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Search - Friday, July 1, 2005

Findory - Profile

HQ: Seattle, WA

Founded: 2004

Management: Greg Linden is CEO. He recently earned some business chops at Stanford Business School and, from 1997 to 2002 was at Amazon.com. He wrote the first recommendation engine used by Amazon.com and later led the software team that developed Amazon's personalization systems. The only other employee is Alex Edelman, who joined Findory in August 2004 as CTO. From 1997 to 2004, Alex worked at Amazon.com, holding the positions of Web Developer, Software Engineer, and Engineering Manager. He is the co-author of three software patents related to e-commerce.

Investors: Bootstrapped

Business Model: Main product is a personalized news site that learns from the articles you read, searches thousands of sources for articles that match your interests, and builds you a personalized front page. The site also features personalized search (different search results for different people depending on their behavior) and personalized advertising (ads targeted to actions and behavior). The business model hinges on personalized advertising. "Our advertising is targeting using detailed information about user behavior in addition to the content of the page, an approach we believe will substantially exceed the performance of existing contextual advertising systems," Greg Linden tells the a:c.

Competitors: PubSub, Topix.net, most major search engines

Dirt: The Web 2.0 is all about revitalizing old concepts - and personalized search definitely falls into that category. With a deep understanding of Amazon's recommendation engine, Linden and Edelman appear to be the men for the job. The primary goal of companies like Findory is to help people deal efficiently with the mounds of content that come across the Net every day. There's clearly a need for such services and, in this respect, Findory has significant competition for mind share - because everyone is interested in this market. Leaving the big search engines aside, we are aware of at least two other stealth mode start-ups that lay claim to the same fundamental mission: helping people deal efficiently with the mounds of content. That said, we like Findory's corporate structure - or lack thereof. It's a lean, mean, personalization machine. We suspect Linden and Edelman stage meetings at the local cafe and that the company's burn rate barely puts a dent in their collective pool of vested Amazon shares.