Recognizing Deven

Brad Garlinghouse's Memo

I must say it takes some real strength and bravery to write what he did here in his Peanut Butter Memo.  I always knew Brad was a good guy but now he has taken it to a whole new level as a leader.  I wish him the best of luck ... our Internet landscape is getting a little too one sided and it will be nice to see it rebalanced a little.

Jacquie made me buy some shoes

Time to eat your own dog food...

I read Jacquie's post on the Likewise Blog about some men's shoes and a few Likeness searches later I bought these shoes (see ones on the left from Kenneth Cole).  This site is going to start costing me some money...;-). 

Nov 8th to Nov 12th - Post Launch

At near midnight on Nov 7th we hold a company wide meeting. It is tradition to have a go / no go. Like I mentioned before 75% of the employees have to agree. Below is a home video of our launch meeting. I hope you enjoy it.

At 12:01am the site goes live!!!!! Heeeeee Haawwwww (sorry I'm an old Dukes of Hazard fan ;-). After the bubbly and company meeting (see video) Neelesh, Mark, Jacquie, and others are outside having a cigar. Mark had only one but he cut it up so all could share.

The whole next day I'm bombarded. I talk to the New York Times (which just came out with their article today here and many other reporters. As Chris Fralic of First Round Capital (one of our investors puts it), there is literally a wall of press articles that is inbound.

The site holds up. Given the 1000 CPU cores, it should. There are sporadic reports of slowness which we can't figure out but traffic is way up. We will have to diagnose this in more detail.

The Techcrunch, Scoble, and Dan Farber starts the ball rolling...

Techcrunch is just amazing in its ability to drive traffic. The fact that you can even see it so clearly in the graph below of our inbound traffic referrals is just amazing.

Michael is really on to something here.

However Like is different than Riya. All evidence points to the fact that Like has appeal beyond the Techcrunch's 150K readers and that of Riya. The evidence is:

- The launch of Riya was huge but the launch of Like way bigger according to Alexa (yes I know Alexa has issues but I figure it has consistent issues...;-). The March 21st blip was the launch of Riya btw. Beth and team almost 10x 'd our last last launch in terms of traffic- unbelievable!

- The launch was so large for a brief period we had more unique visitors than Shopzilla.

- On their own almost 50 local newspapers run the Like.com story from the Associated Press (which you can read here .

- On their own almost 25 local TV news channels, CNN, and Fox run the B-Roll we provided with our release. Almost none of these call us - they just run with the news. See this link for a quick view of 16 of these hits on ABC News, etc.

- In the first day alone there were 556 new blogs - many of them fashion blogs. I start conversing with them but they are coming in faster than I can write.

These last three points are really important. We told a few folks about it, but the marketing of Like seems to be going viral and going there fast. Numerous friends of my wife email me and ALL say, "I used the site all day and I emailed it to all of my friends." I'm sure some will quip that Like is over-hyped. We have been clear - Like is just good enough... not perfect.

One of my investors quips that by the numbers this maybe the largest number of visitors for a new launch of a Web 2.0 company that they can remember. I'm don't think this is true (Flock had a lot of traffic) but it certainly Like was a lot larger than we had expected.

Interestingly we get a male / female split in our attendance. Lots of guys come and check out Like for it's technology and lots of women come to actually shop.

In the next few days the traffic from the first group drops as expected, but interestingly the number of leads we are sending to merchants continues to climb. This is great news and means we a left with shoppers and not just technology reviewers.

All of this being said, I am sure this moment in the sun will fade and we will have to SEM/SEO and market our way back to this level of traffic over the coming months.

We also get a ton of email... mostly from women (which is good) ... on what we have to fix. Like is far from perfect and in my opinion barely an Alpha.

The team seems reinvigorated despite having truly rested (back to my burnout theory). The mood in the office is energized. We starting working on the bugs that were reported. A release goes out the next night. We have another scheduled for the 8th with more fixes and improvements.

I hold a meeting on how to improve some of the search and almost the whole company wants to chip in. Folks are really jazzed and excited.

... However by Friday - three days of running on pure adrenaline after weeks and weeks of working non-stop catches up to us. Peter looks at me and tells me to go home and rest. I go home early on Friday - getting home by 6pm.

