virdy.com

Every now and then someone asks me about the old Summize blog and if there’s a chance to resurrect a few posts.  People found Abdur’s Cost Analysis on Startups writeup on Amazon EC2 especially valuable and people enjoyed my closing post.  Perhaps Abdur will find time to update his excellent post one day.  I found the text of my post, so I thought it be good to repost it here for posterity.

Original Post Date: Tuesday, 15 Jul 2008 16:49

Twitter Buys Summize.  Confirmed.

It’s with great pride that I officially confirm Twitter’s acquisition of Summize.  The rationale for this transaction from Twitter can be found here.  I’ll outline my motivation to sell our beloved Summize, talk about our experience soup to nuts, and recognize the players who made this deal possible.

Summize - A Brief History

Our passion for designing search applications brought us three co-founders, Abdur, Greg, and myself, together back in 2000. After years of building and launching dozens of highly scalable systems serving millions of users, in 2007 we set out to create our own new vertical search engine to help people find opinions and attitudes on the Web.

At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites.  Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says “nice” it isn’t necessarily in a positive sense).  Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine.

In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics.  We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem.

Summize – Nuts & Bolts

Excited by the potential of a realtime Twitter search, we unleashed Matt Sanford, a web crawling wizard, ops extraordinaire, measurement zealot, and foreign language nut, to shift his attention from blogs to microblogs, and to Twitter in particular.

Matt scurried the raw nuggets of data to Mike, an even bigger nut and a master juggler who to this day claims to have juggled SEVEN balls simultaneously.  Mike, who responds well to donuts, just happens to be a C++ and Java guru so he churned out fancy beautified code to parse tweets, thread disparate conversations, and pluck out highly accurate and meaningful trending topics from the Twitter public timeline. The latter task is a really, really tough nut to crack, so it required a helping hand from our nutty professor Adbur Abdir Abdur aka “El Hefe.”

Mike pipes the data into our database for Eric, who spends two hours a day either making the perfect cappuccino or walking 28 blocks to find it.  But Eric’s also a self-acclaimed IR wunderkid who can speak in SQL and can invert, convert, revert, subvert, and even evert relational databases and inverted indices to do exactly what he wants.  (Ok, I don’t know what that means, but that’s exactly the point). He wrung every bit of performance possible to deliver an awesome realtime indexing and query engine.  He also implemented hyper-geospatial proximity search during one of his coffee breaks.

Greg, our CTO, the “Pixelator”, who frequently confines himself in his basement to align a single pixel to achieve ultimate perfection that only the enlightened can discern, also maintains this riveting blog. He once wanted to rename Summize “tweird”, so that tells you a lot about him.  I do admit he’s pretty good at UI design (no surprise here as I taught him everything he knows, including how to manage geeks), assembled all the pieces and served up an elegant user experience for the Twitterati to marvel at.

The bottom line?  In a nutshell, Summize nailed realtime conversational search right out the gate.

Summize – Twitter’s Missing Manual

Summize revealed the true power of Twitter and its thriving community.  Right from our home page you can “see” what people are talking about at this moment via our trending topics.  We tamed the Twitter public timeline by bringing some order to the chaos.

Type any query into Summize to “listen in” on conversations on practically any topic.  What do people think about Hancock?  What’s the buzz on Dark Knight or the new iPhone?  What site is down?

It’s now effortless to find your taste neighbors and to connect with like-minded people worldwide.  Simply search on keywords that interest you and start following.  Experience conferences vicariously and monitor breaking news events as they unfold.

The “Aha! moment” for us was tracking what people are saying about Summize itself.  We have been glued to summize.com nearly 24×7 since launch.  For the first time we could listen, respond, and engage with our customers in realtime.  This revelation was game changing for all of us.  There is great potential for companies to get involved with their user base the way we and others like Zappos, JetBlue, Comcast, Southwest have.

Twitter and their investors understood the potential of Summize, hence the marriage between the two startups.  There is a perfect technology fit, vision fit, and cultural fit as mentioned in the Twitter blog.

The acquisition enables Twitter to fully harness the core search, filtering, and discovery technology built by the extraordinarily talented Summize team.  All five Summize engineers will be joining Twitter.  I will continue as a consultant for a short period of time and then move on to spend more time with the family, of course, and eventually sprout another killer startup here in lovely Northern Virginia, a thriving hotbed for Web 2.0 companies (and, as Abdur would say, I am a cereal entrepreneur now).

Close - Personal Note and Acknowledgment

I have a long working relationship with my fellow co-founders, Greg and Abdur, so it is with mixed emotions for me to see them move to California.  They have taught me far more than just information retrieval.

Eric Jensen also deserves recognition as a quasi-founder for joining Summize before we secured any funding.  Eric is an exemplary technologist and a keen strategist who’s not afraid to take risk.  He’ll definitely be someone to watch in the years ahead.

