The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2012
Ark (YC W12) bets a neutral people-search layer can beat Google and Facebook
Two Berkeley PhDs launched Ark in March 2012 to search people across social networks, betting neutral ground could win the searches giants ignore.
Ark
What the business is
Ark was a people-search engine that let users filter public profiles and friends' private data across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other networks by city, school, employer, relationship status, interests and contact info.
Starting capital：$250,000 seed round from Y Combinator, Yuri Milner, SV Angel and Andreessen Horowitz
How it started
Patrick Riley and Yiming Liu, information-retrieval PhD students at Berkeley, had tried a few other ideas before Ark. Their diagnosis was political: Google's Search Plus Your World favored Google+ listings and Facebook did not want to creep into helping users meet new people, so neither giant would surface results from the other's networks.
What happened
On 2012-03-25 the two-person Y Combinator-backed company sailed into private beta. Ark aggregated public data plus friends' private data from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Orkut, Meetup, Vkontakte and Ren Ren, with stacked filters for dating, classmates and business contacts. It was running on a $250,000 seed round from Y Combinator, Yuri Milner, SV Angel and Andreessen Horowitz, and TechCrunch invited its first 500 readers into the beta.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Ark was founded by Patrick Riley and Yiming Liu, information-retrieval PhD students at Berkeley, on the observation that Google and Facebook both failed at people search for political reasons: Google's Search Plus Your World favored Google+ listings, and Facebook did not want to creep into helping users meet new people. 'We imagined what would Google and Facebook build together if they weren't at war,' the founders told TechCrunch. 'Someone needed to be Switzerland.'
The product, which entered private beta on 2012-03-25, let users filter their way to people instead of typing a name: current city, hometown, employers, education, gender, relationship status, sexual preference, interests and contact details, with results drawn from public profiles plus the private data of friends across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Orkut, Meetup, Vkontakte and Ren Ren. Ark said it respected each network's privacy settings, showing private data only after a user connected Facebook.
The two-person company was running on a $250,000 seed round from Y Combinator, Yuri Milner, SV Angel and Andreessen Horowitz. TechCrunch argued Ark could pull searches away from Google and Facebook and disrupt dedicated sites like Classmates.com, while naming Facebook's improving internal search as the biggest threat. The launch story drew 132 points and 53 comments on Hacker News the same day.
What has to be true
- Neither Google nor Facebook had an incentive to surface people from the other's network, so cross-network search was structurally underserved.
- The founders were information-retrieval PhD students at Berkeley, giving the two-person team credible depth for the technical problem.
- Filters for dating, classmates and business contacts addressed concrete searches the giants explicitly avoided, not just a vague 'search people' idea.
- The risk was a platform move: if Facebook ever built serious internal people search, TechCrunch noted, Ark's wedge could disappear.
What can be applied
When two giants each have a reason not to serve a need, a neutral third party can own it — but only if the giants keep refusing to cooperate for as long as the startup needs to win.
Aftermath
As of 2012-03-25 Ark was entering private beta with two co-founders, a $250,000 seed round from Y Combinator, Yuri Milner, SV Angel and Andreessen Horowitz, and TechCrunch handing out the first 500 beta invitations. Whether Ark's neutral-layer bet beat Facebook's search improvements or the incumbents' indifference is beyond this batch's sources.
Sources
- Find Everyone You Can't Google Or Facebook With YC's Ark People Search
- HN discussion: Ark people search
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe what you are building, and see who is betting on the same thing.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card