Quigo’s 6th anniversary

We (Oded Itzhak & myself) founded Quigo 6 years ago this week. It’s been a wild roller coaster, especially during the years 2000-2003 when investors thought we were either insane, or martians, or most probably both. If we were to hire a panel of experts to identify the worst ever moment time to start a company like Quigo, I don’t think they’d achieve the amazing precision that we did in selecting that worst possible moment in history (excluding the big bang, possibly). The bubble popped and the market crashed. Investors, who only weeks earlier were throwing insane cash at insane companies, were not touching folks like us with a stick. An internet company?? Dealing with this dead-in-the-water search engine stuff?!?!

David Beisel of Masthead Venture Partners wrote a while back:

…one of my favorite questions to ask is, "What is the founding story?"
How did the founders meet and eventually come together? How did the idea for the current incarnation of the business emerge? How has the winding road of the initial days given rise to the current perspective?

So for whatever it’s worth, I’ll take the opportunity to talk a bit about the founding story of Quigo (from my perspective at least):

At the end of ’99 I was moonlighting[1] on an idea I had re search or discovery of pages on the web. The idea was essentially this – the back button was a fully functional piece of the browser, but there was no ‘forward button’ (even if only metaphorically). So my idea was to look at the content of the page a user was browsing, and based on the analysis of that content – provide links to other pages (or – the next pages) on the web that may be of interest to that user. In many ways, I guess, this idea had the seeds of the contextual matching that’s at the core of Quigo’s AdSonar product and Google’s AdSense (though I’ll admit that in many ways it was also quite different… ;-). I hired an engineer to help me hack a prototype of the idea. We never reached a fully working application as this evolved into Quigo shortly after.

At about the same time, Oded was fresh out of a company he was involved with, which was developing geographical streaming technologies (sort of a very early Google Earth  in 3D would be a good description I guess). He was tinkering with a search related idea he had – a downloadable application that would provide direct access to form-based search applications on a variety of different websites. In many ways, Oded’s app had the seeds of what later became Quigo’s FeedPoint product.

At that point Oded and I have never heard of each other. My brother, a classic Galdwell Connector, made the connection through a friend of his wife who happened to be married to Oded. He thought we were working on similar stuff and hooked us up (thanks Eytan, Sharon & Shiri!). We met a few times, opened our kimonos (which is, btw, extremely difficult for 1st time entrepreneurs who are confident the ideas will be stolen…how stupid…), brainstormed both ideas, and decided to take the best of both and start a single company.

Now, before I start bragging about how amazingly smart Oded and I were and all that BS, I want to point out the following points which put everyting below in its due perspective:

1. Starting a successful company is as much about luck, determination and persistence, as it is about smart ideas. Coming to think of it – the idea is probably one of the least important factors in successful entrepreneurship of any kind.
2. If it weren’t for our amazing employees today and along the way (especially those who joined us in the early days and stuck with us through some pretty insane periods….), the company would not have lived to celebrate it’s 1st anniversary, not to mention it’s 6th…. So thanks all you Quigo’ers!

Now I can brag freely…;-)

The combined idea with which we started Quigo was that search engines aren’t properly exposed to some of the most valuable content and product pages on the web (now commonly referred to as the Deep Web), and therefore we’d develop a gateway for the search engines into those pages. In essence, we identified the need to expose product pages from ecommerce sites (and not only sites’ home pages) to users searching for those products on search engines. This now is obvious to any 2nd grader, but at the time there were very few who foresaw this, and even fewer (I dare say – 2?…) who developed technologies to solve this.

While we got many things right (much of the foundation we laid back in 2000 still serves the company today and generates much of its revenues), one area we did get totally wrong was the original business model. We saw ourselves more as a platform for improving search engine technologies rather than a platform for exposure of retailers (aka ‘advertising’…). So our original plan was to crawl high quality sites (both content and ecommerce), and try to license our technologies to the search engines. While that model may have worked spectacularly well just a few months earlier ("we’ll pay any amount of $$’s for a better service/more eyeballs"), it was a total dud in mid-2000 ("eyeballs? yuck! Anyway – we’re running out of cash and can’t spend a dime on anything"). So we ended up flipping the business model: instead of asking the search engines to pay us (for the technology), we’d pay them! We’d charge ecommerce sites for the exposure on the search engines, and share the revenue with the engines.

Bear in mind that this was all a couple of years before search engines conceived of paid inclusion (PI) or pay-for-placement (P4P) programs[2], so the notion of paying search engines for exposure of pages was at the time fairly exotic, to say the least.   

Back to April 19th, 2000 – After working for a couple of months on things necessary for starting a company (seed funding, lawyer, etc, etc) – Quigo was born. Happy Birthday, and many more to come!

[1] I may be off on the dates and details here, but I think that at the time I was doing the following:
a) Trying to finish my senior year studying Product Design at the Holon Technological Institute.
b) Doing client design work under the design shop I owned – NetWorks.
c) Working on the product for another company I co-founded earlier in ’99 – Ad4ever (now part of Atlas).
d) Moonlighting on the product that later evolved to become Quigo.

Busy year…

[2] To be perfectly accurate, GoTo (aka Overture) had introduced it’s P4P program a little while earlier, but it had been available at the time only on GoTo.com which was a pretty obscure engine. Non of the major engines had any significant means of getting pages exposed and promoted on their SERP‘s.