Interview With Barney Pell and Ramez Naam About Microsoft?s Powerset Acquisition: Integration By End Of Year

MA. Is there anything that can happen can stop the closing at this point?

RN: It would be very, very unexpected for anything to stop the closing at this point.

MA: Okay, and how long do you think it would take to close the deal, or more importantly really integrating the teams and move the product forward using Microsoft?s resources.

RN: Well, closing the deal, it?ll take a typical amount of time and not too terribly long, as far as integrating the teams, I think we?ll start on that immediately. And this is both a short term and long term task: Short term we think that Powerset has an amazing team, great people like Tim Converse, Chad Walters, Lorenzo Thione, Scott Prevost, Barney and they?ll have a big impact on Live Search before the end of the year your going to see significant changes and then long term as Barney likes to say, this is a 20 year vision, really the understanding what the pages are about, what queries mean. This is the front line of artificial intelligence, computer science and we?re going to be working on this for quite a long time to come.

MA: Ramez, did you say that your going to be integrating the teams right away?

RN: Yea, essentially yes.

MA: Ok, so effectively the deals close, that means that the deals closed, from an outsiders perspective, you guys are one company and you?re moving forward right now.

RN: We?re certainly laying our plans right now and talk about what we?re going to start doing. You won?t see any impact until the deal actually closes, but we have a a lot of ideas and a lot of conversations.

MA: Barney I?d like to, before we jump in too much more, I?d like for you to give a little bit of a background of Powerset, just a couple of minutes on when you first had the idea, the early days when you founded the company and just a couple minutes on that, and the basic ideas you had that resulted in you founding Powerset.

BP: Ok great. 3 years ago I was an Entrepreneur in residence at Mayfield, a venture capital firm. And I was looking at what was going to be the future of search, projecting forward in an open ended, visionary way and looking at what were the major trends. I had a previous background in a lot of artificial intelligence, and taking advanced AI technology from research labs, and getting them into the world. Either through Mission Critical, or mission operations at NASA, spacecrafts when I was at NASA, or internet search related technologies among other things.

I could see that there was going to be a huge amount of computing power becoming available over time, and that a lot of the work in AI and in particular natural language, was sort of nearing the time where it was going to be commercially ready, and these two trends would be converging just as search was becoming the center of our interactions with computers and tapping into all the information that is out there on the internet. So, I could really see that there were a set of trends that were going to converge it looked like the center of a perfect storm, I then having seen this vision, went out to evaluate how good was this natural language technology across the different groups, the research organizations, identified the key requirements that would make it work at scale, what kind of properties would a natural language search have to have to work at scale, how would the economics work now, and was now really the right time. And in my assessment of the different technologies out there, I found that the technology at Park, after 30 years of development, had come to a point where it was actually ready to be taken out, and to be commercialized. And in principal ought to be able to work at scale. I began negotiating with Park, with Ron Kaplan, who was leading the natural language group there for 30 years, and also with his colleague Danny. These were sort of the fundamental guys in computational linguistics over all this time.

And in parallel I found that there was another group that was related, working with the same Park technology, already looking to apply it to search, in a research basis, and these were the folks at Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto labs including, Lorenzo Thione, and two of our other key people inside Powerset. And they had a similar vision on a research side, and they were already looking at the Park technology and they were saying that this should be able to work. So, we actually had a shared vision, a shared recognition across all of us, that this could be possible. And Lorenzo would up saying right away, ?let?s go do this, you know I want to join you?, and became a co-founder.