information (endorsements, awards, companies announcing they use Julia, etc), and you may want to update the Github star graph from earlier.
That said, I think that for a reasonably smart investor the value of Julia should hinge on something specific to your product, so you should think about that (eg fast prototyping, solving the two language problem, composability, speed, …) and pick examples accordingly.
Finally, the first question I would ask is how easy it is to get experienced developers. Even if you have an existing team, there is always turnover and learning Julia idiomatically can take up to 6 months even for an experienced programmer (coming from certain languages actually makes this longer, as one must reformulate old habits). I am not sure where to find hard data about this.
Sure! Something like a Google Sheet maybe with stats, links, etc?
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Yes, I get the newsletter too, it’s interesting. That’s why I was thinking that Julia Computing should have these numbers somewhere.
If the product is targeted at Julia users, then this defines the size of the market. The larger the market, the better. I was specifically asked: “what is the biggest threat to your product?”. At this point, in my mind, there’s no doubt that it’s the risk of Julia to fail to capture a significant part of the market. Obviously, I believe that Julia will become a major programming language in 5-10 years, but it’s still got a long way to go to reach the user base of Python, Ruby, Java, etc.
Indeed, recruiting Julia developers is inherently difficult at this stage of user adoption, but this is less of a concern for me. I’m a Julia developer myself and through my network in the Barcelona area, I can probably attract 1-2 more, which is plenty. Also, this is an opportunity as well: workshops, training, certifications are great avenues for both marketing and extra revenue.
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This was pretty big news around my fintech circles recently:
Alladin is written in Julia. Too bad the article doesn’t mention it 
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