Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search (Part 4, final)
SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company?
VH: Our company is funded by VCs, Accel and Lightspeed, and private individuals such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Bill Miller of Legg Mason.
SM: What financing stage are you at right now?
VH: We feel like we are fully funded, so we are not looking for more money at this time. If the opportunity arises, we will look at adding more funding.
SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now?
VH: Yes, we feel pretty good about where we are with the management team at this point. We have strong leads in product management, development and business partnerships.
SM: What is your growth strategy?
VH: We see a lot of growth in our core verticals – health, auto, and travel. We’re also working on a horizontal product offering that we believe will be another key driver of growth, which we will give additional details on in the coming months.
SM: I have covered health, autos and travel. They are all good growth categories. I would also do Business & Finance and Sports. They would probably lend themselves to your taxonomy model quite nicely.
As I said, I am not convinced about your horizontal product strategy.
SM. What are some of your key learnings from this journey so far?
VH: Have fun doing it. Make friends doing it.
SM: Yes, make friends doing it is something people don’t put as much emphasis on 
Thanks, Venky, and good luck!
This segment is part 4 in a 4 part series
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Sramana, Interesting interview. I don’t understand why you think:
“As I said, I am not convinced about your horizontal product strategy.”
Web search and wikipedia are both horizontal so that strategy should work pretty well. Going horizontal, should just create more value for the users, right?
Hi Rob,
Good question.
Couple of reasons:
Taxonomies are hard to scale on an unconstrained level. They work well and require a lot of manual work to properly organize and maintain, as long as the domain is constrained. What I say above is that I am not convinced about Taxonomies being scalable in a horizontal mode.
I believe that the web will verticalize in the next wave, and in general, if advertising is your business model, then you get much better advertising rates if the audience is well-defined.
For further discussion on the subject, please read my Web 3.0 writings.
Sramana
Sramana/Rob
I think the semantic taxonomy would be
deep vertical (SM)Vs Broad Horizontal (Public) Horizontal-vertical (a verticalizied horozontal)(Rob/Venky)
!:-)