Friday, March 4, 2011
Rob Bell Stirs Wrath
How a 19-Year-Old Ea
How a 19-Year-Old Earned $5 Million to Revolutionize Search
How This 19-Year-Old Is Taking On Google
He's an Israeli who sidestepped military service in favor of moving to the Bay Area to become Y Combinator's youngest founder. Six months later, all eyes are on Daniel Gross, as he has almost $5 million in funding backing his search engine, Greplin. Oh, and he didn’t go to college.
Courtesy company
The 48-Hour Start-up: Daniel Gross developed the idea for Greplin during a breakneck, two-day coding session.
Courtesy company
Robby Walker is the co-founder of Greplin. His first company, Zenter, was acquired by Google.
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Where might you want to search that Google can't reach? The social slice of the Web, plus everything that an individual has password-protected hovering in the cloud, has been largely off-limits to traditional search engines. Well, until an Israeli high-school graduate took a hiatus from Army duty to spend three months at Y Combinator, bombed on a few projects, and then struck gold in his last 48 hours at the start-up incubator. Daniel Gross, along with co-founder Robby Walker, 27, created Greplin, a user-authorized search that can access Facebook, Twitter, Google Documents, Salesforce, and more. The site launched in late February. Inc.com's Christine Lagorio spoke with Gross, age 19, about his struggles, raising nearly $5 million in investment after just six months at work, and his unique lack of college experience.
Tell me how Greplin came about.
I'm originally from Israel. I was in Israel and had graduated high school, and I was all set to go into the Israeli Army. I applied to Y Combinator. And not thinking I'd get in, I was invited to an interview. I thought of it as a fun long weekend in San Francisco. They had an odd reaction—they didn't quite like what I was working on, but I guess they liked me. They wanted me to come back, so I hopped back on a plane.
In my three months there, I built several things, none of which caught on. Right at the end of Y Combinator, you get a cool opportunity to get up on a stage and show your project to the world. And our project had just got shut down, so this was 48 hours before the end of the program. I went over to [Y Combinator co-founder] Paul Graham's house, and he said, "Just build something that you'd want to use today, not something you think people could use somehow." So I created a very, very, very basic demo in that 48 hours.
I got a weird reaction. I was a disheveled 18-year-old kid. But the idea had support. So I spent the next months building a workable product by night and raising $780,000 in angel funding. It was from a pretty cool team, the guy who made Gmail, Paul Buchheit, and Chris Dixon, and the guy who did Square. Also the CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor.
Was there an "a-ha" moment in deciding on working on a search engine for peoples' online documents and social media files?
I had this very long list of things I thought would be cool. Greplin was always near the top. But my mistake at Y Combinator was not listening to my own intuition enough. There's the line "Wouldn't it be cool if this thing existed?" but those aren't often good ideas, because you're not the ideal user. It's also very hard to make a product when you're not the target audience. Because you have to make decisions along the way, and unless you would be the target user, you're going to make the wrong decisions. Understanding that fact was my "a-ha" moment. Greplin was the one project idea I had for which I was the target audience.
Where does the name come from?
The idea came way before the name. The idea was in a sense a headline: A search engine that lets you find all of your stuff online. This guy Adam Goldstein [cofounder of flight-search start-up Hipmunk] and Paul Graham were sitting with me. Adam just threw out this name. And using the word grep, which in CS programming is essentially a command for search. So a lot of nerds get that. Adam threw out the name, and people liked it.
It's also a good one because people can pronounce it, spell it over the phone, and has a backwards inside joke that you'll only get if you a technical person. Total win.
Did you ever have to slow down and think: Wait, what am I doing?
Well, once, and it was wise. More or less, we had some money in the bank and we launched the product. But we had this weird problem where we didn't know so many people would use it. I mean, a lot did. Somehow the code I'd written at 4 a.m. trying to get onto stage didn't scale very well. (Laughter.) At that point you can either monkey-patch everything, or you can start from scratch. We chose to do the latter. So we spent September through last month reworking it all.
And you just launched the site officially last week?
Yeah, we raised $4 million from Sequoia in December, and kept programming, and then just lauched the site, and we're trying to keep it growing since.
You say you're not trying to compete with Google, but what you've created seems a lot like Google for social media and cloud-computing. What portion of your data lives, personally, is in the cloud?
I had this realization a few days ago when I thought I lost my laptop. Then I realized I don't think I have a single piece of information that's solely on my laptop. I think I'm indicitive of a future generation.
You told the Wall Street Journal "We're Switzerland; we're neutral." What does that mean?
I think what I was trying to say is that if you look at a product like this, it's useful. There's a need. And the question is why hasn't someone built it already? The answer is that Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., they're not able to get access to the data other than your own. Google and Apple compete. They're not sharing data anytime soon. We're Switzerland, because any company creating a product like this cannot be biased to any product over another.
