Ask Jeeves

“A lot of people ran out and invested in Ash Cheeves and Alta Vista and Lycos and excite and name all the companies that a few years later would go to zero. And it's almost certain that that will also happen in AI.”

“If you have a large user base, That's product has seen better days where the you know, the team could probably be improved, where the brand had seen better days. If you just focus on crushing it for your users, for the users you already have. That that actuall…”

“And in 2002, we switched to Google AdWords where I think we're the first ones to do that, which helped us become profitable and set our stock on a, I mean, I think we, 50 X that thing from there. And then we sold I see in February of 2005.”

“In fact, most category creators lose the market. Like what happened to MySpace? What happened to Ask Jeeves? It didn't work out so good for them. Most category creators actually get overtaken by fast followers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”