Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search (Part 4, final)

SM: How did you finance the different phases of the company?

VH: Our company is funded by VCs, Accel and Lightspeed, and private individuals such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Bill Miller of Legg Mason.

SM: What financing stage are you at right now?

VH: We feel like we are fully funded, so we are not looking for more money at this time. If the opportunity arises, we will look at adding more funding.

SM: Describe some of your team building experiences. Is your management team complete now?

VH: Yes, we feel pretty good about where we are with the management team at this point. We have strong leads in product management, development and business partnerships.

SM: What is your growth strategy?

VH: We see a lot of growth in our core verticals – health, auto, and travel. We’re also working on a horizontal product offering that we believe will be another key driver of growth, which we will give additional details on in the coming months.

SM: I have covered health, autos and travel. They are all good growth categories. I would also do Business & Finance and Sports. They would probably lend themselves to your taxonomy model quite nicely.

As I said, I am not convinced about your horizontal product strategy.

SM. What are some of your key learnings from this journey so far?

VH: Have fun doing it. Make friends doing it.

SM: Yes, make friends doing it is something people don’t put as much emphasis on 🙂 Thanks, Venky, and good luck!

This segment is part 4, final in the series : Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search
1 2 3 4