I have really missed Deven these past weeks. The whole weekend we just hang out together. Deven and I spend Friday night chasing each other and stealing ballons at the Sunnyvale Fry's Electronics, we get ice cream, we watch Battlestar Galactica (he screams space ship everytime one comes on - of course I had to edit out a few scenes)... on Saturday we goto the Children's discovery museum and a party where his friends were there, on Sunday we goto brunch as a family and have dinner with Vijay's sisters and mom. Deven and I play car race on his toy track all day and then as if we haven't had enough of cars ;-) we watch the movie Cars together.

I love this little guy and I can't tell you how long I've waited to have someone who can watch movies and do guy things with. Some dad's go golfing or hang with their buddies. I don't really do that. I'm kind of a loner I guess. I focus on having a few close friends ... but the most important are my two best friends - my wife Vijay and Deven.

Seem like most folks at the company take rest as well. For the first time in weeks there is almost no email.

By Sunday night the work begins again. I write this post, Azhar calls a 10:30pm meeting to get some more patches out, and I prepare for another day of press meetings. On Tuesday I have a board meeting which I am totally unprepared for. I'm sure we've over spent to plan but my sense is not by that much.

We continue on...

Coverage of Like.com

So many generous folks have written about Like.com. Thank you all.

There is one clarification I want to make sure is very clear. When you click on a celebrity's item Like shows you similar items. Even the item on the left of the search result page is probably a similar item and not the real one. Just based upon appearance it is hard if not impossible to find the exact item. I do feel however that most people want to see similar items, but in case it was confusing I wanted to make sure we clarified this. We'll be adding something to the product messaging this as well.

Now on to the articles...

Techcrunch
Robert Scoble (Pod Tech)
Dan Farber - CNET
Rob Hof Business Week
Liz Gannes - GigaOm
Walt and Katie wrote here Subscription required
Kate Greene - MIT Technology Review
Matt Marshall - Venturebeat
Search Engine Journal
She Finds Blog

I'll add more as I see them....

Munjal

Riya launches Like.com

Finally after 8 months since Riya 1.0 launched, we launch our new product Like.com in the middle of the Web 2.0 conference.

URL: Like.com
What: Like is the first visual search engine where you can click on / submit a photo as your search query
Index: Like searches merchants sites for Jewelry, Handbags, Shoes, Watches. 200 merchants 2M SKUs

Like.com is the world first visual search engine. We focused visual search on items that are hard to describe linguistically. Think about it, you don't need visual search to search for an iPod ... but you do need visual search for finding a shirt with a pattern similar to your friends. When it comes to design oriented or aesthetic elements, text search tends to fail you. Try to describe the pattern on a plate of china in text. It is really hard.

Like solves this problem. All you have to do is a "Likeness search" on a photo and Like will show you items that look similar.

Some other features of Like include:

• Likeness Search – the ability to search by image instead of text;
• Like Detail – finds items that have a specific feature you like (such as a buckle, straps, bezel, etc);
• Like Color – find color variants of the item you desire;
• Like Celebrity – find clothing, shoes and accessories similar to those worn by celebrities;
• Like Upload – the ability to upload a photo of your favorite item and find similar (coming soon)

Over time we will more categories (visual search can apply to clothing, home & garden, furniture, and even landscape photos) and items (we are adding 30K items a day). So while Like starts with only 4 categories we will continue to expand it over time.

I hope you all enjoy it. ;-)

What about Riya - it will still stay as a face recognition product at Riya.com. We will continue to improve it over time (albeit slower). The company name is still Riya.

Below are some photos of the Riya team (US and India)

web2con
web 2.0

Today - Nov 7 - The Jumbo Shrimp

I wake up at 6am and check my Blackberry. Disaster! A reporter who is supposed to hold our news under embargo has released the story. I call Lisa and Laura at our PR firm and they call the reporter. I call Azhar and tell him if the news breaks we will need to launch early. It is awful, I had to wake him up after a few hours of sleep due to this reporter. After a few minutes the reporter manages to take it down quickly. Wheeeeuuu.... that was close. I drive to the city to meet with a reporter. After two additional meetings I go to the Web 2.0 conference to talk to a few more folks.

