My post earlier this week about Spokeo opened up a door again with someone I had connected with a few years back. That person would be the founder of Spokeo, Harrison Tang. He and I had a nice email exchange this past week post this Spokeo post I wrote. Go give it a read if you missed it.

One thing I would like to make clear before continuing: I did ask his permission to quote him from his email. Harrison, as like I have been, have been the victim of people who think they can just post any email online; damn the privacy of a one to one exchange. But that is the day and age we live in. Still the same, since I have had that done to me before, I always ask permission. It’s just the right thing to do!

One of the main things that he stated was in this day and age of valuations of companies going through the roof, you really don’t need millions of dollars to make something from nothing. Another successful serial entrepreneur, who I just linked, I know loves to say that as his calling card. Here now are some quotes from Harrison.

As you’ve noticed already, Spokeo.com has changed quite a bit.  The
team, however, is still the same small team that you knew since 2006
(we do have more than 15 people now though, as opposed to 6).  We
haven’t taken any VC funding, and no, we do not have an outsourcing
staff in India.  Everything is designed and built in USA.  A lot of
people are surprised by how such a small team can operate a site like
Spokeo.com.  Well … the truth is that you don’t need millions to
start a company anymore.

Surprised anyone? The truth is that you don’t need millions to start a company anymore. I suppose in defense of companies taking on the millions these days, it’s for scale once you get past that startup mode. The funny thing is, is that Spokeo has been around plugging away since 2006 when I first came to know of them.

We’ve done more than one “pivoting” (I guess that’s the buzz word for
startups nowadays) not because we like to pivot, but rather because we
need to pivot in order to survive.  Building a technology does not
always translate to building a business.  As we’ve learned from the
hard way, people do not pay for social network aggregators even though
it’s a cool concept and a very hard technology to build.

That is surely something to think about. Building a social aggregator is cool – but guess what – no one really will pay you to do it! For anyone contemplating on building the next Facebook/Twitter aggregation engine, you might want to think about that further before you execute it!

Why did they pivot and do the change from social aggregator to a more in demand product? It’s the users. It’s always about the users of your product.

It takes visions and creativity to create something different, but it
requires execution and discipline to turn that thing into a business.
Without vision, we could not have build something as innovative as
Spokeo’s underlying technology.  That said, without practical
execution, we would still be building a social network aggregator that
only technical people use, as opposed to tailoring our technology for
the larger target audience.  At the end of the day, we changed
Spokeo’s direction because our users wanted us to change, and they
voted for the new direction with their own wallets.

This goes back to the days I was playing actively in bands. One thing I always tried to relay to people is that not everyone will like you. But in the same token, you have to sometimes swallow what you want to do for the better of the whole. In other words, building the social aggregator was fun, but it was also not a true business that would succeed or gain any traction.

What about all the criticism that Spokeo was receiving in regards to the whole privacy issue, etc.

We are receptive of all criticisms
(constructive or not), and we try our best to address them one-by-one.
This explains why we’ve been constantly updating our website and
technology, making it more accurate and friendlier.

Going back to an earlier comment about one of my former companies, who Harrison even was nice enough to remember, what about the competition? Does it mean you shouldn’t do it?

There are hundreds of online directories out there (we are actually
not the biggest one), but since most of them don’t work that well,
Spokeo is the first people search engine that most people have ever
seen. Because Spokeo offers a lot better user experience than
traditional directories, we leapfrogged past the early adopter crowd
relatively quickly. We don’t have much time to fine-tune our product
and business model with the early adopters before going mainstream, so
we’ve had couple stumbles here and there. That said, if you’ve been
following the evolution of Spokeo.com, you can see that we’ve been
making constant progress in addressing all the issues.

Oh and to be clear, I don’t think I was doing anything crazy back in the day, but maybe we were. It’s nice to hear how some people see you from the outside.

Image via CrunchBase

The last time we talked you were doing crazy stuff at Lookery. Sounds
like you are even busier nowadays and doing well :)

One of the things that I realized back in the Lookery days was that most of the people in that company were engineers. Or very tech oriented people and very startup veteran. To illustrate what I mean, the one item that sticks out is the last thing Harrison said in our email exchange.

Anyway, we are engineers here, not marketers and philosophers, so we
know our most convincing argument is our product itself. With
millions of searches every single day, people are finding Spokeo
useful. This encourages us to keep innovating and making Spokeo
better for everyone.

