schumitsch

If you want really want dividends instead of a buyback, just sell your shares in proportion to the percent of the company bought back.

It's logically the same thing. In both cases you have the same amount of cash and the same ownership of the company (although, you do have to pay a transaction fee to sell shares).

Does anyone know what a $8M Seed means?

Does that mean it was raised in such a way that no investor has a board seat?

define "we"

"In effect, a job doing research in Computer Science is more prestigious than an industry job building real system"

That's actually no longer true. Hence why a Prof leaves to take a job at Google

I respectfully disagree. A start-up is hard. If you're doing anything other than putting maximal effort into your current endeavor odds of success go down.

I think the title is appropriate. The approximate solution is the interesting one, as the exact solution is believed to be intractable.