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Security - Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Abaca Guarantee: Kill 99% of Your Spam Or Your $ Back

Some founders are so wealthy they don't need venture capital for years. This is the case with San Jose-based Abaca. The startup was founded by Steven Kirsch who has enough cash in the bank to donate $75M to charity. Among the ventures that he made a fortune on were early search engine Infoseek (acquired by Disney) and Frame (sold to Adobe).

As Kirsch explains Abaca's story: "I hired a few engineers to code up the algorithm and it worked extremely well on day 1. We decided to productize it and market it. But when we tried to get funding, all the venture capitalists told us 'the space is too crowded.' I disagree. The market is crowded all right, but with products that don't work very well."

In March, Google was issued a patent for a "method and system for selectively blocking delivery of bulk electronic mail". This patent was assigned to Google, but was actually created by Steven Kirsch, who worked with Vint Cerf (Google evangelist).

We are going to watch this story with interest.

View - Abaca site