location based blog: How This 19-Year-Old Is Taking On Google

Friday, March 4, 2011

How This 19-Year-Old Is Taking On Google

greplin daniel gross founder

Where might you want to search that Google can't reach? The social slice of the Web, plus everything that an individual has password-protected hovering in the cloud, has been largely off-limits to traditional search engines.

Well, until an Israeli high-school graduate took a hiatus from Army duty to spend three months at Y Combinator, bombed on a few projects, and then struck gold in his last 48 hours at the start-up incubator.

Daniel Gross, along with co-founder Robby Walker, 27, created Greplin, a user-authorized search that can access Facebook, Twitter, Google Documents, Salesforce, and more. The site launched in late February. Inc.com's Christine Lagorio spoke with Gross, age 19, about his struggles, raising nearly $5 million in investment after just six months at work, and his unique lack of college experience.

Here's how a 19-year-old is taking on Google >>

This article was originally published on Inc.com and has been republished here with permission. To read more from Inc.com, check out:

Inc: Tell me how Greplin came about.

Daniel Gross: "I'm originally from Israel. I was in Israel and had graduated high school, and I was all set to go into the Israeli Army. I applied to Y Combinator. And not thinking I'd get in, I was invited to an interview. I thought of it as a fun long weekend in San Francisco. They had an odd reaction—they didn't quite like what I was working on, but I guess they liked me. They wanted me to come back, so I hopped back on a plane.

"In my three months there, I built several things, none of which caught on. Right at the end of Y Combinator, you get a cool opportunity to get up on a stage and show your project to the world. And our project had just got shut down, so this was 48 hours before the end of the program. I went over to [Y Combinator co-founder] Paul Graham's house, and he said, "Just build something that you'd want to use today, not something you think people could use somehow." So I created a very, very, very basic demo in that 48 hours.

"I got a weird reaction. I was a disheveled 18-year-old kid. But the idea had support. So I spent the next months building a workable product by night and raising $780,000 in angel funding. It was from a pretty cool team, the guy who made Gmail, Paul Buchheit, and Chris Dixon, and the guy who did Square. Also the CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor."

Was there an "a-ha" moment in deciding on working on a search engine for peoples' online documents and social media files?

"I had this very long list of things I thought would be cool. Greplin was always near the top. But my mistake at Y Combinator was not listening to my own intuition enough. There's the line "Wouldn't it be cool if this thing existed?" but those aren't often good ideas, because you're not the ideal user.

"It's also very hard to make a product when you're not the target audience. Because you have to make decisions along the way, and unless you would be the target user, you're going to make the wrong decisions. Understanding that fact was my "a-ha" moment. Greplin was the one project idea I had for which I was the target audience."

Where does the name come from?

"The idea came way before the name. The idea was in a sense a headline: A search engine that lets you find all of your stuff online. This guy Adam Goldstein [cofounder of flight-search start-up Hipmunk] and Paul Graham were sitting with me. Adam just threw out this name. And using the word grep, which in CS programming is essentially a command for search. So a lot of nerds get that. Adam threw out the name, and people liked it.

"It's also a good one because people can pronounce it, spell it over the phone, and has a backwards inside joke that you'll only get if you a technical person. Total win."

View more at Business Insider