February 25, 2008
LA Times on Founders Brunch and the PowerStache
My friend Jessica Guynn just wrote an article that appeared online in the LA times today entitled: Brainstorming over bagels: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seek camaraderie and capital at brunch.
The article will appear in the LA Times print edition tomorrow morning.
The articles covers the Founders Brunch, a networking event for founders of companies that I attend regularly.
Many of my friends are quoted in the article, and there are photos of Auren Hoffman and Keith Rabois (our host this time). Peter Thiel expressed the networking aspect of this kind of event well:
Founders Brunch is important for the same reason Silicon Valley is important: There are all of these subtle network effects,” said Peter Thiel, a 40-year-old former PayPal executive now bankrolling some of the hottest Internet companies. “Otherwise why wouldn’t you start a tech company in Fresno where everything is cheaper? The advantage to being in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco area is that so many other people are doing the same thing.”
Jessica noted that I had a new beard, and I explained my recent decision on growing it:
Barney Pell, the 39-year-old co-founder of Powerset, a natural-language search engine trying to challenge Google, sported a new beard he vowed not to shave until his San Francisco start-up launched its new product.
To be more accurate, I vowed not to shave off my beard until the launch, but I didn’t vow that I wouldn’t shave at all. I made that mistake during graduate school. I thought I was ready to submit my PhD thesis in about 3 months, and vowed not to shave or cut my hair until it was done. This was partly a way to motivate myself to finish, and partly a way to let my friends stop asking about my progress as they would clearly know when was done. As it turned out, my thesis advisor thought I had more work to do, and I wound up taking a full year before finishing. So by the time I was actually ready to submit my thesis, I had really long hair and a very full beard indeed. I’m not going to do risk that again…
Anyway, you might think I’m a maverick, but it turns out that most of Powerset is in on the gig. Almost all our employees are growing moustaches and/or beards in preparation for our upcoming launch. Even women who can’t grow nearly as nice moustaches as the men have painted them on from time to time. And our folks even registered a domain name and created a website, PowerStache.com, featuring photos taken over time as people grow their beards and moustaches.
It’s pretty silly and really wasn’t initially a coordinated effort, but it’s fun and reflects the excitement inside the company as we are nearing the time when the early version of our product will be available to the general public.
Posted by barney at 7:52 pm | No Comments
February 25, 2008
Powerset in Forbes article on the Language of Search
Forbes.com has a special issue on language, including interesting articles and interviews by some of my favorite writers on Language.
I’m happy that natural language and semantic search was included in the special issue. Andy Greenberg from Forbes.com published his piece on language and search engines devoting a good portion of the article to Powerset and Hakia, featuring interviews with me and with Hakia’s founder Riza Berkan. The article, entitled “Language Web-lish” starts off with Andy using Powerset’s metaphor comparing people’s current use of search engines to communicating like cavemen:
A question in English, like “What year was Hillary Clinton born?” becomes what he calls a primitive “keywordese”: “Hillary Clinton born year.”"We have this great gift of human intelligence based around language,” says Pell, “and now we have to translate it into a grunting pidgin language to interact with machines.”
Andy described an example I showed him from Powerset:
When a user enters the question, “In what year was Hillary Clinton born?,” Powerset’s algorithm doesn’t simply scour the Web for this collection of words in close proximity. Instead, it looks at pages with an eye for their meaning. Reading the sentence “Born to Dorothy and Hugh Rodham in 1947, Hillary Clinton is a New York senator,” Powerset will disassemble the sentence’s grammar and extract the fact of Hillary Clinton’s birth date. That fact is then connected with the user’s question, even if the word order of the result and the query didn’t originally match.
Andy also went through an example from Hakia:
Taking the question “What drug is best for treating a urinary tract infection?” Riza Berkan points to the word “drug.” Hakia’s algorithm, he says, understands that the word contains a massive subset of concepts including synonyms and specific names of medicines. When it spots a term that falls into that subset, like “Amoxicillin,” Hakia can substitute the medicine’s name for the word “drug” in the result.”You don’t want the word ‘drug,’ you want the name of the drug,” says Berkan. “That’s a hidden failure in search engines, and people don’t even know what they’re missing.”
Other natural language and semantic search companies mentioned included Cognition Search and Lexxe.
