The past two months have been exciting.  I started a company called Searchify.  Searchify is a hosted search API that makes it easy to add full-text search to your application, without the hassle of configuring and hosting your own search infrastructure.  With a few lines of code, you can have scalable full-text search - and without dealing with servers or XML.  Searchify is based on the IndexTank API. You can read more about IndexTank's history on the Searchify blog.  

So far, business has been great, with both new users as well as IndexTank customers switching to Searchify.  Because Searchify is based on the IndexTank open-source project, the API is identical. The transition is about as easy as you can get.  As one person put it, "Just moved my site search over from @indextank to @getsearchify in about 5 mins. Talk about seamless!". And we're working on making it even easier to switch, with an index migration tool due out this week.

One thing has come up that I'd like to address head-on. These days, it's common when checking out a new company, for people visit the Team page, and then search for the founders on Google. In my case, one of the first results on Google is my Wikipedia entry. Check it out if you're interested. Here's the short version. When I was much younger, in 1995, I got myself into serious trouble and spent about 5 years in federal prison. I was also given the restriction that I could not use the Internet for 3 years following my release. From 1995-1999, I watched the first Internet boom from right here.  They gave me the nickname "dot-com". I made the most out of my time in there, staying mentally and physically active, taking some correspondence classes, learning French, then Spanish, learning first amendment law (as I fought my Internet ban). I even did some programming on a friend's TI-85 calculator.

I was released in September 1999. I got a job making $8/hour selling nutritional supplements at a gym. (I can tell you everything you want to know about protein powder). After a year or so, the judge lifted my Internet restriction early. I went back to the University and finished my computer science and math degrees in 2004. I was lucky enough to start working as employee #1 at Indeed.com, where I worked for 6.5 years. That's where I learned most of what I know about search engines, relevancy, scalability, and high availability. And now I've started Searchify because I want to build an interesting, profitable search-related business, and the IndexTank situation provided a unique opportunity to do this.  

I'm writing this post because after googling me and reading wikipedia, someone recently asked about my past. I hope my actions since 1995 are enough to demonstrate that I'm "no longer evil." Most of my friends would tell you I'm not :)

 

I was reading about the Y Combinator application process last week and I seemed to recall that I "almost" applied in 2005.  I searched my gmail and found the following email I sent to 7 of my friends in 2005:

 

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 05:41:01 -0600
From: Chris Lamprecht <cl...@gmail.com>
To: Jason, Thore, Michael, James, Gene, Omar, Andrew (full names & emails removed)
Subject: Summer founders program - startup deal

I'm mailing this to everyone in my gmail contacts who I think might be
interested in this and qualified to do it.  I freaked out when I read
it, it sounds too good to be true, but it's paul graham we're talking
about here.  Read this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html

If anyone is interested in applying for this, let's meet.  The
application is due march 26 (that's about ONE week from now), and
preference is given to people who apply earlier.  As for "what"
business to actually start, who knows.  I have a few ideas, and I'm
sure many of you do too.

-chris

PS-Forward this to anyone you think would be interested and is qualified

 

I had been contract programming for a new web site called Indeed.com for a few months when the Summer Founders Program was announced.  I was so excited by SFP that I decided to stop working at Indeed to work on my own startup again.  I met with Rony and told him I was going to stop contracting to work on my own startup, and I was going apply to Y Combinator.  Rony talked me out of leaving Indeed, and I stayed for 6 more years.  I'm glad I decided stick around. 

It's also kind of interesting to look at what the friends I emailed about SFP in 2005 have done since then:

Jason - Worked for Indeed briefly (funny story how he was hired, I'll blog about it sometime), lived on my living room floor in 2007, spent some time in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia

Thore - Co-founded a successful technology business, and just bought a sweet 911 GT2 turbo

Michael - Worked for TopCoder for several years, now works for another Startup in North Carolina, and has a new baby!

