I thought this was a cool article until I read this line:
"But regardless of how successful Greplin is, say, even if we go public someday, my parents won't be satisfied unless I get a degree. They won't speak to me."
I'm really curious, is it a 'personal search engine' where you just give your login details to greplin and you can then search all of your online docs/profiles?
I came here to say the same thing (even worded the same way in my head).
Why are people so fixated on college degrees -- even if they've already built a profitable company from scratch? Is it to prove something? If so, what?
A great many people rely on social proof if there is any when deciding to trust someone rather than taking the time to find out for themselves. In fact, we all probably do that to some degree. You can't have firsthand knowledge of everything.
I don't think it's sad at all. People seem to forget that college can be about more than career advancement.
In this case, he clearly doesn't need a degree to be gainfully employed. Chances are that he's a pretty intelligent kid with other interests. If he puts 3-4 years into startups, not only will he probably be able to pay his own way through college, but will be at a point in life to appreciate the learning options a lot more (I can attest to this having taught many "older" undergraduates).
Maybe he'll develop an interest in advanced algorithms, or number theory, or neuroscience, or literature. At 19, there are a lot of possibilities in life, and college is a great way to be exposed to them, as well as people with passions in other fields.
Sorry, but it's definitely sad if your parents are more hung up on some external arbitrary stamp of approval than on your own true achievements and passion for how you spend your time. Especially if it's to the point that they won't speak to you? That's pathetic.
How ridiculous would it be if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs parents still refused to speak to them because they had dropped out of school, despite creating two of the world's most powerful companies, employing hundreds of thousands of professionals, and making hundreds of millions of lives better every single day?
That was my point--why do you assume it's an arbitrary stamp of approval to his parents, and not the reason I mentioned? Anyway, the author's comment above seems to support my point.
It looks like he's using APIs, which means that he can only index as much data as the services are willing to provide. They can squeeze him out of business by shutting down or reducing access to the data whenever they please. Or just add to their API TOS that keeping a cached copy of the data is a no go.
The service would lose a lot of relevance if suddenly one of the main players like Facebook decided that they don't want to be indexed by Greplin anymore. Without long-term partnerships or contracts with all the stakeholders, I wouldn't bet on that horse.
Facebook already updates their API and policies very regularly, nothing they give an application access to can be given for granted in the long term. Especially when it deals with private content.
When your service is dependent on another, you're always at the mercy of an update that can shut down the API feature you were using, whether the intention is to kill your service or not.
In this case it seems like the goal of the website is to become a starting point for a person's browsing/searching experience, facebook and google want the same thing. If they feel threatened they could cut just stop Greplin in particular from accessing their API. It's not hard for them to update their API terms of service to make that kind of use forbidden, for instance. That kind of tactic has been used in the past.
That's why I see a lot of uncertainty in the future of that service. I'm not worried about the founder and the company, though, their most likely exit is a talent acquisition by Facebook or Google.
Yes, but you haven't really address 'why' they would do it.
> In this case it seems like the goal of the website is to become a starting point for a person's browsing/searching experience, facebook and google want the same thing.
This is your only 'why', but it's very weak. Every company wants to be the 'starting point for a persons browsing experience', but Facebook doesn't provide that, and neither does Greplin. Google does of course, but Greplin doesn't.
Your point reduces to "companies which consume APIs might compete with the companies which create them, and so might be shut down". Of course, your statement is true, but it's valueless.
The companies providing the APIs don't have to justify the "why". When I was working on Facebook applications a few years ago they would change the API calls and rules almost monthly, app developers had to adapt or die. The changes were often due to apps abusing the system in one way or another, but Facebook defined what was abuse or not. Sometimes the changes just looked completely arbitrary and sometimes meant that some applications were just not possible anymore due to vanishing API calls.
Exporting the private data from Facebook is considered a big no-no, from what I remember the TOS might only allow you to do so for a short period. Maybe that search service gets away with it because it stores an index based on the private data and not the private data itself. If Facebook gets uneasy with how close the index is to the original data or what private information leak might happen if Greplin is compromised, that could be a good enough reason to put a stop to it. Facebook not getting into a private information leakage scandal is probably more important than allowing a startup to live on Facebook data.
Why wouldn't they? Why did they kill off Breakup Notifier? It's not like that was obviously going to happen.
The problem here is that you have no visibility into Facebook's roadmap, priorities, etc. Sorry, but I think betting $5m (or years of your life) on a startup that can literally be killed overnight on the whim of someone at another tech company is crazy.
The point of these API-based companies is usually to gain a foothold and some user traction and then reduce their dependency on the mothership once they've got some leverage.
It's pretty obvious that a business that's completely dependent upon FaceBook isn't in a very good position. It's equally obvious that a business that's completely dependent upon FaceBook but has users is in a better position than a business that nobody cares about. You start with the latter, not the former.
If Greplin or some other startup is still dependent upon FaceBook after years gone by and $5M spent, they're doing something wrong. But in the near-term, they're doing a helluva lot better than the average startup.
Breakup Notifier was stalker-ish - not guaranteed to get cut off, but certainly a risk. I wouldn't bet $5m on that, definitely.
In general, we're young in the space of companies that rely on APIs and other companies (App Store much?). Zynga has made a pile of cash relying on facebook, and plenty more will too, and that's just the way the world is from now on.
As for the whim of some individual, you are absolutely right. But that will sort itself out in the next few years, and it doesn't seem like a good reason not to get in early on what is obviously a trend that's here to stay.