As is typical, my friend Peter Norvig at Google gets the last word in the article:
Google’s Peter Norvig, the search giant’s director of research, knows just how complex semantic algorithms can be: His Berkeley Ph.D. thesis tried to develop one in 1978. Every sentence of text, he says, took weeks to analyze. “The result was kind of like a dancing bear,” he says. “It was amazing that it could dance at all, but we didn’t expect it to star in the Moscow Ballet.”But that doesn’t mean Google’s engineers are idly watching semantic search from a distance, says Norvig. The company’s thousands of engineers are looking at how to incorporate semantic analysis into a search algorithm. But semantic analysis is just one of many directions that Google’s teams are exploring… “Basically, we just do whatever works,” says Norvig. “Instead of trying to understand everything, we’re trying to understand something about billions of pages a week.”
But does that pragmatic approach leave Google vulnerable to an innovative start-up willing to risk its fate on building meaning-based search from scratch?
“It’s unlikely,” says Norvig. “But even car companies have to worry about anti-gravity machines.”
I think that analogy is quite a stretch. It’s more like big car companies having to worry about smaller companies focused on electric cars. They don’t have to worry about this immediately but, at some point, this is going to be the future of their industry.
Posted by barney at 12:16 am | No Comments
January 20, 2008
Crunchies 2007 Award Ceremony and After Party
Crunchies 2007 After Party, originally uploaded by Zivity.
Yesterday I attended The Crunchies, an award ceremony to honor innovation in the tech community. The event was organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, and VentureBeat.
My personal highlights from the award ceremony were:
- Live performance by The Richter Scales, singing “Here Comes Another Bubble“.
In case you haven’t seen the video before, it is must viewing. It combines melody from Billy Joel with acapella (my favorite kind of music) with technology startup themes and humor. The video opens with a line from my friend and Powerset investor and board member Peter Thiel stating there is absolutely not a bubble in technology. The song later features lyrics such as “Babies blogging in the womb” and “I sold my twenties for a worthless pile of tech stock”. My friends in the group, Tom Shields and James Currier, invited me to come sing with them sometime, which could be a lot of fun. - Fake Steve Jobs accepting the Crunchies award on behalf of Apple for the IPod.
His speech is totally hilarious. The whole speech is like one big inside joke. I had previously read his book “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody“, an autobiography of Steve Jobs as told by Fake Steve Jobs, and this video conveys the parody well. - A video of my friend Nova Spivak (Founder of Radar Networks) answering the question about the most important technology innovation. Given the position he has taken in recent panels we have been on together, one might have thought he would talk about the Semantic Web, but instead Nova argued passionately about the virtues of Cool Whip!
He illustrated many uses of the technology and had had the crowd rolling with laughter. This also inspired us to attempt to have a cool-whip afterparty, which fizzled out.
- Running video commentary by Sarah Meyers. Even without the platinum wig and corset she wore during her Party Crashers career (including crashing Powerset’s Series A Funding Party), she’s still adorable and very personable.
- Luke Nosek from The Founders Fund presenting the awards for “Best Business Model” and “Most Likely To Succeed”. While many of the candidates were Founders Fund portfolio companies, I appreciated that he was wearing a Powerset t-shirt (with the grunting pigeon) under his jacket.
The After Party took place in the famous Green Room. My group had to wait a little while to get into the party, which exceeded the capacity of the room. The wait itself was fun because we were joined in line by MC Hammer. The party was enlivened by a photo activity sponsored by Zivity. In his award introduction Luke Nosek had described Zivity as “Myspace for Grownups.” People took photos with props, costumes, and attitudes, accompanied by several Zivity models. I included a photo of me (in cowboy hat) with Pearl and Cyan in this post. The rest of the collection is fun.
Overall, while the event had its ups and downs, there was really a nice sense of community and cameraderie in both the presentations and in the audience. The award recipients made really brief and generally humble speeches (with the exception of Fake Steve Jobs, of course), most of them thanking their engineers and their moms. The videos shown during the ceremony were mostly sent in by nominated companies. Altogether it felt more like a summer camp show than the Oscars and it is good to see our community not taking itself too seriously. On that note, it was great to see Om Malik on stage at the event shortly after recovering from a heart attack that had left him hospitalized and the subject of much concern among his friends. When people saw him at the event there much applause and support.
I took some photos of the event myself and plan to post them here soon.
Posted by barney at 6:49 pm | No Comments
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