James - Co-founded a startup which had a successful outcome, "retired" (the first time), travelled the world, and is working on another startup

Gene - Finished his computer science PhD in garbage collection (the Java kind, not the urban kind)

Omar - Also worked for Indeed briefly, went to medical school in Australia, and is almost finished

Andrew - Started working with me at Indeed in 2005, and is now VP of Search Quality

 

Now, back to my 2005 plans...

Today is my last day at Indeed.com.  I've been here for 6.5 years.  I feel like I could write a book about my experience at Indeed.  But for now, I'll give the short version.

In December 2004, I was working on a company I started in college called Classgrabber.  I saw a job posting on craigslist with the title "Search engine fun", looking for a software developer.  I had been interested in search for a while.  I remember reading about Craig Silverstein being employee #1 at Google, and thinking how cool it would have been to work at Google in the early days.  So I replied to the job posting.

The co-founder of Indeed, Rony Kahan, called me and did a short phone interview.  Rony asked me to look at the site and tell him what I would change about it.  The homepage was simple -- a "what" and "where" field, and a "Find Jobs" button.  I told him, "well first, I would put the cursor focus in the what box automatically, so users don't have to click their mouse before typing."  He agreed, and called it a "rookie mistake".  We set up a meeting at a Starbucks in West Austin.

When we met, Rony asked me about my experience using Java and Lucene, a fulltext search library for Java.  He asked about Tomcat and Apache, and asked if I knew how to setup mod_jk to load balance across multiple Tomcats.  I happened to know the things he asked about, so later that month, I started doing contract work for Indeed.  There was no source code control system yet, no bug tracking, no build system (Rony was using Eclipse to do deploy builds!).  I was setting this stuff up from scratch and loved it.  John Battelle did a nice blog post about indeed.  Traffic started to grow and never looked back.  I was employee #1 at a search startup!

Photo: early servers for Indeed.com, just before blowing the circuit breaker while load testing them (2005)

In 2005, Indeed raised $5 million from one of the best VC firms in the business, Union Square Ventures.  We started launching Indeed in new countries, and now we currently serve 53 countries on all seven continents.  Yes, that means even Antarctica.  We launched a mobile job search site.  Indeed is now the #1 US job site, with the most pageviews and the most job search visitors. 

Being able to watch all this from the inside has been an amazing experience.  I've worked with some amazing people.  I got to meet Brad and Fred from Union Square Ventures.  Indeed's future is bright, and working at Indeed is still the best job I can imagine, aside from starting your own company.  And Indeed is hiring - so if you're in Austin, check out their hiring page.

Photo: here's what we did on a snowy Austin day

So what am I doing next?  I used to think that after leaving Indeed, I would just take a break and travel around until I got tired of traveling.  But that probably won't happen, at least not yet.  Opportunity called, and I'm already working with someone on a new startup.  I'm not ready to announce what it is yet.  But I can say that it involves creating a product that I think people will find useful and love to use, in an area that badly needs it.  And I'm as excited as I was about Indeed in 2005.

Switching to a new IDE is a pain. Even when you know the IDE all your co-workers are using is way better than the one you're using.  You have to re-learn all the keyboard shortcuts, setup options, navigation tricks, etc. 

The last big IDE change I made was completely on accident.  I was an intern at a software company here in Austin.  I'd been using Borland's JBuilder for a few years.  JBuilder was okay, it got the job done.  But all of my (more experienced) co-workers were using IntelliJ IDEA.  One day I was working on a project with James, one of the developers.  He suggested we pair program - I would write the code while he talked to me and thought about the design.  We were in his office, so I was at his computer, with his IDE, IntelliJ 2.5. 

Every time I wanted to do something in IntelliJ, I'd just ask him.  "How do I get the Javadoc for this method?"  "Control-Q", he'd call out.  "How do I find usages of this variable?"  "Control-shift-F7 -- and escape to clear it"  After a few hours, I knew 80% of what I needed to get around in IntelliJ.  The next day, I switched to IntelliJ and never looked back.  For those of you still using Eclipse, I highly recommend trying this method out ;)

tl;dr - to switch IDEs painlessly, pair program for an afternoon with someone adept at the new IDE