Retrevo’s Vipin Jain on Vertical Search (2)

SM: How big is the market for what you have to offer? (TAM analysis is essentially what I am looking for here … )
VJ: $1B-$1.5B. Assume a conservative $25B online spending out of a total of $150B CE spending in the US. Assume 4%-5% of the total online spend in referral. TAM is much larger if you consider the bridge between online research (75% of consumers research their products online) and offline purchases (and how to build that bridge).

SM: What is your personal background?
VJ:I have built hi-tech products and services throughout my career from IBM to Bell Labs to 3Com to Telseon (a broadband services company I cofounded in late 1998 funded by Sevin Rosen, Crosspoint Ventures, Goldman Sachs and others) to incubating, building and owning the P&L of wifi business at Extreme Networks. Other founders have deep technical background in AI, database/data modeling, data visualization and distributed SW systems.

SM: Under what circumstances did the company get started?
VJ: We experimented with a few ideas around converting unstructured information scattered around the web into actionable knowledge. Our semantic analysis, classification and contextual correlation technology was developed in the process. We then picked consumer tech as a good market to target first. Rapid innovation/high rate of change, deep pain and consumer passion for specific categories make it a very attractive market overall.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]
[Product Review]