December 17, 2008
First Round Capital Holiday video
First Round Capital, one of Powerset’s investors, had a really innovative idea for a holiday card.
The partners in the fund visited all their portfolio companies around the world and danced with them. In this video, you can see Barney Pell and Lorenzo Thione dancing with Josh Kopelman in the lobby at Powerset.
I found it really touching to watch the joyful spirit in all these startup companies even in the tough economy that is making life difficult for startups.
Posted by barney on December 17, 2008 at 7:52 pm | 2 Comments
January 1, 2007
Happy New Year: Powerset in the New York Times
Powerset was featured in the New York Times today in an article by Miguel Helft entitled: “In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google“. The article talks about the wave of startups going after aspects of the search market. I originally thought the article was going to be titled: “What are they thinking?”, as the emphasis is on the mindset of the entrepreneurs and the investors going after a large market in the presence of such formidable players.
The article begins and ends with a discussion of Powerset.
In between, the search startups discussed in the article include Powerset, Hakia, Snap, A9, ChaCha, and Wikia.
continue reading the Happy New Year: Powerset in the New York Times
Posted by barney on January 1, 2007 at 4:34 pm | No Comments
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 on December 9, 2005 at 11:30 pm | 6 Comments