After 8 months of effort we seem to be getting very positive feedback. Scoble tells me this that our new service is the most interesting new thing he has seen today. This is great, however, I care more about if people use it over and over. Of course we still get a curve ball at the last minute.

Burak and team have found a bug which is going to cause worse results in our local search for shoes. We can't fix it in time. Do we launch or do we delay?

Just before a launch we all get myopic. It is usual for folks to think that last bug has to be fixed (at a cost of a delay) and forget just how significant what they are already launching is (even with the bug). I call this the Jumbo Shrimp problem. You lose perspective on if fixing this bug is important or not. Some bugs should be fixed and some shouldn't, but you can no longer tell. In Riya 1.0 I think we spent an extra month or two on items like this.

Forunately, Azhar and Dan can still keep perspective. They balance out Burak and Baris at this time and tell us to just get it out. At 1:30pm we do a call to discuss the last few issues. The conclusion - we won't fix much and the site will go out.

At 7pm I go to a Web 2.0 dinner with Tami Zhu and the AOL team. Seems they have invited a few CEOs of startups to meet with the team. I think our new product would be a good partnership with AOL.

I drive to the office at 10pm. The whole team is there. The environment is festive. The bubbly is chilling, the cake is ready, etc.

At 10 we have an our final company wide staff meeting. This is a go/no go meeting. This is tradition at Riya. Before a big launch all employees have to say yes or no. We need 75% of the people to vote for the launch for the product to go out. All employees have 1 vote regardless of if they are the CEO or not.

We go around the room here and in India. One by one people say their name and their vote. We are all a go!!!!

I use this meeting to really thank the team. I am truly proud of this product and of this team. The new product isn't perfect but it is quite revolutionairy and it is all because of the people who work for Riya. I am very very very proud of our team. I have never worked with a better and smarter team.

I also use this meeting to set expectations correctly. I think it will take some time after our launch for this to take off and for our monetization to take off. I think there will be much optimization. I think we will need to get more inventory into the service. I think we will all need to be patient.

We pop the bubbly - take a group photo and eat cake. To be honest I think we are all excited, relieved, happy, and exuberant!

I really love these folks. They are just super!

Ben, Andy, and Ginto - prepare the 1000 CPUs for launch - only a few hours to go....

Episode 16 - Nov 4 to 6th - Calm before the storm

I fly back to SFO on the 8:30 flight from JFK. Landing at midnight I head home. The next morning Deven wakes me up and says, "Papa wake up ... play with baby." He says this over and over again until I wake up. We play for a few hours. It is clear he misses me after a week of not seeing me. Unfortunately I have to go back to the office at 10am. For the next two days I don't see him much except for the 1 hour he and Vijay came to the office.

We all work away the next two days. It is non-stop. The good news is that the site is almost ready. The bad news... well for a change there is no bad news. We are truly making progress.

By Sunday night things look good but the effort is still very high. Jacquie (who recently joined us on Beth's team to blog and provide merchandising) pulls another all nighter. Dan continues his amazing output with Azhar and the two of them are working until 4am each night.

On Monday morning I continue the press tour - I meet with some of my favorite PR folks whom I've known for a while now.

I get some great positive feedback on the product. I only wish I could share this with the rest of the company first hand. I'm very excited and hope people like our new site once it goes live on early Wed morning.

Episode 15 – Oct 30 – Nov 3 – It’s all about Women (Shoppers, Entrepreneurs, PR)

(This post is a continuation of my prior posts on the transition from Riya 1.0 to what comes next. The previous episodes are:
14 , 13 , 12 , 11 , 10 , 9 , 8 , 7 , 6 , 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1 .

Episode 15 – Oct 30 – Nov 3 – It’s all about Women (Shoppers, Entrepreneurs, PR)

Beth and I had decided to hire a PR agency and do a press tour for this launch. While Riya 1.0 had been done almost entirely through the blogs, we knew Riya 2.0 couldn’t just be. Our logic went something like this…

Marketing to Women
--------------------------
Riya 2.0 would help most in hard to describe items for which searching inside photos was most important. Objects that had this property tended to be soft goods like clothing, jewelry, handbags, shoes, home and garden, etc. Looking at Hitwise we realized that while there were $15-$30B worth of these items sold on the Web, almost 65% of the buyers for these items were women.

