Are you interested?

I think the samurai represents Flash: He's from the same country as the ninja -- he might even be a close relative -- but his moves and his costume are a lot more ostentatious, and he's got better PR. He's also owned by a shogun who controls his every move.

That's not actually true. The thing about giants that acquire startups, is that a) they had the resources to build this thing themselves; b) they didn't.

So ask yourself why didn't they build this thing. It wasn't lack of resources. It wasn't lack of intelligence; they keep tabs on everyone and they go to SXSW too. There were forces that stopped the giant from innovating in this direction. Some of them are technological, but the real issues are usually cultural and political.

Once acquired, the startup is now exposed to all these forces -- with double intensity, since it is an outsider and has few friends in the organization. Unless it's already profitable, has a large userbase, or has big fans among the top execs, it has very little power.

I think these recent articles about how giants "ruin" acquisitions do not take culture and politics into account. The technical issues are not the problem.

But so far my experience has been very positive. I still have near-absolute control over the development and creative direction of the site.

I really love the principle behind this: http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicam...

I hope that this can help make programming as fun and accessible as it was on the C64. I grew up learning QBasic, taking for granted that I could draw some stuff to the screen and play music in a handful lines of code.

Personally, I would evaluate "Google" money based on the numbers.

The editors of Nature should know better than to put a headline like "faster-than-light information transfer" on there, since that is exactly what isn't going on.

It's a shame that the article didn't make any mention of the "many-worlds" interpretation of QM (I don't like that term myself) which as far as I know is the only explanation for these results which makes any sense.

To answer your question: If I were in your position, I'd try to work an option 1.5 -- see if you can take an unpaid leave of absence for 4 months and spend that time working on your startup. Most universities are happy to let their faculty do this sort of thing, since they usually come back far more excited about their research than when they left.

Spend those 4 months working on your startup full-time, and plan on deciding at the start of the 4th month whether you're going to take your option 1 or your option 2. I don't think you can really make a rational decision without working on this full-time for at least a few months.

Re your startup: Have you considered putting it together with freebase? I don't know how structured your input databases need to be; but since freebase is basically wikipedia (EDIT: and apparently other data sources now, too) parsed and converted into a database, being able to run natural language queries against it could be very interesting...