by Mark Gritter | at MinneBar 11 | 2:45 – 3:35 in Discovery | View Schedule
Conventional auctions sell a single item to a single bidder, and are familiar to anybody who's heard of eBay or Southeby's. But they they don't work well at allocating items where "the sum is greater than the parts", such as airplane landing slots, cell phone spectrum, or truck transportation. Combinatorial auctions can sell multiple items to multiple bidders simultaneously, but they also produce new computational and economic challenges.
This session will include: live auctions with volunteers from the audience, integer-linear programming, failed startup ideas, economic theory, and maybe a few Lego bricks.
Mark Gritter is a Founding Engineer at Akita Software, his fourth startup experience, building API observability. Mark formerly worked at HashiCorp on the Vault team; co-founded Tintri, an enterprise storage company that IPOed in 2017; and was a day-one employee at Kealia, a video streaming startup acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2004.
Mark's previous Minnebar presentations have covered topics such as correctness of algorithms, combinatorial auctions, scaling a startup, building a file system, and procedural content generation.
