
How a 19-Year-Old Raised $5 Million to Revolutionize Search - culturebeat
http://www.inc.com/articles/2011/03/how-19-year-old-daniel-gross-is-taking-on-google-with-greplin.html
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acconrad
I thought this was a cool article until I read this line:

"But regardless of how successful Greplin is, say, even if we go public
someday, my parents won't be satisfied unless I get a degree. They won't speak
to me."

That's pretty sad, actually :(

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m_myers
I came here to say the same thing (even worded the same way in my head).

Why are people so fixated on college degrees -- even if they've already built
a profitable company from scratch? Is it to prove something? If so, what?

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mixmastamyk
They're nice in that they force you to learn some subjects you wouldn't
normally ... that and the college chicks.

Agree that the idea in that you have little worth without one is a bit absurd.

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EvilRobotMonkey
> college chicks?

Is every founder either a man or a lesbian?

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mixmastamyk
The answer is leaning heavily toward yes.

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kouiskas
It looks like he's using APIs, which means that he can only index as much data
as the services are willing to provide. They can squeeze him out of business
by shutting down or reducing access to the data whenever they please. Or just
add to their API TOS that keeping a cached copy of the data is a no go.

The service would lose a lot of relevance if suddenly one of the main players
like Facebook decided that they don't want to be indexed by Greplin anymore.
Without long-term partnerships or contracts with all the stakeholders, I
wouldn't bet on that horse.

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pbiggar
Why would they do that? That's what the APIs are for.

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kouiskas
Facebook already updates their API and policies very regularly, nothing they
give an application access to can be given for granted in the long term.
Especially when it deals with private content.

When your service is dependent on another, you're always at the mercy of an
update that can shut down the API feature you were using, whether the
intention is to kill your service or not.

In this case it seems like the goal of the website is to become a starting
point for a person's browsing/searching experience, facebook and google want
the same thing. If they feel threatened they could cut just stop Greplin in
particular from accessing their API. It's not hard for them to update their
API terms of service to make that kind of use forbidden, for instance. That
kind of tactic has been used in the past.

That's why I see a lot of uncertainty in the future of that service. I'm not
worried about the founder and the company, though, their most likely exit is a
talent acquisition by Facebook or Google.

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pbiggar
Yes, but you haven't really address 'why' they would do it.

> In this case it seems like the goal of the website is to become a starting
> point for a person's browsing/searching experience, facebook and google want
> the same thing.

This is your only 'why', but it's very weak. Every company wants to be the
'starting point for a persons browsing experience', but Facebook doesn't
provide that, and neither does Greplin. Google does of course, but Greplin
doesn't.

Your point reduces to "companies which consume APIs might compete with the
companies which create them, and so might be shut down". Of course, your
statement is true, but it's valueless.

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kouiskas
The companies providing the APIs don't have to justify the "why". When I was
working on Facebook applications a few years ago they would change the API
calls and rules almost monthly, app developers had to adapt or die. The
changes were often due to apps abusing the system in one way or another, but
Facebook defined what was abuse or not. Sometimes the changes just looked
completely arbitrary and sometimes meant that some applications were just not
possible anymore due to vanishing API calls.

Exporting the private data from Facebook is considered a big no-no, from what
I remember the TOS might only allow you to do so for a short period. Maybe
that search service gets away with it because it stores an index based on the
private data and not the private data itself. If Facebook gets uneasy with how
close the index is to the original data or what private information leak might
happen if Greplin is compromised, that could be a good enough reason to put a
stop to it. Facebook not getting into a private information leakage scandal is
probably more important than allowing a startup to live on Facebook data.

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pchristensen
Did Andrew Warner write that headline?

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mkramlich
probably not, but this will save him the effort when he inevitably interviews
him :)

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elvirs
Traditional media and established blogs have sympathy for small startups that
take on giants like Google, etc. especially if they are founded by someone
under 20. btw, where is cuil now?

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kouiskas
My thoughts exactly, also that of story reminds me of many articles published
in the bubble era, as do many valuation and funding stories lately.

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asr
Nice piece. I have a question that comes up every time I read a "we came up
with our Y-Combinator demo in the last weekend and got funded" story--is this
rare? It seems like I hear it all the time, but maybe most of the "last 24
hour" demos don't get mentioned.