Do you think you'll go to college eventually?
The way it works in Israel, you're supposed to go into the Army first, and they have a computer science division, I would have done that. But regardless of how successful Greplin is, say, even if we go public someday, my parents won't be satisfied unless I get a degree. They won't speak to me. But, really, I've been completely focused on the company, and haven't given it too much thought.
Did you always intend to become an entrepreneur?
I was always fascinated by the greater speed start-ups function at versus larger corporations.
It was always something I wanted to do—the unexpected thing was how quickly that happened. I thought I'd go to the Army, develop relationships with intelligent guys, and then three years later maybe start something.
How does your life and work now compare to what you see yourself doing in five years?
It'd be really great for me personally if we were able to keep growing Greplin in the next five years. If we can create something that's a household name and that people use every day, that's a dream.
Rob Bell Stirs Wrath With New Views On Old Questions
In a book to be published this month, the pastor, Rob Bell, known for his provocative views and appeal among the young, describes as “misguided and toxic” the dogma that “a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better.”
Such statements are hardly radical among more liberal theologians, who for centuries have wrestled with the seeming contradiction between an all-loving God and the consignment of the billions of non-Christians to eternal suffering. But to traditionalists they border on heresy, and they have come just at a time when conservative evangelicals fear that a younger generation is straying from unbendable biblical truths.
Mr. Bell, 40, whose Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., has 10,000 members, is a Christian celebrity and something of a hipster in the pulpit, with engaging videos that sell by the hundreds of thousands and appearances to rapt, youthful crowds in rock-music arenas.
His book comes as the evangelical community has embraced the Internet and social media to a remarkable degree, so that a debate that once might have built over months in magazines and pulpits has instead erupted at electronic speed.
The furor was touched off last Saturday by a widely read Christian blogger, Justin Taylor, based on promotional summaries of the book and a video produced by Mr. Bell. In his blog, Between Two Worlds, Mr. Taylor said that the pastor “is moving farther and farther away from anything resembling biblical Christianity.”
“It is unspeakably sad when those called to be ministers of the Word distort the gospel and deceive the people of God with false doctrine,” wrote Mr. Taylor, who is vice president of Crossway, a Christian publisher in Wheaton, Ill.
By that same evening, “Rob Bell” was one of the top 10 trending topics on Twitter. Within 48 hours, Mr. Taylor’s original blog had been viewed 250,000 times. Dozens of other Christian leaders and bloggers jumped into the fray and thousands of their readers posted comments on both sides of the debate, though few had yet seen the entire book.
One leading evangelical, John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, wrote, “Farewell Rob Bell.” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a blog post that by suggesting that people who do not embrace Jesus may still be saved, Mr. Bell was at best toying with heresy. He called the promotional video, in which Mr. Bell pointedly asks whether it can be true that Gandhi, a non-Christian, is burning in hell, “the sad equivalent of a theological striptease.”
Others such as Scot McNight, a professor of theology at North Park University in Chicago, said they welcomed the renewed discussion of one of the hardest issues in Christianity — can a loving God really be so wrathful toward people who faltered, or never were exposed to Jesus? In an interview and on his blog, he said that the thunder emanating from the right this week was not representative of American Christians, even evangelicals. According to surveys and his experience with students, Mr. McNight said, a large majority of evangelical Christians “more or less believe that people of other faiths will go to heaven,” whatever their churches and theologians may argue.
“Rob Bell is tapping into a younger generation that really wants to open up these questions,” he said. “He is also tapping into the fear of the traditionalists — that these differing views of heaven and hell will compromise the Christian message.”
Mr. Bell, who through his publisher declined to comment on the book or the debate, has resisted labels, but he is often described as part of the so-called emerging church movement, which caters to younger believers and has challenged theological boundaries as well as pastoral involvement in conservative politics.
As the controversy exploded last week, HarperOne moved up to March 15 the publication date of Mr. Bell’s book, “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
Judging from an advance copy, the 200-page book is unlikely to assuage Mr. Bell’s critics. In an elliptical style, he throws out probing questions about traditional biblical interpretations, mixing real-life stories with scripture.
Much of the book is a sometimes obscure discussion of the meaning of heaven and hell that tears away at the standard ideas. In his version, heaven is something that begins here on earth, in a life of goodness, and hell seems more a condition than an eternal fate — “the very real consequences we experience when we reject all the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us.”
While sliding close to what critics consider the heresy of “universalism” — that all humans will eventually be saved — he never uses the term .
Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today, in a blog posting called for all sides to temper their rhetoric. and welcome more debate.
“We won’t be able to discern where the Spirit is leading if we don’t listen and respond respectfully to one another,” he wrote.
“God once used a donkey to make his will known,” he added, “so surely he is able to speak through both traditionalists and gadflies.”