links for 2009-07-31
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this is long
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this is long!
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not exactly walkable, but still cool.
Archive for July, 2009
Response to comments on TechCrunch article: “Searchme Searching for a Buyer”
The following is my reply to the comments on today’s TechCrunch article “Searchme Searching for a Buyer”. For some reason, my reply was removed from the comment thread on the original article.
Though I’ve been gone from the company for nearly a year, as one of the founders of Searchme, I think it’s a fair assessment to assign blame to the leadership of the company, and I accept full responsibility. We had committed investors, buckets of cash, great technology, and a fantastic team. While I was at Searchme, we made many mistakes, which I do not care to enumerate in this forum. I can’t speak to decisions and events after I left Searchme; I will simply let the current reality speak for itself. We often said, “it’s ours to f up,” and I still believe that. So, if you want to blame leadership, fair enough.
However, I think it’s unfair to criticize the skills, commitment, and accomplishments of Searchme’s dedicated employees. Their passion, courage, and creativity energized me on a daily basis. Their talents never ceased to surprise, delight, and amaze me. Denigrating their contributions betrays a profound ignorance of the immensely difficult task of building a search engine from scratch, not to mention the many ground-breaking innovations that were fundamental to the product.
I am extremely grateful to this amazing team of people who tirelessly poured their lives into our collective vision. They became my best friends. They deserve full-credit for the many successes we experienced at Searchme, and I wish we could have been more capable leaders so that their brilliance and hard work could be better rewarded.
links for 2009-07-13
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a shocking read.