My elementary school had 150 students, with one class for each grade, 1 to 9, so I was with the same kids throughout. When I entered high school, there were 1,700 students. It was a big change.
In 1996, I enrolled in the University of Calgary for a degree in electrical engineering. After my junior year I lived in Montreal, working on speech recognition technology during an internship at Nortel Networks. I also took courses at Concordia University in Montreal. I returned to Calgary in 2000 to finish the degree and stayed for a master’s in software engineering.
I started our company in Calgary with three friends while in graduate school. I like to say StumbleUpon provides a personal tour of the Internet. The responses are more targeted to your interests than they would be with a regular search engine. If you choose a topic on our site that you’re interested in, such as art, Web sites related to art appear, as if you’re leafing through an art magazine.
I’m interested in sites that help people find information and filter what’s available. The Internet is so big that no one can stay on top of everything. I’m also interested in projects in which Internet technologies augment brick-and-mortar businesses. In 2009, I was a co-founder of uber.com, which allows people to book idle town cars and drivers over their cellphones. I’m the chairman.
If I had it to do over, I might have finished school first, then devoted all my time to StumbleUpon instead of dividing my time between the two. In the end, however, it was probably good to take the time I did. From the papers I read in grad school, I learned what researchers were finding about collaborative systems, which was helpful in designing our product.
My co-founders and I knew we wanted to start a company before we had a fully formed idea. At the beginning there were four of us; Geoff Smith and I are left. I remember the timeline. We set up the corporate entity in October 2001, and on Nov. 5, I came up with the name. We finished the prototype in 2002 and I worked on it part time until 2005 when I met with angel investors who provided financing.
The company took off, and in 2006 I moved to San Francisco to be near the start-up scene. Before long, we were getting buyout offers. EBay made a great offer, so in 2007 we agreed to be acquired. Two years later, we assembled a few investors and bought the company back to have total control. We believed we could attract the best people by being a start-up again.
I’ve met a number of employees and investors through our site. Our first angel investor sent me a message through StumbleUpon and said he liked what we’d done. I met him for dinner and he introduced us to other angel investors. We hired our first business development specialist from Google; he left when eBay acquired us. But when we spun out from eBay, he became one of our investors who helped us buy the company back. I literally stumbled upon our chief scientist when I was on our site and landed on a page that he had added. I realized I had based one of the chapters in my thesis on his work. I contacted him, then hired him.
If the founders of a start-up are considering selling it, I’d advise them to consider the synergies. Could the buyer give you access to something you don’t have now, like a certain technology? Would it make your life easier? Are you looking for a change? Things will change, so you have to be ready for that. It took me several months to make the decision.
As told to Patricia R. Olsen.
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