It's surprising to me to think it might be common, because my gut reaction is
that this means the founders don't actually have a viable product, but because
they got funded before they could figure that out, it will now take months or
years for the founders to move on (or pivot significantly). I'd love to hear
why that's not what's going on, though.

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yewweitan
From the article, on going to college: "The way it works in Israel, you have
to go to the army first"

I wonder how much this impacts the entrepreneurial mindset in male youth. I
grew up mostly in Singapore, and they too have conscription upon reaching the
age of 18 (with some exceptions, eg: for medicine and for national scholarship
holders). From what I see from my friends' facebook channels, it's definitely
a draining experience indeed, one that takes months to recover from once its
done.

But Kudos to this guy! Greplin is pretty awesome and I've already put it to
use.

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edanm
I'm Israeli, so I thought I'd share on how the Army has a huge positive impact
on entrepreneurship.

For a lot of Israelis who are smart, the army is a _great_ experience that
really helps them. For example, there is a very respected Programming Course
in the Israeli army, which trains programmers for half a year. These
programmers then go on to work on all the Armies' systems for the next 5 1/2
years. This course is called Mamram (I was in it).

This means that programmers in Israel are not only trained in a very intensive
course for half a year, but they then go on to work on real-world (and often
critical) systems, for 5 1/2 years. Which means there are many Israeli
programmers who, at age 24, have 6 years of professional experience working on
big, important systems.

Add to this that the Mamram course is very famous (most Israeli companies
require programmers to _either_ have a degree _or_ be a graduate of Mamra).
Also, serving 6 years in the army (and being in a course with 100 peers) means
you get an incredible network of connections. I'm a good example - I'm working
on my own startup with two people I served with in the army, and I know many
people who either work at or run a lot of Israeli startups, just because I
served with them at some point. I'm probably 2 hops from most startups in
Israel, just because almost all of them hire programmers from the Mamram
course.

OK that came out long. I only focused on the Mamram course since that's what I
know best, but there are a lot of other fields the army is great for that have
nothing to do with programming.

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yewweitan
That sounds great! It seems like the Israeli military system brings with it an
integrated approach to pathways in life.

That's far better than the picture that has been painted in front of my eyes
(South-East Asian context) with places like Singapore and Vietnam. With the
former, it's 2 years of physical grunt work. With the latter, one of my
friend's cousins had to serve in the Army for 2 years as a Private after
having graduated with an Engineering degree from the University of Melbourne,
Australia. =(

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hnfwerr
Raising money is not hard, what is hard is make money :/

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jasonwilk
Your comment is flawed

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gooberdlx
Met this guy sitting outside of Facebook a few months ago. Nice kid, smart,
savvy. We chatted about Greplin and it sounded like he was making good
progress... Let's hope he keeps it going...

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jhuckestein
Daniel, if you're on HN, I'd love to know how the visa/immigration situation
worked out for you in this case (if you can publicly talk about it, I know
that this is not always the case).

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charlesdm
I actually emailed him for this about a year ago and he told me that he was an
American citizen.

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devindotcom
It's troubling how little of this article is about the actual service. I'm
left wondering why this is worth $5m? Isn't this basically HotBot for signup
services?

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EastSmith
I just linked my Twitter account and have to say Greplin is scary fast on
searches. I am not sure I would like another 3rd party indexing my emails, but
will keep an eye on Greplin because of the twitter searches. I always wanted
to search just my twitter stream, but I have never found, until now, such an
easy and fast way to do it.

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iworkforthem
easy to click Greplin Programming Challenge: <http://challenge.greplin.com/>

Anyone managed to pass level 1? I am stuck at level 1. Please share the logic.

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RiderOfGiraffes
What a crock - the second challenge requires calling a USA phone number.

Color me unimpressed.

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lysium
There's an alternative, just click the provided link:
<http://challenge.greplin.com/static/nophone.html>

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RiderOfGiraffes
Thanks - I might get back to it in a few hours. Currently busy now - I did
have 20 minutes to spare earlier and thought a small challenge could be fun.

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rokhayakebe
_But my mistake...was not listening to my own intuition enough_

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mjh8136
Do startup founders in Israel tend to be relatively younger than US-born
founders, and if so, why do you think that is?

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rudiger
Jewish men and women are a precocious bunch :) I'm sure you'd find that US-
born Jewish founders are relatively younger too.

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108
didnt anybody notice that you cannot use greplin without signing up. #fail

