Stephen Wolfram Q&A
Submit a questionSome collected questions and answers by Stephen Wolfram
Questions may be edited for brevity; see links for full questions.
Business
(27)January 1, 1993
From: Interview by Michael Swaine, Dr. Dobb's Journal
With Mathematica, did you set out to create an application program or a programming language? You sell it as an application.
I viewed the intellectually most significant [part] of the enterprise as being the creation of the elements of a programming language.
[Selling it as an application] has to do with the practical problem of introducing programming languages. Programming languages are a surprisingly slow-moving field. Fortran was invented before I was born and C is more than 20 years old now. Read more
March 1, 1993
From: Interview by Paul Wellin, Mathematica in Education
What is the breakdown of educational vs. research users of Mathematica?
That’s a bit of a difficult question to answer. Because when you have a class that uses Mathematica, how do you count the individual students that are going through there? I think that about 40% of the number of copies of Mathematica that are out there are in the educational sector. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Chicago Software Newspaper
You’ve spent a lot of time in business and working in pure science areas. Do you prefer one environment to the other or have any observations on the two worlds?
There is science, and then there is academia. When I was a professor I used to say that business was my hobby and being a professor was what I made money at. Now I say that if one wants to do basic research and you have no other choice—go be a professor. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Chicago Software Newspaper
Was the MacArthur Fellowship grant what enabled you to start Wolfram Research?
No, that wasn’t really enough. I made some money from the previous company and I made money doing consulting work too. Also, the costs of launching a software company aren’t that great. I tell people that if a software company costs more than a million dollars to launch you are doing something wrong. Read more
June 1, 1996
From: Interview by Chicago Software Newspaper
Do you have any outside investors?
One of the things we have done that is somewhat unusual for a software company is avoid venture capital and going public. Many companies seek venture capital and then work to puff up the company for four or five years so they can go to the market…. My company has been built up as a stable, Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
What is more important to you—the technical elegance of the Mathematica program or the financial rewards it brings?
In the world of high-tech industry, the money becomes the main point for a lot of people. Take your company, puff it up a bit, take it public, cash out, retire. And then what? I have kept my company private and intend to continue doing that because what I am really interested in is the long-term intellectual achievement that our product represents. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
From your experience, can the academic culture support high-tech entrepreneurs?
Well, they can avoid trying to squash entrepreneurial activities. Ten or 15 years ago, when I was at Caltech, for example, the idea of commercial stuff going on in an academic setting was viewed as completely horrifying.
Universities in some cases provide the way to get the R&D for a product done fairly cheaply, Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
Over the years, you always have been unusually careful to spell out your rights to any intellectual property. How important are patents and copyrights?
One of the things that people often forget about intellectual property and its ownership is that the formal pieces of paper that describe the ownership of a piece of intellectual property are a small part of the battle in terms of having it turn into something valuable.
So many times I have seen people who say they have this very clever idea and who want to patent it and who think they are going to get rich from the patent. Read more
September 30, 1996
From: Interview by Robers Lee Hotz, Los Angeles Times
What would you consider your most serious mistake running Wolfram Research?
Part of our market is selling to universities—maybe 25% of our revenues. When Mathematica first came out, academics were used to the idea that any software they cared about was free—at least to them.
I thought there was a serious market for Mathematica in the academic market. We had to dig in our heels and say this is going to cost you real money. Read more
October 30, 1996
From: Interview by Nick Turner, Investor's Business Daily
What’s the market for technical computing?
The kinds of people who need to calculate things span a surprisingly large range. And that range is an ever-increasing one. It started off with scientists and engineers. Now, it includes financial analysts, people in medical research, social sciences and life sciences. A lot of students also use it—from graduate school down to high school. Read more
January 5, 2010
From: Interview by Gregory T. Huang, Xconomy
What are your tips for managing a company remotely?
My theory is the most productive form of meeting is conference calls with Web conferencing. You can have more people in the meeting, and you’re not wasting anyone’s time. They can work on other things, and if you need them, you just say their name. I’ve found that it’s what I spend my life doing. Read more
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
How much of a hassle was creating Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica?
Hassle? Well, we’ve been working on Mathematica for 25 years, and Wolfram|Alpha for nearly 10. And they’re incredible complicated pieces of technology. But I certainly consider working on them to be a lot of fun…
May 14, 2012
From: Reddit AMA
What effect do you think monetization of intelligence has had on scientific pursuit? Do you think your decision to delve into private enterprise has lessened your potential contribution to scientific fields?
I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to set my life up so that I can really work on things that I think are worthwhile. And to create an organization that’s good at stimulating me, and taking ideas I have and turning them into reality. It’s great, and I’m certain I’ve been incredibly much more productive than if I’d for example stayed a professor or something. Read more
February 23, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
What’s the biggest technological advancement that has helped your company?
Obviously we wouldn’t exist but for universal computation and the possibility of software….