We knew we need to reach more women. We would talk to the fashion bloggers who were had the largest audience online, but in addition, I wanted to talk to the traditional fashion magazines like Instyle, People, Lucky, Jane, etc. Millions of women each day read their articles. The reporters at these magazines were not reading Techcrunch or my blog and had never heard of Riya.

Porter Novelli
-----------------
Laura’s team at Porter Novelli were perfect for this. They knew the technology reporters and they had folks who had pitched these consumer women’s magazines before. Her team was in Austin, but as a result was far cheaper than most S.F. or NY agencies.

They started setting up meetings almost 1 month in advance. After about 3 weeks things looked bleak, we had very few meetings. I called Lisa Peterson and Laura Beck and said, “What the frack is going on.” Laura said, “Don’t worry we will get there.” Lisa seemed a little scared of me. Nonetheless she took the feedback and took action.

In the end, Lisa Peterson, Cindy Young, and Lesley Pitts (who all work for Laura) just knocked the ball out of the park. I have worked with many PR agencies in my career (actually almost 7 different ones) and PN Austin is the best … and cost effective to boot. They don’t try and tell you that they know your business better than you. They just make the meetings happen.

Lisa Peterson impressed me the most. She quarterbacked the whole tour, got us even more meetings while driving in the car to our existing meetings, and made sure we were answering follow up questions. Lisa is a smart and determined person who cold called her way into her first internship in NYC after college. Like many she followed her dream of working in NYC and doing PR even if it meant she had to live in Spanish Harlem. She worked her way up through great execution and attention to detail. After spending a 12 hours a day for a whole week with her, I was blown away.

The Tour
------------
Lisa and I met in Washington D.C. on the 29th evening and for the next five days we did 6-8 meetings a day between D.C. and Manhattan. It was exhausting. Rushing around in Manhattan is no fun, but the response we kept getting was just extraordinary. Person after person we met just sat there with their mouth gaping wide open. Some of the comments I heard were:

- This is just amazing.
- I didn’t know this could be done with technology.
- I’ve been waiting for this for years
- This will increase online sales of clothing.
- How did you guys do this?
- This is so impressive.

A most of all (since most of the fashion reporters were themselves women) they said, “I will use this site daily and will tell my friends to.” Compliments are great – usage, visits, and purchases are better.

The Experts on Women
------------------------------

For me these weren’t just pitch meetings. I was learning about a new industry. From Jane (where we met a really smart fashion editor named Kelly Culp – who eventually led us to the Editor in Chief – Brandon Holley) we learned about how truly technology savvy women aged 25-30 were and from People Magazine we learned just how popular dressing like celebrities was for the mass consumer market. However I learned the most from the bloggers.

I got the opportunity to meet three very impressive entrepreneurs.

Lesley Scott from fashiontribes , Julie Fredrickson (and her very smart partner Philip Leif Bjerknes) from Coutorture , and Michelle Madhok from She Finds . All three had been building their online magazines and had seen their blogs take off. All three where experts in fashion and style. Frankly all three reminded me of the position Michael Arrington was in the early days of Techcrunch. Like him a year ago, their audience was just starting to find the Blogosphere. Their audience was just starting to transition from email lists like Daily Candy . All three had experimented with various revenue models, had done great SEO work, and were building traffic month on month. They seemed aggressive and driven. I could relate to them as a fellow entrepreneur. In the 45 minutes we spent together, I learned so much from them and I realized just how little I knew about the world of fashion.

They also had seen the male biases of many bloggers. One said, “… our traffic is sky rocketing but the traditional blogosphere can sometimes be hostile to us. For example when my article on the best moisturizers got put in Digg by a reader, the tech crowd that frequents Digg marked it as spam even through it was an genuine article.” It seems the Blogosphere is still a little male-centric.

From them all I learned new vocabulary – What is a Mary-Jane shoe (every girl seems to know this – no guy does). I learned that the average Vogue reader is in her fifties while the after Jane reader is much younger.

The key to being successful is to learn as much about how you customer thinks as possible … even if you are the wrong gender… ;-). Of course my wife just laughed at me.

