Barney Pell's Weblog

Thanks to Peter Thiel, from The Founders Fund, for personally covering a large portion of the party costs and for reserving Frisson for us on a busy Saturday night.

Thanks to Foundation Capital for covering some party costs and the costs for all the t-shirts, which Charles Moldow, our board member from Foundation, had said they would cover but only on condition that they were "really nice" shirts (more on the shirts in a moment).

Thanks also to Amidzad Ventures, another Powerset investor, and to our partners Amazon and Rackable, who also contributed to the party.

Grunting Pigeon t-shirts

I'll hope to put up some photos of the t-shirt soon, but they featured the names of our investors/sponsors Foundation and Founders Fund on the sleeves, and the Powerset logo and Series A event information on the back. On the front, it featured a graphic of a pigeon saying "grunt, grunt".
We didn't explain the significance of this at the party, but for Powerset insiders it was a really funny joke, which I will attempt to explain here.

In my early post about Powerset and natural language search, I explained that "keywordese" is the language that people use today to interact with search engines. It is not a natural language of the kind people use, which has rich and flexible structure for specifying relationships, constraints, and meaning of the words and their combinations. Instead, it is like the languages invented by people who speak different human languages but need a way to talk to each other. They use a limited number of shared words, with no order or structure, and supplement this with gestures and grunts. These languages are called "pidgin" languages. So "keywordese" is like a grunting pidgin language.
When Matt Marshall interviewed us for the first time, he misunderstood me to say it was a "grunting pigeon language." My friend and Powerset advisor Matt Hurst picked up the theme and defined a new acronym, GPL, for Grunting Pigeon Language. So the shirt illustrates the current state of keyword search by showing the obvious mascot, a grunting pigeon.

PARC/Powerset partnership

While the party was originally planned to celebrate just our Series A funding, it turned out that we were able to announce the Powerset PARC partnership the day before the party. So we had even more to celebrate. Mark Bernstein, the head of PARC, attended the party and gave a nice speech, and we had a large turnout of PARC people working with Powerset.

Party Crashers

We had several people crash the party to take photos and videos. One video blogger caught some Powerset folks being fairly tipsy and not fully coherent about our product strategy. This got publicized afterward as if to indicate that we might not be sure of what we're doing. My response to this: if that's the most embarrassing thing to come out of the party, then we need to party harder next time!

Peter Thiel's speech and Charles Moldow's Poem

The highlights of the party for me were the speeches by our VC investors. Peter Thiel said that Powerset was trying to address one of the most important problems possible and to do it for real. He communicated the passion we all feel for what we're doing. After his speech, as we called up Charles Moldow, I commented that I didn't see how anyone could top Peter's speech. Charles smiled and pulled out a piece of paper with what looked like a prepared speech. It turned out to be a poem Charles composed just for this occasion.

Here is Charles Moldow's poem, "Ode to Powerset:"

Early web was directory. We'd drill down to stuff,
For finding anything was truly quite tough.
Then search came along, Inktomi and Magellan
powered the Web, we were all in heaven.
Jerry and Dave created Yahoo and harnessed the power
They created a portal, from whence the Web flowered.
Infoseek, Lycos, Excite were the "Me too"
But although they tried, they could not come through.
Then along came a promise of a butler named Jeeves,
When asked a quick question, he promised to please.
But the answers were lame, quite random, bizarre
When asked "who shot Lincoln?" he replied: "It's a car."
So Yahoo had won, hand out Superbowl rings
Till Larry and Sergey reminded "the show's not over until the fat lady sings
With better search using link graph analysis
Google gave the other search engines a sudden paralysis
We all got trained to speak keywordease
HBO, Sopranos, Bada bing, Strip tease
Once again pundits have proclaimed the search game is done
Then along comes Powerset with technology to stun
They've aimed their sights high, at the 800 pound giant
They are up to the challenge, Barney and team are defiant
The winner will be crowned when I ask Google a question
And it's only reply is "Go ask Powerset, that's my best suggestion."

Jessica Guynn, at the SF Chronicle, was the first to publish this peom online, as Charles gave it to her at the event. Jessica's blog entry is here.