Internet Advertising Pioneer: Kevin O’Connor, Founder of DoubleClick and FindTheBest (Part 4)

Sramana: One of the core philosophies of our incubator is that over 99% of business that seek venture or angel financing get rejected. In the reject pool, there are a lot of solid mid-sized businesses. They will not be massive, but they can be solid profitable businesses.

Kevin O’Connor: I agree. Every top VC going today wants to see a billion-dollar business. I think a lot of people would be happy coming up with a $10 million company or a $100 million company.

Sramana: You spent seven years investing in companies. How did you transition from that into your current role?

Kevin O’Connor: I was not sure I was going to do another company because it is a lot of work. I did it for 20 years. You work 100-hour weeks, and I didn’t really know my own family. It was pretty unappealing to get back into the startup phase. I kept running across the exact same problems over and over again: what college should my kids go to, what resort were we going to go to, analyzing companies and determining what the best product in that market was. Then Kayak came out.

I thought that it was a brilliant tool that flipped the travel industry on its head. It gave all the data someone needs to make the best decision about travel. I asked why we could not make a Kayak-like tool to help consumers and businesses make the best decision across a wide range of products and services. When I looked, I found there were thousands of companies doing this for their topic, but they were really affiliate shells.

We started building a broad platform to take data and turn it into content. We wanted to do for data what WordPress does for bloggers. How do you take a data set and make it really useful to drive a decision that is unbiased?

Sramana: Can you give me a use case? What data would you start with and how would you flesh it out?

Kevin O’Connor: If you take a look at smartphones, and the way that people decide which one to buy, there is a set of data that is most important to people as they evaluate them. We will build out a taxonomy of what the most important information is. Things like talk time and screen size are important drivers. We bring those decision points out, and we do that on the search results page. People want to enter their requirements and have us show them which phones, of the 500 that are out there, match their requirements.

The same process applies for college selection, but the data sets are different. For colleges people will consider things like location, degree, SAT scores, and other factors. We can pull out the relevant colleges based on their preferences.

Sramana: We have covered the vertical search category extensively since 2006 and 2007. We have interviewed all of the major players in that category. I want to drill down a bit more about a term you used, “affiliate shells.”

Kevin O’Connor: If you think back five or six years ago, there were a lot of people telling you what the best product was in any particular category. Of course, the product they recommended was probably the one that had the best affiliate payout program. Companies like Kayak, Trulia and Zillow came out with true vertical search engines. We are probably the biggest vertical search player out there. Nobody covers the number of topics that we do.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Internet Advertising Pioneer: Kevin O'Connor, Founder of DoubleClick and FindTheBest
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