Topsy was founded by Vipul Prakash (CEO), Gary Iwatani (CFO/COO), and Rishab Ghosh (VP, Research) in 2006. Previously, the three founders all worked together at Cloudmark, an anti-spam company which Prakash co-founded, and Prakash and Ghosh also worked together on several Open Source research initiatives. All of the founders had separately worked on several startups before Cloudmark.
I remember asking Prakash about the transition from a security / anti-spam company to a company focused on search, and he told me that these two fields face the same “signal to noise” challenge. With anti-spam, the technology focuses on detection in a similar way that search technology focuses on detection. To Prakash, the transition from anti-spam to search was very natural.
The technology behind Topsy started as a side project for Prakash. At Cloudmark, Prakash began to realize the growing amount of conversation streams that were occurring on the web. Today, these streams occur on twitter, yelp, identica, blogs, digg, and other social media sites. Prakash wanted to be able to filter these conversation streams which represented new forms of information on the web. Initially, the project took the form of a Firefox / IE add on which would display what people had written about a particular URL (the source of comments were from blogs). Prakash began to involve Ghosh in his side project, and the two of them realized that there was a need to navigate and filter all of the conversations that were happening on the web and that a browser add on was not the most effective way to do it.
In 2006, Prakash and Ghosh left Cloudmark and brought Iwatani with them. The three of them worked on Topsy (then called “Slaant”) and started hiring developers from companies they had previously worked for. For the next three years, the team worked on developing a search engine which would index conversation streams on the internet.
It seems that one of the biggest challenges for Topsy in the transition from idea to company was the hiring process. Topsy currently has only 11 employees, and it took a long time to reach that number. Talent was scarce, and the founders wanted to be very careful about culture fit and bringing people on board who shared their passion. Hiring was slow at first, but after a year, the core developers were hired and the team was rounded out.
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