I believe Breakup Notifier was blocked due to too many api calls. Facebook hasn't really been commenting on the specifics as to why it was blocked. So why would they block Greplin specifically? Well the point is no one knows if/why/when Facebook would block Greplin, if ever. But they have the option to. And if Facebook decides to block Greplin, who holds all the cards?
because they will eventually have a superset copy of all this data, which these companies are building a business model on. eg. Facebook API access is for Facebook apps that use Facebook credits. Twitter API access is expensive (Gnip charge $10k+ a month plus just for a slice).
Traditional media and established blogs have sympathy for small startups that take on giants like Google, etc. especially if they are founded by someone under 20.
btw, where is cuil now?
Nice piece. I have a question that comes up every time I read a "we came up with our Y-Combinator demo in the last weekend and got funded" story--is this rare? It seems like I hear it all the time, but maybe most of the "last 24 hour" demos don't get mentioned.
It's surprising to me to think it might be common, because my gut reaction is that this means the founders don't actually have a viable product, but because they got funded before they could figure that out, it will now take months or years for the founders to move on (or pivot significantly). I'd love to hear why that's not what's going on, though.
From the article, on going to college: "The way it works in Israel, you have to go to the army first"
I wonder how much this impacts the entrepreneurial mindset in male youth. I grew up mostly in Singapore, and they too have conscription upon reaching the age of 18 (with some exceptions, eg: for medicine and for national scholarship holders). From what I see from my friends' facebook channels, it's definitely a draining experience indeed, one that takes months to recover from once its done.
But Kudos to this guy! Greplin is pretty awesome and I've already put it to use.
I'm Israeli, so I thought I'd share on how the Army has a huge positive impact on entrepreneurship.
For a lot of Israelis who are smart, the army is a great experience that really helps them. For example, there is a very respected Programming Course in the Israeli army, which trains programmers for half a year. These programmers then go on to work on all the Armies' systems for the next 5 1/2 years. This course is called Mamram (I was in it).
This means that programmers in Israel are not only trained in a very intensive course for half a year, but they then go on to work on real-world (and often critical) systems, for 5 1/2 years. Which means there are many Israeli programmers who, at age 24, have 6 years of professional experience working on big, important systems.
Add to this that the Mamram course is very famous (most Israeli companies require programmers to either have a degree or be a graduate of Mamra). Also, serving 6 years in the army (and being in a course with 100 peers) means you get an incredible network of connections. I'm a good example - I'm working on my own startup with two people I served with in the army, and I know many people who either work at or run a lot of Israeli startups, just because I served with them at some point. I'm probably 2 hops from most startups in Israel, just because almost all of them hire programmers from the Mamram course.
OK that came out long. I only focused on the Mamram course since that's what I know best, but there are a lot of other fields the army is great for that have nothing to do with programming.
That sounds great! It seems like the Israeli military system brings with it an integrated approach to pathways in life.
That's far better than the picture that has been painted in front of my eyes (South-East Asian context) with places like Singapore and Vietnam. With the former, it's 2 years of physical grunt work. With the latter, one of my friend's cousins had to serve in the Army for 2 years as a Private after having graduated with an Engineering degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia. =(
Met this guy sitting outside of Facebook a few months ago. Nice kid, smart, savvy. We chatted about Greplin and it sounded like he was making good progress... Let's hope he keeps it going...
Daniel, if you're on HN, I'd love to know how the visa/immigration situation worked out for you in this case (if you can publicly talk about it, I know that this is not always the case).
It's troubling how little of this article is about the actual service. I'm left wondering why this is worth $5m? Isn't this basically HotBot for signup services?
I just linked my Twitter account and have to say Greplin is scary fast on searches. I am not sure I would like another 3rd party indexing my emails, but will keep an eye on Greplin because of the twitter searches. I always wanted to search just my twitter stream, but I have never found, until now, such an easy and fast way to do it.
I think this would work (but I haven't tested it):
Convert the string to an array of integers called FORWARD.
Copy and flip the array into REVERSE. Subtract the values of REVERSE, offset by (0..length), pairwise from FORWARD. Then, just keep track of the longest block of zeros (index in FORWARD and length)
In this case, the password appears at an offset of 2
REVERSE(2): (0,0,14,14,19,17,0,2,4,2,0,17,4,10,8)
SUBTRACTED: (-8,-11,6,4,15,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,-15,-4,-6)
The longest zero block occurs at FORWARD[5] and ends at FORWARD[11]... in other words, racecar.
I did manage to solve all three problems and I really liked the way the problems were put up on the website.
Anyway, I would still suggest trying for some more time before looking at the solution that that I have provided here - https://gist.github.com/849813 .
The first problem itself took me most of the time. All this time I was trying to come up with a optimal approach (and was stuck in some boundary condition in implementation for Approach 1) until I realized that even a brute force solution will work in this case because of the smaller text input.
If you finish you're prompted to submit your code along with your resume for employment consideration. Keep that in mind as you move on to each next step. Had to piece together one of my solutions into a single solution.
https://www.greplin.com/jobs Here is the source of the challenge link which gives you a heads up it's for a job contest.
Thanks - I might get back to it in a few hours. Currently busy now - I did have 20 minutes to spare earlier and thought a small challenge could be fun.
"But regardless of how successful Greplin is, say, even if we go public someday, my parents won't be satisfied unless I get a degree. They won't speak to me."
That's pretty sad, actually :(