Ask Jeeves

“When I got to ask, there were, it was post nine, 11, there were rolling blackouts in California. People were taking sodas from the machine home at night. They had gone from, you know, a ten billion dollar valuation to a hundred million dollar valuation.”

“We were later called the apple of search, believe it or not, by people in the search industry and just being really proud of that turnaround and what we were able to accomplish there.”

“We raised fifty million dollars. We're going to go public. And then we crashed like you wouldn't believe with the crash. We sold what was left to ask Jeeves which is pretty much the only company that wanted us.”

“It was a question and answer product that was essentially manual. And it showed up at the top of the page, 90% of the time in how we looked at the data. It was only clicked on 25% of the time.”