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December 9, 2005
Entrepreneur Ex Residence: Powerset
My blogging infrastructure was broken for about 2 months, so this update is by now rather old. But better late than never…
After spending much of this year having a great time as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, I have left and started a new company! The company, called Powerset, is going to be in “semi stealth mode” for a while. I call it “semi stealth” because I don’t want potential competitors to know what we’re doing too early. That’s the “stealth” part. But at the same time, I want to let my friends (and more generally, my extended network) know at a high level what I’m up to, so everyone can help. I find it continually amazing what kind of help you get when people know what you’re trying to do.
So here’s the high-level story, which should come as no surprise to folks who know me:
Powerset will be developing advanced AI technology to make significant improvements in search.
In case you’re wondering about the company name, “powerset” is a concept from mathematical set theory. The powerset P(S) of a set S is the set of all subsets of S. So if you have a set {a,b,c}, the powerset is: {{a},{b},{c},{a,b},{a,c},{b,c},{a,b,c}}.
If there are N elements of the set S, there are 2^N elements of P(S).
That’s a very large number.
I plan to write more about how I came up with the vision for Powerset , the transition from EIR to Entrepreneur on the street, and ongoing steps in the adventure so far. For now I’ll just say that I’m totally excited, incredibly busy, and having the time of my life.
Posted by barney at December 9, 2005 11:30 pm
This entry was posted in Venture Capital
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Comments
posted by Steve Portigal at December 10th, 2005 2:34 pm
Congrats Barney! You had me at “powerset” …!
posted by Joel Toledano at December 11th, 2005 9:45 am
Hi,
I really need to contact you. Please do reply me on prakulsharma@gmail.com. I would like to help you with this project. Pleasezzzz
posted by Prakul at December 26th, 2005 8:26 pm
Barney,
Please provide me more information about PowerSet and how I can be involved. You will find information about me on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/e/fps/6994
posted by TopSec1 at January 7th, 2006 8:13 am
Hey Barney,
As a fellow old search guy, (ok, s’pose “mid-old” would be more appropriate – 37′s not _that_ bad! 
) would love to hear more about what you’re up to on Powerset to see if/how I can help you out. Feel free to check out my blog @ http://www.dylanhunter.com, and / or contact me @ dylan@dylanhunter.com, (where I have my SpamAssassin settings high enough to let me actually put my real email down! ).
Talk to you soon,
Dylan
posted by Dylan Hunter at March 9th, 2006 6:56 am
Barnie
I would be very interested if you would compare your proposed Powerset approach to our own
http://www.explorexy.com
we have created the world’s first knowledge correlator, with no requirmetn for any taxonomies, lexicons, ontologies or classifications.
It can correlate between anything as long as sufficient source information is first found.
Carl Wimmer
posted by Carl Wimmer at August 21st, 2006 5:03 am
Congrats! Can’t wait to find out more…I am expecting a big impact/big splash!