
Greplin (YC W10) Grabs $4 Million From Sequoia For Social Search - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/greplin-grabs-4-million-from-sequoia-for-social-search/
======
aepstein
Not only was Daniel (and his co-founder Shai) the youngest in our YC batch,
but they built and launched a couple of different startup ideas in the time
that the rest of us built a couple of features.

Daniel easily could've packed it up when he lost his cofounder - Shai had to
go back to Israel a week or two before Demo Day. Instead, he built a prototype
of what would become Greplin (in a week), pitched it to investors at Demo Day,
secured funding from Sequoia, and is riding a rocketship.

When PG and YC say that they invest first and foremost in founders, this is a
perfect example of what they're talking about. Every startup hits a rough-
patch, and some even look like they have no hope at all, but the best founders
persevere against crazy odds and will themselves to succeed.

~~~
jganetsk
I am going to risk being downvoted to hell on this.

Maybe Daniel isn't "persevering against crazy odds" and "willing himself to
success". It's apparent from the story that he's a really fucking good coder.
With a reasonably accurate estimation of his own abilities, and with all the
support and inspiration around him at YC, it didn't take much perseverance and
extraordinary will to put something together. He just had to continue doing
what he loves and does best... writing code.

I certainly can't speak for Daniel. I get tired of these descriptions of
entrepreneurs that make them sound like cancer survivors. I think founders
often have extraordinary skill, and that changes the required personal
characteristics considerably.

~~~
Harj
Daniel's coding ability, or love of writing code, isn't the reason he's
managed to get this far. I remember meeting with him regularly after demo day;
no investors were interested, he had no co-founder and an idea that was all of
a week old with a very buggy prototype (by very buggy, I mean didn't work).
Things looked bleak. I still believed in Daniel's determination but even I was
thinking in the back of my head, at least he'll be able to take these
experiences with him on his next startup.

"Extraordinary skill" or not, the fact is the majority of people would have
given up at this point. Daniel instead kept doing back to back investor
meetings during the day and coding at night. He's of course benefitted from
being smart and part of YC but clearly those can't be sufficient conditions
for success, if they were we'd have a 0% failure rate at YC.

~~~
jganetsk
Well, this is the interesting part of the story I'd like to hear.

Harj, I wish you the best in selecting people for the program. But, I don't
know what the moral of the story is for the rest of us. Be determined? Never
give up? That's not quite right... because that's not sufficient. I'm just
tired of the heroic founder myth.

~~~
Harj
The only sufficient ingredient for success is luck. Luck is out of your
control so the best you can do is to put yourself in a position that increases
your chances of being lucky. That includes surrounding yourself with good
people but fundamentally, the best way to be lucky is to keep going and not
giving up. Perhaps that doesn't feel quite right because it's not sufficient,
you're not guaranteed luck by being determined, but the alternative of saying
"be lucky" isn't very meaningful.

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troyk
Congrats Daniel, sometime would like to know about the backend rewrite

~~~
smanek
It involved a lot of interesting work, including porting all the
infrastructure from PHP to Python and Java.

We were shooting to make the whole system less tightly coupled so that, for
example, the machine fetching my GMail data, the machine indexing the data,
and the machine displaying the front-end website are all able to survive and
do work if any of the others are down.

This allows us to scale horizontally just for our current bottleneck, and to
be more robust against individual machine or external service failures.
Additionally, it helps us build in much deeper security since each piece of
our infrastructure has a small and well defined purpose.

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ankimal
I would love to know what their stack looks like and if they re using any open
source libs especially what they re using for indexing and search.

~~~
smanek
Some of the main pieces of our stack include Lucene, Twisted, and Tornado.
We're looking to do some more work with Hadoop and HBase coming up too.

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grandalf
Anyone who applied to Greplin for a job based on the programming challenge
looking for a job? Let me know b/c my company is hiring for two engineering
positions in SF.

~~~
vegita1022
contact info?

~~~
grandalf
email mmmurf at gmail

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wildmXranat
I like the idea of searching my own online service accounts, but how do they
implement visibility layers ? There are reasons why online services don't
allow indexing content.

The outcome could be either really good or a privacy nightmare.

~~~
knowtheory
Most of the service revolves around you authenticating greplin (using oauth or
xauth) to provide them with a feed of your data.

Greplin's core service really is tied into reading all of your stuff. That is
a privacy nightmare in some regards, but all of this data exists in other
services already, so you trust someone else with it. Question is whether you
trust Greplin i suppose!

~~~
arst
There's also a difference between trusting various bits and pieces of your
data to exist on a variety of online services, and trusting a single service
to aggregate all of your data from everywhere.

A local version of Greplin would be more interesting to me; I think the Locker
project <https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker> might make that possible
someday.

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6ren
Sounds like a great example of launching, then improving: if there's a real
market need, users will forgive everything else.

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moomba
I never heard of this site until now. Its a great idea. I really wish I
thought of this. Not only is it a fun project, but it has the potential to be
used by a great many people. I wish the Greplin guys luck with this.

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surlyadopter
Last week Greplin gave all(?) of it's beta testers a free upgrade to the
premium tier of service. That was a nice touch even though I have not yet
found a use for their product.

