1. April 2010 Damon Horowitz dhoro@google.com Max Ventilla mventilla@google.com, @ventilla

2. Our Product

3. Web Search is great for objective questions, but subjective questions generate the majority of search revenues Queries X00B/yr Search quality Examples RPMs What is Einstein’s birthday? ~45% Objective Great Low How much is the cheapest iPhone? What’s a decent housekeeping service in SF? How much should it cost for a small two bedroom place? ~30% Research What’s a good book to read about Romantic Poets? ~25% Opinion High Ok

4. Friends can answer subjective questions but… Unreliable -- small number of friends available to you in the moment Hard to keep up with what your extended network knows about Social cost of asking for a favor

5. Aardvark is a new type of social search

7. Most content is still locked in peoples' heads

8. Each individual’s network is growing exponentially

9. Social intimacy makes information actionable

11. Startups take a while…

12. …and they generally fail “In a startup, the chance of anything good is always under 50%” -Mike Cassidy (Ruba) .

13. Minimize Risk Maximize Trials Be Patient

14. Our Timeline

15. Conception0.5 Years Picked a problem Prototyped in serial Abandoned

16. Rekkit - A service to collect your ratings from across the web and give better recommendations to you. Ninjapa - A way that you could open accounts in various applications through a single website and manage your data across multiple sites. The Webb - A central number that you could call and talk to a person who could do anything for you that you could do online. Web Macros - A way to record sequences of steps on websites so that you could repeat common actions, even across sites, and share "recipes" for how you accomplished online tasks. Internet Button Company - A way to package steps taken on a website and smart form-fill functionality. People could encode buttons and share buttons a la social bookmarking.

18. Implementation1 Year Raised seed financing Wizard of Oz testing Recruited core team

19. Full Human Judgment Constrained Actions Automation Rote Tasks Action with Approval Prediction Logging February 2009 June 2009 August 2009 September 2009

20. Refinement1 Year Raised series A Extensive refinement Tripled team

22. The goal is eventual product / market fit Focus on acceleration

23. Our Process

24. Maximize the quantity and impact of trials Process is king

26. Process: Assume that you are wrong Make continuous improvement the goal Experiment with process as much as product Hire and indoctrinate to support process

27. Learning: exploit collective wisdom Task people to collect and disseminate learning Set aside regular time for discussion Make transparency the default

28. Thank You White paper on Aardvark Social Search (vark.com/aardvarkfinalwww2010.pdf) How we do qualitative user research at Aardvark (http://blog.vark.com/?p=314) Our approach to design and development processes (http://blog.vark.com/?p=49) Preaching User-Driven Design (http://ventilla.posterous.com/preaching-user-driven-design)