The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 4)

SM: Based on the way you are approaching the problem, it seems much easier to do relevance in a constrained domain than in an unconstrained domain. TC: Absolutely. Relevance is the idea of constraining things.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 3)

SM: How successful is your architecture when it comes to indexing? TC: We now index a lot more pages than other people. Microsoft and Yahoo! have fallen behind in terms of indexing and keeping up with Google. Google will get better with more competition.

The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 2)

SM: Did Anna go to Google after it went public? TC: She went there before it went public. Google was in a total panic as Yahoo! had come out with a competitive product. Google was in a hyper phase of trying to make things better, which is a terrible thing to do. They got nothing

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The Audacity of Tom Costello (Part 1)

Tom Costello has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University. His emphasis is artificial intelligence (AI), and aside from teaching he has worked as a researcher at Stanford for DARPA and the U.S. Air Force. He was one of the founders of Xift, and he later worked at IBM. Today his research in the area

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From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 7)

SM: Since you have set up the company as an equity-based structure, you are going to have to exit it. If you were going to keep it you would have needed a different structure. MM: Definitely. We would like to sell the company as a strategic acquisition to a company that can make use of

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From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 6)

SM: What was your ultimate design goal? MM: The first problem we aimed to solve was how to make a re-transmission machine, a control system that retransmits data at a rate that matches the channel capacity for any packet loss rate over the channel and any delay. That was our design goal.

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 5)

SM: You were able to find a starting point in the open source community? MM: I found a good model from a different domain that we experimented with, and it worked well. That was the point at which we started making the protocol.

From Laid-off Engineer To Successful Startup CEO: Michelle Munson of Aspera (Part 4)

SM: What was the problem the digital media companies were facing that you wanted to solve? MM: I knew it was a problem in application layer networking, which was something I had always had an interest in. I liked the theoretical underpinnings of it. I could see there was a layer which was unsolved.