I’m thrilled for the Summize guys and for Jack, Ev, Biz and the Twitter team as they will benefit tremendously having Greg and Abdur in senior technology leadership roles.

I would like to acknowledge our angel investors who saw the potential in the Summize founding team from day one.  A big thanks goes to Roger Richter and Tim Webb who are always on my side even when things look bleak.  Another big thanks goes to John Burbank, Andrew Seligson, Seth Spalding of Passport Capital for leading our angel round and for listening to my wacky ideas.  I’m also grateful to Jim Davidson, our former boss at AOL, for believing in us despite the obstacles we face out here in the East Coast.

During our travails as a coastally challenged startup we met with many VCs, but one VC firm stood out far above the rest—Union Square Ventures.  There is a good reason why USV is admired by entrepreneurs and the Web 2.0 community—they are simply the best.  In fact, the most important advice I received was from Brad Burnham and it’s still ingrained in my head, “Create something simple.  Let the market pull you in.”  Thank you, Brad, and thank you for introducing us to John Borthwick.

John and Andrew Weissman of Betaworks Studio saw the potential in Summize even before we launched our Twitter search.  They worked tirelessly to open doors to help us get funding and/or partnering deals.  They introduced us to Josh Auerbach, the most amazing deal maker ever and a really nice and funny guy overall, and they re-introduced us to Gerry Campbell, our former colleague at AOL Search (read Gerry’s thoughts on the deal).  Thank you, John, Andy, Josh, and Gerry.  With Summize you have proven your “Outcubator” model.

This post cannot be complete without thanking Fred Wilson.  Thank you, Fred for helping to make this deal happen.  There’s a reason why we use “from:fredwilson” as our test query at Summize.  If we don’t see any search results, then clearly “Something is Technically Wrong” in the social media world which requires immediate attention.

And last, but not least, I want to thank our loyal Summize fan base.  There were so many Summize evangelists who supported us that it’s impossible to call out individuals.  On behalf of the Summize team, I offer each and every one of you our sincerest gratitude.

Respectfully,

Jay Virdy
http://twitter.com/jayvirdy

This past week I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with Sheryar Durrani, an old college buddy of mine.  I have yet to meet anyone with as much raw energy, passion for innovation, and unfettered optimism as Sheryar.  He truly is a remarkable individual who leaves a lasting impression with everyone he meets.

Sheryar is an inventor and a visionary who’s mission is to advance the use of magnesium to manufacture lightweight products from motorcycle wheels to wheelchairs. (Sheryar is also known for his god-awful puns, so one could say he wants to en-”lighten” the world.)

Back in the day, Sheryar would show me his portfolio of sleek concept cars he had drawn. His room was littered with stunning automobile artwork.  Fast, beautiful cars were in his blood.

After completing his Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Maryland, Sheryar moved to Detroit to join Ford.  I vividly remember the day I dropped him off at National Airport with his family.  Sheryar packed his belongings in a monstrously large leather suitcase which he designed and built himself.  His mom looked at me and asked, “Why must he build everything? Couldn’t he just buy a Samsonite?”  That’s Sheryar.  Once he identifies a problem, he sets his mind to solve it.  He loves to build things whether it’s leather suitcases, wooden rowboats, Ferrari engines, or motorcycle wheels.

Sheryar made an impact in Detroit–especially in advancing magnesium solutions within the global automotive industry.  After leaving Ford, he went on to design the Lexus SC430 Retractable Hardtop.  He also engineered magnesium parts for the Corvette Z06 (engine cradle), Dodge Viper, Mercedes Benz (seats), Jeep (steering column), Porche (convertible top), and he even worked with the F1 Ford racing team.  He and his team clearly have deep knowledge and expertise working with magnesium.

Sheryar is the CEO of Durrani Racing Components (http://durraniracing.com).  His latest invention is the Durrani 510 Series Magnesium Wheel targeted to motorcycle enthusiasts.  He’s generated quite a bit of excitement–and controversy–with his highly anticipated product.  Durrani Wheels is among the most talked about topic on biker forums.  The chatter on these boards is about the merits of the ground-breaking wheel and about Sheryar himself.  The sentiment is all over the place, but there’s no denying that everyone, including top multi-national corporations, are keeping a watch on him.  Not many are betting against him.  I’m certainly not which is why I’ve decided to lend my support to his fledgling company as an angel investor.

I’ve seen the wheel and I’ve seen a few biker’s reaction to the wheel. It’s an amazing piece of engineering and it’s amazing listening to Sheryar talk about his invention.  He’s a perfectionist with extremely high quality standards and it definitely shows in his product.

I wish the DRC team success in the coming months to deliver on their promise to their customers and to realize their long term dreams to advance magnesium solutions.