With regards to that statement. It sort of bodes well for people like me as well as other people type of people. Every startup needs someone besides the engineers to scale well. While the product does matter, if you can’t win over the people, eventually you’ll be the startup with no one using that fantastic product. Just like back in the band days, while your material might be excellent, if you can’t put butts in the seats to listen, you’ll be playing for bartenders and barmaids only.

Technically Speaking, Harrison had a lot of great stuff to share, and I’m glad he gave permission for me to share it with everyone reading this. And one last item – Harrison is an Apple fanboy or maybe just a Steve Jobs fanboy! :)

We are fans of Steve Jobs here at Spokeo, and we will keep simplifying
Spokeo until every grandma on the planet knows how to use it.

Related articles

• Spokeo and personal data aggregators: Xeni on The Madeleine Brand Show (boingboing.net)
• Spokeo (indigoundecided.wordpress.com)
• Spokeo: Not your grandma’s phonebook! (chicagonow.com)
• Spokeo may know more about you than you realize (boingboing.net)
• Spokeo.com: This will freak out the privacy advocates (thoughtgadgets.com)

Found another good article on students blogging and making money:

The general definition of a student all around the world is same – a child who studies. Their daily routine comprises of going to school/college and completing assignments related to your subjects. Normally, a student’s life is considered boring because he do not have much to do except studying and securing good marks.

But in this era of modernization and materialism, students need extra money to live their life and so they are indulging in part time jobs. And lot of them has opted for blogging. I personally feel that blogging is the best part time business for any student. There are lots of positives in blogging which can compliment your all round performance.

The general definition of a student all around the world is same – a child who studies. Their daily routine comprises of going to school/college and completing assignments related to your subjects. Normally, a student’s life is considered boring because he do not have much to do except studying and securing good marks.

But in this era of modernization and materialism, students need extra money to live their life and so they are indulging in part time jobs. And lot of them has opted for blogging. I personally feel that blogging is the best part time business for any student. There are lots of positives in blogging which can compliment your all round performance.

Here are the top 5 reasons why a student should go for blogging if he/she is thinking of a part time job:

1. Very Little Investment – Blogging does not require huge investment. If you are passionate or very knowledgeable about something (cricket, technology, commerce, environment etc.) and can spare an hour or two and Rs 200 per month from your pocket money, you can easily start a blog with own hosting and domain. My blog, BloggersPassion, just cost me Rs. 1000 per year. You need to do hard work in the beginning and after that, life will become easy for you as a blogger.
2. Work At Your Own Leisure – The major problem with students is the time. They have to adjust their schedule for other jobs. But for blogging, you can work when you want. Late at night or early in the morning; it’s entirely your choice. You decide the work hours and effort without anyone’s supervision.
3. Great Boost In Resume – If you will mention in your resume that as a student, you are into serious blogging and are successful; that will be a strong point in your hobbies or extra curricular activities and will surely impress the Human Resource Department, thereby increasing your chances of being selected.
4. Popularity With Knowledge – A successful blog can get you fame more than topping your examinations and you can be a popular guy in the college. Blogging is not considered a common activity in India and a blogger is bound to receive huge compliments, but only if his blog is successful and recognized. If you fail, then you will be ignored and labeled as just another internet psycho.
5. Huge Returns – Nothing could be better in a student’s life than earning an extra few hundred bucks. Blogging can fetch you lot of them and if you consider the fact that every thing is earned in US dollars and the conversion rate of USD to INR is quite good, an extra amount of Rs. 4000 would be too much to say. This is enough money to take care of your EXTRA EXPENSES (I hope you get them).

Technically Speaking, you will want to go read more for all the cool links in that article…

The news of the moment is that Twitter has been officially down for about 1.5 hours now, and looks like Facebook has suffered it’s own meltdown.

MySpace however seems to be rockin’ right along just fine. I haven’t checked any of the other social net’s – but it seems that out of the big two, the one that everyone has abandoned seems to be working just fine. A little too messy looking still, but hopefully in time the new leadership sees the error of the past administration that was in charge there.

It does bring up an interesting thought of maybe just possibly the social net revolution isn’t over quite yet. Stay tuned for sure, as with this mornings meltdown and people that can get in to update their fb status, all are crying that Twitter is down. Now I’m sure once everyone wakes up and the services come back, there will be a lot of analysis of this event.

Technically Speaking, a new social world is in order about right now; well if someone can tune the cloud, but as someone once already stated “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish!” >:-?