Greplin (YC W10) Grabs $4 Million From Sequoia For Social Search

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/greplin-grabs-4-million-from-sequoia-for-social-search/

by ssclafani • 15 years ago

138 28 15 years ago

I like the idea of searching my own online service accounts, but how do they implement visibility layers ? There are reasons why online services don't allow indexing content.

The outcome could be either really good or a privacy nightmare.

knowtheory• 15 years ago

Most of the service revolves around you authenticating greplin (using oauth or xauth) to provide them with a feed of your data.

Greplin's core service really is tied into reading all of your stuff. That is a privacy nightmare in some regards, but all of this data exists in other services already, so you trust someone else with it. Question is whether you trust Greplin i suppose!

arst• 15 years ago

There's also a difference between trusting various bits and pieces of your data to exist on a variety of online services, and trusting a single service to aggregate all of your data from everywhere.

A local version of Greplin would be more interesting to me; I think the Locker project https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker might make that possible someday.

troyk• 15 years ago

Congrats Daniel, sometime would like to know about the backend rewrite

smanek2• 15 years ago

It involved a lot of interesting work, including porting all the infrastructure from PHP to Python and Java.

We were shooting to make the whole system less tightly coupled so that, for example, the machine fetching my GMail data, the machine indexing the data, and the machine displaying the front-end website are all able to survive and do work if any of the others are down.

This allows us to scale horizontally just for our current bottleneck, and to be more robust against individual machine or external service failures. Additionally, it helps us build in much deeper security since each piece of our infrastructure has a small and well defined purpose.

aepstein• 15 years ago

Not only was Daniel (and his co-founder Shai) the youngest in our YC batch, but they built and launched a couple of different startup ideas in the time that the rest of us built a couple of features.

Daniel easily could've packed it up when he lost his cofounder - Shai had to go back to Israel a week or two before Demo Day. Instead, he built a prototype of what would become Greplin (in a week), pitched it to investors at Demo Day, secured funding from Sequoia, and is riding a rocketship.

When PG and YC say that they invest first and foremost in founders, this is a perfect example of what they're talking about. Every startup hits a rough-patch, and some even look like they have no hope at all, but the best founders persevere against crazy odds and will themselves to succeed.

6ren2• 15 years ago

So Daniel was a solo founder, for Greplin?

danicgross• 15 years ago

for a bit. then i met robby walker.

maxdemarzi• 15 years ago

I never really got the "we invest in founders" idea until now. YC funds people who execute.

jganetsk3• 15 years ago

I am going to risk being downvoted to hell on this.

Maybe Daniel isn't "persevering against crazy odds" and "willing himself to success". It's apparent from the story that he's a really fucking good coder. With a reasonably accurate estimation of his own abilities, and with all the support and inspiration around him at YC, it didn't take much perseverance and extraordinary will to put something together. He just had to continue doing what he loves and does best... writing code.

I certainly can't speak for Daniel. I get tired of these descriptions of entrepreneurs that make them sound like cancer survivors. I think founders often have extraordinary skill, and that changes the required personal characteristics considerably.

answerly• 15 years ago

>I think founders often have extraordinary skill

I think that was Aaron's point. Daniel is an extraordinary person. An ordinary person would probably have just given up given a similar set of circumstances.

Harj2• 15 years ago

Daniel's coding ability, or love of writing code, isn't the reason he's managed to get this far. I remember meeting with him regularly after demo day; no investors were interested, he had no co-founder and an idea that was all of a week old with a very buggy prototype (by very buggy, I mean didn't work). Things looked bleak. I still believed in Daniel's determination but even I was thinking in the back of my head, at least he'll be able to take these experiences with him on his next startup.

"Extraordinary skill" or not, the fact is the majority of people would have given up at this point. Daniel instead kept doing back to back investor meetings during the day and coding at night. He's of course benefitted from being smart and part of YC but clearly those can't be sufficient conditions for success, if they were we'd have a 0% failure rate at YC.

StavrosK• 15 years ago

There's quite a bit of outcome bias here. For every founder who sticks with bad odds and succeeds there are ten who stick and fail. Who's to say that the decision with the largest reward wasn't giving up and trying to do something else?

Not specifically in Daniel's case, mind you (he was already in YC with a good idea that's also rather easy to implement, so this made sense), but I will argue that it doesn't generally make sense to persevere when everything is against you.

ankimal• 15 years ago

I would love to know what their stack looks like and if they re using any open source libs especially what they re using for indexing and search.

smanek2• 15 years ago

Some of the main pieces of our stack include Lucene, Twisted, and Tornado. We're looking to do some more work with Hadoop and HBase coming up too.

6ren2• 15 years ago

Sounds like a great example of launching, then improving: if there's a real market need, users will forgive everything else.

grandalf2• 15 years ago

Anyone who applied to Greplin for a job based on the programming challenge looking for a job? Let me know b/c my company is hiring for two engineering positions in SF.

vegita1022• 15 years ago

contact info?

grandalf2• 15 years ago

email mmmurf at gmail

surlyadopter• 15 years ago

Last week Greplin gave all(?) of it's beta testers a free upgrade to the premium tier of service. That was a nice touch even though I have not yet found a use for their product.

moomba• 15 years ago

I never heard of this site until now. Its a great idea. I really wish I thought of this. Not only is it a fun project, but it has the potential to be used by a great many people. I wish the Greplin guys luck with this.

Greplin (YC W10) Grabs $4 Million From Sequoia For Social Search

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