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

We then spent a long time negotiating with Park to set up the right kind of teaming and partnership relationship, and to ultimately develop a very powerful license for this technology that would work for everyone. And during that time, we wound up, we were stealth for a while, and we would up hiring and building a great team, raising several rounds of funding, and basically building our product. And we had to build a lot of challenging infrastructure, take this natural language technology from the research labs, and really making it work on a large scale. Bringing together a world class search team, with together people like Chad Walters and Tim Converse coming on board, bringing their expertise and figure out how to make this stuff work on scale with natural language and the best of search, and then build up a product and user experience team that would be able to make this work in a way users would understand and be able to see the differentiation and like it.

Ultimately, after two years after we hired the first employees, we launched our product a couple months ago, demonstrating this capability on Wikipedia, and the response, you know we talked about this mike, the response that we had is that people generally really like the system and they just want to have it on the whole web. So I guess that?s a basic tour through the history of the company it?s only been 2 years since we hired any employees at all, and now the company is 63 people.

MA: How many of those 63 are search engineers and scientists?

BP: Most of them.

MA: Okay, how much money have you raised?

BP: We reported our series A round which we raised 12.5 million and that was including our angel bridge round. We actually didn?t report anything after that; clearly we did raise some more money, but we you know, we didn?t report anything.

MA: And what was the acquisition price?

BP: We?re not discussing that?

MA: Really, how about a ballpark? Everyone said 100 million is that where it ended up?

BP: We?re not even discussing ballparks, we?re not talking about it all together.

MA: That?s a great background of the company, but let?s talk a little bit about what you actually do that?s different in terms of thinking about Yahoo! Or Google search or search that Microsoft has today that?s keyword based and I?d love to go back to a post you did probably over a year ago now, maybe a year and a half ago, I think on your personal blog, where you talked about Powerset for the first time, and what you were trying to accomplish. From a non technical standpoint, what?s your vision for helping users search?

RN: One way to think about it is today?s systems that are out there, they don?t really understand language, so they don?t understand what a user is really saying, and the intent that?s behind the users query and they also don?t understand the documents that they are reading that they are ultimately trying to let the users find and by the way, they don?t understand the ads. So they don?t really understand anything and their based largely on statistical properties. Does this particular stream of characters appear with the right frequency in the right locations on certain pages? Does it all match? And it kind of does it pretty good job for being such a basic approach.