Deal Radar 2008: Kosmix+Adify – Potential Google Challenger

Kosmix is a vertical portal startup. Founded in 2006 by Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, founders of Junglee, this site aims at creating a ‘Home page for every topic’. Featured Kosmix sites are RightHealth, RightAutos and RightTrips focusing on health, autos and travel verticals. They have also been working on other verticals like politics, finance,

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 10)

SM: What are your thoughts about exit? CL: I don’t think Elvis will leave the building for a long time yet. We’ve certainly had offers that would have made me a very wealthy man, or at least a guy with a very loud car stereo.

Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 9)

SM: What is your growth strategy? CL: Growing a network is pretty straightforward. You build out the sales team and you add more publishers. We plan to continue on these core aspects while establishing more specialization, new products and barriers to entry. We have plenty of room for growth both in publisher audience base (there

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 8)

SM: Describe some of your team-building experiences. CL: From the start-ups I was associated with before TAN, I know that team building is perhaps the most difficult aspect of entrepreneurism (aside from spelling the word, of course). You start, and it’s just you and you are alone and you are screaming at the world, saying

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Is Google Scared?

Why this charade, if not? In a “Pot calling the kettle black” statement, Eric Schmidt whimpered that Microsoft’s Yahoo bid is anti-competitive. My poor little Google, let me rock you and soothe you … Here’s an excerpt from last week’s analysis on Google’s earnings: “Revenue on Google’s site stood at $3.12 billion, up 58% y-o-y.

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 7)

SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company? CL: In late 2005 and early 2006 we signed on two publishers that, together, quadrupled the size of our audience. We grew the company to the maximum extent possible with all the profits we’d accumulated. A few months later, one of those publishers left

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 6)

SM: What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Traffic? Customers? Users? Advertisers? Any other metrics you track? CL: We ran the company at break-even for the first three years. We didn’t have a choice. All the profits went right back into the company (and a few to American Express and Mastercard). Now that we have

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 5)

SM: What are your top target segments? CL: We’ve been called the “long tail of travel websites” but that’s not completely accurate. RandMcNally.com, LonelyPlanet.com, WAYN.com and AreaGuides.net are hardly long tail publishers. These are premium properties with deeply integrated advertising packages that command high CPMs. Generally speaking, we make most of our revenue comes from

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