napkintech by andrew meyer

Everyone at Topsy works around the clock. Most people don’t come into the office until noon or one pm, but I see emails sent to our team alias as late (or as early) as four or five am. From speaking with employees, everyone on our team believes in the emergence of real-time data streams as a major shift in the internet. By extension, search is critical for filtering through the massive amounts of instantaneous information. I think employees are excited about working at Topsy because our work is at the forefront of shaping how people will interact with the internet

All of Topsy’s current employees had previously worked with at least one of the founders, and it’s obvious that they respect and admire the founders’ leadership and technical abilities immensely. A few employees told me how lucky I am to be mentored by such luminaries. It seems that in addition to believing in Topsy’s position at the forefront of a major shift in the internet, the employees are at Topsy because of the strength of the founding team. Topsy has hired a few employees since I have started my internship, and I imagine another selling point to new employees is the amount of VC money Topsy has raised ($15M) to date.

I haven’t had the opportunity to talk much with other employees about the expectations for the company’s future, but I have had conversations with the founders on the topic. When I first interviewed with Topsy, I framed one of my questions around the built-to-flip vs. built-to-last mentality and how the founders viewed Topsy. I imagined that the founders might look to be acquired (by twitter, google, or facebook, perhaps), but our CEO, Vipul Prakash, assured me that Topsy was a built-to-last company. At this point, Prakash spoke about real-time streams, Topsy’s place in the future of the internet, and how the company had spent three years in R&D before launching. With so much time spent in R&D (for an internet startup) and the level of passion the founders have about their work, Topsy is definitely a built-to-last company.

All of that being said, I believe there will be acquisition offers made for Topsy. It seems to me that Topsy is one of the few real-time search companies trying to balance chronology and relevance. On top of that, I believe Topsy’s initiative to attribute influence to people (rather than documents) leaves them in a field of their own. Will Microsoft (Bing?) make an offer? Maybe.

BTL BTF:

In regard to the built-to-last vs. built-to-flip debate, I see no problem with both types of companies existing in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Built-to-flip companies have certainly contributed to major technological innovations by being acquired by larger companies who have the resources to turn the work a built-to-flip company has done into built-to-last value. Larger companies sometimes cannot afford to be more entrepreneurial and sometimes can only foster major innovation by acquiring smaller companies. I would argue that a built-to-flip company is providing value if it is acquired or if people are purchasing the product/service.

My mentor also told me that if he could do it all over again, he would have started at least six companies before Topsy. His view was that one can gain valuable experience working on smaller, built-to-flip companies, which will help entrepreneurs ultimately succeed with their built-to-last companies down the line.

The web was abuzz yesterday about the Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. Some pundits claim it to be a huge blow to Twitter in the real-time war–others think the acquisition was not as important as the rest of the web claims.

To me, this is huge, and I think that this could potentially be a massive blow to Twitter search. Real-time search is going to be lucrative, and one thing facebook is lacking is powerful search functionality (new facebook search was announced moments after the acquisition news). Friendfeed had an exceptional search experience (the only problem was that it its index was limited to the few friendfeed users out there). This team and the core FriendFeed search technology can really help facebook ramp up their search offering. Just think: a real time, social search engine where all of your friends are. To me this is really the way to actually monetize for facebook. I really don’t think twitter search is that great right now, especially because only ~40 of my real friends are on twitter (although I do like seeing what shaq has to say). I’d love to get more socially relevant search results based on my friends’ activity, and that’s what facebook can now provide (since all of my friends are on it) with a good search offering.

Working at a small startup which sits at the intersection of real-time and social search, I was a little concerned about Topsy’s prospects for the future after the acquisition news. After all, if Facebook can now offer a much improved search experience–one where users can find links, photos, videos, news articles that their friends are talking about–it’s going to be tough for other social search companies to compete since everyone is already on Facebook. One thing that keeps me positive about Topsy’s prospects is that the company has been in 3 years of R&D to develop authority based pagerank. That is to say, part of the algorithm to determine pagerank in Topsy is based on how influential people are who talk about various topics you search for. So, if I search for “Obama” in Facebook, I’ll get a lot of hits, but I won’t know which ones are important or meaningful results. Topsy serves you the most important links as deemed by the Twitter community. I think as Topsy begins to expand its index to Disqus, Yelp, Amazon Reviews, and eventually all of the conversation streams on the web, it will be in a unique position with its author based search. After all, Facebook and Twitter search are limited to searching their index of users (although they can received some activity from outside sites, e.g. through FB Connect), but Topsy is attempting to index everything. Things should get exciting in the next 6 months…

Back to the acquisition, everyone agrees that the FriendFeed team is great, and they certainly were the beloved by bloggers and developers alike for their culture of openness and their APIs. We will see what happens to them at Facebook, but my guess is that FriendFeed’s culture of openness will give way to that walled garden of facebook which is a bummer. I’ve read that they plan to keep the FF API the same, but we’ll see.

Here’s a story from Mashable highlighting Facebook as a major search contender.

Here’s one from Techcrunch.