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Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution. Sundar became a rising star and ultimately CEO of Google because he directly managed more paid distri
by nugget 3y ago
Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution. Sundar became a rising star and ultimately CEO of Google because he directly managed more paid distribution and user acquisition for Google search than anyone else. Not a coincidence. Google promotes the narrative that they organically grew to dominate the search market when in fact they spent many billions of dollars on user acquisition (while also, for most of that time, having the best product).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dehrmann 3y agoYou're talking about being the default search engine in Firefox and Safari, right?
- EscapeFromNY 3y agoThat, and also bundling their browser (and hence their search engine) inside lots of popular apps during the late '00s and early '10s. Remember these prompts? https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/chrome_real_bundle_400x443.png https://www.thewindowsclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ch...
- kyrra 3y agoSundar was the lead PM on Chrome (before it even released).
- nugget 3y agoToolbar, Chrome, other software partnerships and many enterprise search deals besides Firefox and Safari.
- quickthrower2 3y agoNot best product. The only product. IMO altavista and yahoo were so far behind they were hopeless, relying on unchanged habits and noisy news.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoAlltheweb was good
- Cockbrand 3y agoIndeed, they had an excellent search back then. But in a world before auto-complete in the URL bar, I wondered why they hadn't come up with a shorter and more catchy name. I usually was just too lazy to type "alltheweb.com", and I always had to think for a second to remember the URL in the first place.
- giantrobot 3y agoYahoo never had great search, they started life as a directory rather than a full search engine. Their first search functionality only searched their directory. Later they used Inktomi's crawler based search.
- usaar333 3y ago> Neeva failed because they didn’t understand distribution No, the team and its VCs fully understood distribution. Neeva never got to the point of having a compelling enough product where cost of user aq was below LTV for a large enough market.
- mi_lk 3y agoYea, distribution > product (most of the time) is almost startup 101 these days. It's dismissive to think the team and its big-name VCs behind it don't know the importance of distribution
- MichaelZuo 3y agoWasn't Stripe mostly word-of-mouth, with quite little money spent, until recently?