Diego and I first met in 1997. I had recently finished the Master of Software Engineering (MSE) program at Carnegie Mellon and gone full time on my first startup. Diego had just started in the MSE program. Diego was a hacker’s hacker. He was full-stack, full-power, Mr.-build-anything type of a guy. So of course when he graduated, I convinced him come work with me at SneakerLabs (based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).
But even SneakerLabs couldn’t satiate all of Diego’s creative energy. He loved music and this is right around the time when MP3s were becoming popular. In fact, if I remember right this was pre-Napster. So Diego did what only a hacker who loves music can do — as a side project he built a search engine for MP3s – (2look4.com) that let you find almost any song available on the web in MP3 format. Since the sites serving up MP3s were very transient (you can take an educated guess as to why!) he had to build his indexing technology to be able to update very quickly and filter out stale data very quickly. And so began Diego’s foray into search technology.
Diego was smarter than me. He knew that the right place to be for what he loved to do was in the Valley (It took me a few more years to figure that out!). I was bummed when Diego decided to leave SneakerLabs in December of ‘98 to move out west to the Bay Area and work for Inktomi. We lost touch once he moved out west and didn’t really have much contact for the next 10 years.
In March, 2010 Diego and I reconnected. He had been working on search in one form or another for the entire decade, having worked at LookSmart, XoopIT, and then starting his own search consulting business. Diego saw a problem with search. Users’ expectations of how search works is set by their interaction with Google (Yes, Bing and Yahoo still have a portion of the market too, but Google dominates). But, for any other small to medium sized company (and in some cases even large companies) adding a high quality search experience to their websites is hard. These companies don’t have search engineers on staff. Diego realized that there needs to be a platform for providing Search-as-a-Service and started to create what became IndexTank.
Having known Diego for such a long time, and having seen the depth of experience he and his team had in doing search, it was an easy decision for me to have K9 Ventures participate in the seed round for the company in September 2010. IndexTank pulled together an awesome list of investors in a round led by Michael Dearing from Harrison Metal and Steve Anderson from Baseline Ventures.
Given Daniel’s expertise in search and information retrieval (blog: The Noisy Channel), when Diego and I started discussing IndexTank, I introduced him to Daniel. Long story short, Daniel left Google to join LinkedIn as their Principal Data Scientist and he and Diego stayed in touch. It was through their conversations that LinkedIn and IndexTank started discussing working together more closely. Small world!
A huge congratulations to the IndexTank team and to their new friends at LinkedIn!
You can follow me on Twitter at @ManuKumar or @K9Ventures for just the K9 Ventures related tweets.