A Brief History of Adpinion (Part 1)
Welcome to the blog of the Adpinion Team. I (Luke Iannini) will be your host here, but if we’re lucky Mike and Kevin will be dropping by often to share words of profundity, or at least some links they found on the internet. We’ll kick things off with a short, 2 or 3 part series explaining the genesis of Adpinion, but after that, our startup and its doings will only be one animal in a great menagerie of topics. So let us begin the stampede…
Story Begins
The realization that I was doing far more interesting things outside of school than inside first lead to my taking a year off. I spent that year making a rather healthy salary for the age of 19 working for an internet company, which handily fed my addiction to musical synthesizers. But I became disillusioned with that, too. That world of business struck me as a sad evil, so I returned to college to study music. Sadly, the program was a cruel joke. So I went off on my own again, this time determined to serve neither headmaster nor CEO. This time I’d heard of a downtown brand of dance. It was called the Startup.
Thus, in early 2006, I began working with Mike on an almost humorously ambitious idea we buzzworded “collaborative social networking”. I still believe in it greatly, but a description would surely stretch longer than your attention span. To be brief, we started with some mockups: draggable panes, a notification center, windows showing your friends’ status. And since we were feeling practical, a place for ads.
But something felt very wrong with that last step. Our site, like a rapidly growing number of sites, was almost entirely defined by its users. And yet we were excluding one rectangular pane from that personalization because, hey, that’s Internet Advertising! That’s just the way things are! Well, we knew that didn’t make sense. Moreover, we knew from a decade spent growing up with the internet that internet advertising sucked.
So I dragged two blobs next to the ad. I colored them red and green. The logic went like this: if the goal of advertising is to let people know about things they may want, why not just ask them what they like, rather than try to infer their interests by “following them around” on the net? Within 3 weeks we were no longer working on how to make social networks into productive tools.1 We were now devoted to discovering what was possible if the user defined his or her own content all the way down to the ads they saw. Those red and green blobs became the universally known “Internet Voting Thumbs”, and so were born the Buttons of Judgement.
My programming experience at this point was limited to obscure dataflow DSP languages2, so I called up Kevin. We had worked together before: at the age of 12 we founded Warp Speed Computer Repair, which, after turning down Sequioa, we sold to Apple for an undiscosed sum.3
Kevin wrote the software for the voice controlled Linux computer I installed in my high school car. When I called him he was working for the Phoenix Mars Lander while writing software to predict the stock market on the side. He took my vague scaffolding and designed an unbelievably cool algorithm for determining people’s likes and dislikes, then choosing the most appropriate ad to display.
At this point, we hadn’t heard of Y Combinator. We were determined to go it alone. We built a site with a mini-novella per page, and a demo to show off the tech. Then we called all our friends and family and stormed Digg. We made it to the front page before getting accused of PR astroturfing for a big corp (ha!). It was also around this point that I stumbled into the YC application. The deadline was in 2 days, but we went for it anyways; in our typical style, we stayed up all night and got it in on time.
JOIN US NEXT TIME…
1 I should mention that we also realized that the scope of our social networking project had grown to a size barely appropriate for Google let alone 3 hackers; we’d revisit this type of delusion of grandeur in the heady early weeks of Y Combinator (stay tuned!)
2 It’s called Pure Data, and it’s wonderful. Give it a try!
3 You may have heard of the Genius Bar. Do you think they’re just born geniuses? Well, you’d be right. But who were the two Original Geniuses rooting that family tree? I’ll say no more.
4 Fine. Fine. OK? Satisfied? I swear, Internet, if you meme us, we are SO OVER, you and I. Like you never had blue hair. Whatever. (Oh thank fsm, they put it behind a paywall! You’ll have to pay to make us pay for posting this)