Killer Apps and Purple Cows
---------------------------------

On the 2nd to last day of our press tour when meeting with a really smart BD guy from a large search engine in NYC it dawned on me… he said, “You have the killer app for shopping for soft goods…”

Maybe we did and maybe we didn’t, but it was nice to get such a positive response.

Ironically the interest we are getting in Riya 2.0 is not due just to good execution such as that of Tara in Riya 1.0 or Beth and the PR agency in 2.0 but mostly because of the Godin’s purple cow-esque approach of Riya. Once again, people were talking about Riya because we had build something truly different and used technology to get us there.

Ann Chao presented to a bunch of merchants during the week and she probably said it best when she wrote to the whole company, “

First of all, I want to congratulate everyone on a great looking site and thank you for all your hard work. Over the last 2 days, I met with 3 different affiliate networks in Chicago.. Everyone … was blown away with the new site and was incredibly excited to get their merchants involved. I had no problems demo-ing. Everything performed smoothly and quickly. Thank you for making this possible.

Myself, Ann, Mark, Beth, and even Lisa are just the broadcasters of the incredible work of our engineers. Our engineers made a product that got us so many meetings and such a strong response.

Thanks team…

I don’t know if they any of these reporters will deem this newsworthy enough.... we'll see.

Episode 14 – October 23th to 29th

(This post is a continuation of my prior posts on the transition from Riya 1.0 to what comes next. The previous episodes are:
13 , 12 , 11 , 10 , 9 , 8 , 7 , 6 , 5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1 .

Episode 14 – October 23th to 29th.

Monday morning 8am. I walk into the office. I have an 8am call so I'm in early. As the door slams behind me, Dan and Karl’s heads pop-up from the couch. I spin around. It is clear they pulled an all nighter. Unfortunately, it won’t be their last this week. They are not the only ones. In the India office, Sajan, Amod, RK, and many others seem to be on IM all hours of the day.

There are always those people in a company who say, “I work smarter not harder.” I’ve never believed that is enough. Given this is the 2nd time I’ve build a company I can tell that I am way more efficient than I was before. However, I believe the startup world is super competitive and to win you have to work harder and smarter. However, despite this view, even I have a limit and the team is clearly there. This week however something bigger than my desires is driving the team. It is their desire to get this site out and their own pride. Thus, unbelievably the pace quickens even further... driven by what seems to be passion.

On Monday morning we have a user test of 20 people. For the first time in weeks we have a working build. The test confirms that we are on track and finds a few bugs. Both of which are good news. Now each day we meet at 6pm and review where we are and open items. The war room is our front conference room. Each day we make a new list of tweaks and the next day we see how many were done.

As any engineer can attest it is exhausting to have to make changes to have a stable build each day. We work on. Things are really starting to click all over the company. The good news starts rolling in:

- The software build is up and working
- The UI is almost finalized and complete – Dan’s made a brilliant Ajax framework decision that has really made this part easy.
- The user satisfaction with the categories we plan to launch is quite positive
- The data from the crawl is finally cleansed and is starting to get indexed
- Beth completes the hiring of her team

Everything is looking up…

Of course we start seeing bugs and we start the bug list. The list is 231 bugs long. We start hacking away at it.

Monday night we are at the office until 8pm, Tuesday until 10pm, Wednesday until 11pm. This continues until Saturday night at 1am I leave to go home and pack for our press tour. The rest of the team is still there. The bug count starts falling. We now have only about 11 days until launch.

Peter's Move to Crosslink

Peter writes here about his move to Crosslink Capital.

I must admit I was a little tenative when he first told me he was considering this. I've had two of my board members at Andale leave their VC firms and frankly it was just disasterous for the company. What happened was that the company became an orphaned "deal". The new guy assigned to the deal had no motivation to really make big needed changes since if it failed he would get blamed, and if it succeeded the IRR with LPs would always give most of the credit to the guy who originally made the investment.

However, in this case, Peter was a real pro in how he handled this and how he set it up to ensure Riya didn't get orphaned. In addition, his old partners seem very committed to letting him continue as the board member on Riya and his other companies. I blogged a long time ago about how great Peter and his partners were and how it was at his Birthday party in Feb '05 that they helped us get our Series A done. It seems that same relationship between them all has allowed for a smooth transition for Peter.

Congratulations on the new job Peter!