I have always taken the point of view that I want to design a language the way it should be, independent of what happens to be easy to implement on computers with a particular level of power. It’s helped tremendously over the last 30 years that computers have kept on getting more and more powerful, Read more
July 20, 2016
From: Reddit AMA
Did you have some doubt about leaving academia and going to businesses to pursue your entrepreneur ideas?
Different people are different of course. But for me what’s important is being able to have ideas, and turn them into reality. And it didn’t take me long to realize that I could do that much more effectively in an entrepreneurial business setting than in academia.
I have to say that successful academics typically operate a bit like entrepreneurs anyway—but usually with a bunch of constraints imposed by the big institutional structures they’ve embedded in. Read more
October 3, 2019
From: Interview by Matt Mullenweg, Distributed.blog
Would you consider management or running a company computationally reducible?
This is one of the embarrassing things about people who like to think they’ve invented paradigms for thinking about stuff. The question is, “Can you live your own paradigm?” And it’s often the case in these things where I can see something developing at the company—I’ve been doing this a long time so I know how this story ends. Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
When it comes to the workplace, what is your one unbreakable rule?
Don’t (BS).
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette
What is your philosophy on meetings?
I like to do ones in which things are actually figured out. Most days, I’ll have meetings scheduled back-to-back for many hours. I believe in thinking in public, figuring things out with people, in meetings, with my thought processes visible.
We have a very geodistributed company, and I’ve been a remote CEO for 28 years, Read more
December 6, 2019
From: Interview by Jeff D’Alessio, The News-Gazette (unpublished)
What is the hardest thing about being a leader?
I think I’ve never found the “leader” thing difficult; I’ve been doing it most of it my life (and I’ve been a tech CEO for 33 years now). What I find difficult is situations in which I’m not the leader. I tend to avoid “be on a committee” kinds of things. Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What would be the disadvantages from working from home that you have found?
Some people find that it’s more difficult to get engagement in larger groups of people when they’re not physically together. Personally, I don’t find this. I think it’s mostly a question of having energy in running the meeting; that’s important in keeping people engaged. Also, realistically, there are meetings where not everyone has to be engaged all the time; Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What is the minimum setup to remote work, and what is an ultimate setup for remote developers?
I’ve sometimes used what I consider the minimum when I’m traveling. For me, it’s just a laptop and a good headset. The “next level” involves a secondary screen that I can use to do a bit of multitasking when I’m sharing my main laptop screen.
For longer periods, I find it helpful for some (but not all) tasks to have big monitors. Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
Our company just started remote work today. We have our daily stand-up in the morning as well as a casual catch-up in the evening just before we finish. Is this a good way to go about it?
Do it by audio. You don’t need to physically have everyone there. Just make sure they all have good audio connections (no weird “people sounding like they’re in caves” etc.). Personally I’ve never found video useful. (The closest I get is that if I think people are not paying attention, I’ll sometimes threaten that we should switch video on … Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What can you say to reassure managers and CEOs who are concerned that if they can’t see people working, they might not be working?
For me, the most important thing is what people produce, not which particular hour of which day they did it. Sometimes there are things that need to be done on a short timescale, and I pay a lot of attention to whether they’re done.
People in our company send out email reports about what they’re doing (usually weekly or monthly), Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
How do you motivate staff that you know are dealing with their own anxieties and personal issues?
In general, I think it’s my responsibility to make sure that people are doing things that are interesting and important (and to communicate why those things are important and interesting). And then it’s the responsibility of me and our management chain to make sure that people are doing things which are a good fit for their skills, Read more
March 16, 2020
From: Reddit AMA
What would you say to a manager who wants employees engaged in remote work to be on a webcam meeting all day so they can be monitored?
One wonders what the manager is doing so that they are in a position to just be “watching other people work” 🙂
The only thing that I’ve heard is that sometimes there are groups where people like to have videos of each other running, as a kind of simulation of being in an office together. Read more
March 31, 2020
From: Jai Preston
Running a single, simple company is one thing. Certainly you’re quite an obsessive person. Do you find it hard to switch between focuses and/or problems? Can you work on two such great problems in the same day without something less cognitively demanding (such as sleep) to break them up?
I used to find it somewhat hard. But in the past 20 years I’ve trained myself to switch quickly. New meeting, new topic (or not a meeting at all): I just have to start thinking about the new topic, and I quickly get drawn in. (Before 20 years ago, it was different. Read more
March 31, 2020
From: Jai Preston
Did you go all in on remote CEOing pre-wife and pre-kids, or the reverse? And how was your schedule and/or productivity impacted with the change?
I met my wife after I’d been a CEO for a while, but before I was a remote CEO (and, yes, we’ve now been married a long time). Kids came after I’d been remote for a few years. I might have data that would confirm or deny this, but my impression is that the main effect of having a family is that my schedule got more regular, Read more