Not only was Daniel (and his co-founder Shai) the youngest in our YC batch, but they built and launched a couple of different startup ideas in the time that the rest of us built a couple of features.
Daniel easily could've packed it up when he lost his cofounder - Shai had to go back to Israel a week or two before Demo Day. Instead, he built a prototype of what would become Greplin (in a week), pitched it to investors at Demo Day, secured funding from Sequoia, and is riding a rocketship.
When PG and YC say that they invest first and foremost in founders, this is a perfect example of what they're talking about. Every startup hits a rough-patch, and some even look like they have no hope at all, but the best founders persevere against crazy odds and will themselves to succeed.
I am going to risk being downvoted to hell on this.
Maybe Daniel isn't "persevering against crazy odds" and "willing himself to success". It's apparent from the story that he's a really fucking good coder. With a reasonably accurate estimation of his own abilities, and with all the support and inspiration around him at YC, it didn't take much perseverance and extraordinary will to put something together. He just had to continue doing what he loves and does best... writing code.
I certainly can't speak for Daniel. I get tired of these descriptions of entrepreneurs that make them sound like cancer survivors. I think founders often have extraordinary skill, and that changes the required personal characteristics considerably.
It involved a lot of interesting work, including porting all the infrastructure from PHP to Python and Java.
We were shooting to make the whole system less tightly coupled so that, for example, the machine fetching my GMail data, the machine indexing the data, and the machine displaying the front-end website are all able to survive and do work if any of the others are down.
This allows us to scale horizontally just for our current bottleneck, and to be more robust against individual machine or external service failures.
Additionally, it helps us build in much deeper security since each piece of our infrastructure has a small and well defined purpose.
Anyone who applied to Greplin for a job based on the programming challenge looking for a job? Let me know b/c my company is hiring for two engineering positions in SF.
I like the idea of searching my own online service accounts, but how do they implement visibility layers ? There are reasons why online services don't allow indexing content.
The outcome could be either really good or a privacy nightmare.
Most of the service revolves around you authenticating greplin (using oauth or xauth) to provide them with a feed of your data.
Greplin's core service really is tied into reading all of your stuff. That is a privacy nightmare in some regards, but all of this data exists in other services already, so you trust someone else with it. Question is whether you trust Greplin i suppose!
I never heard of this site until now. Its a great idea. I really wish I thought of this. Not only is it a fun project, but it has the potential to be used by a great many people. I wish the Greplin guys luck with this.
Last week Greplin gave all(?) of it's beta testers a free upgrade to the premium tier of service. That was a nice touch even though I have not yet found a use for their product.
[+] [-] aepstein|15 years ago|reply
Daniel easily could've packed it up when he lost his cofounder - Shai had to go back to Israel a week or two before Demo Day. Instead, he built a prototype of what would become Greplin (in a week), pitched it to investors at Demo Day, secured funding from Sequoia, and is riding a rocketship.
When PG and YC say that they invest first and foremost in founders, this is a perfect example of what they're talking about. Every startup hits a rough-patch, and some even look like they have no hope at all, but the best founders persevere against crazy odds and will themselves to succeed.
[+] [-] jganetsk|15 years ago|reply
Maybe Daniel isn't "persevering against crazy odds" and "willing himself to success". It's apparent from the story that he's a really fucking good coder. With a reasonably accurate estimation of his own abilities, and with all the support and inspiration around him at YC, it didn't take much perseverance and extraordinary will to put something together. He just had to continue doing what he loves and does best... writing code.
I certainly can't speak for Daniel. I get tired of these descriptions of entrepreneurs that make them sound like cancer survivors. I think founders often have extraordinary skill, and that changes the required personal characteristics considerably.
[+] [-] maxdemarzi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6ren|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troyk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smanek|15 years ago|reply
We were shooting to make the whole system less tightly coupled so that, for example, the machine fetching my GMail data, the machine indexing the data, and the machine displaying the front-end website are all able to survive and do work if any of the others are down.
This allows us to scale horizontally just for our current bottleneck, and to be more robust against individual machine or external service failures. Additionally, it helps us build in much deeper security since each piece of our infrastructure has a small and well defined purpose.
[+] [-] ankimal|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smanek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandalf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vegita1022|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildmXranat|15 years ago|reply
The outcome could be either really good or a privacy nightmare.
[+] [-] knowtheory|15 years ago|reply
Greplin's core service really is tied into reading all of your stuff. That is a privacy nightmare in some regards, but all of this data exists in other services already, so you trust someone else with it. Question is whether you trust Greplin i suppose!
[+] [-] 6ren|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moomba|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surlyadopter|15 years ago|reply