Dear Investors, I think you are wrong
By: Own Intelligence
Tags: Search, Investing, Startup, Google, Artificial Intelligence

Part 1. Why we need to compete with Google.

In the past months we had numerous pitch presentation with investors. “We” for the most part means Tatjana and I, as we organize our next round of funding at OWN.space.

As an outsider and given the buzz around artificial intelligence you might think that a startup likes ours that develops your future digital colleagues and the platform around it (you can check our OWN.space agents for yourself) would be flooded with investor requests.

As an insider, however, you know that raising money at an early stage always means hearing some ‘no’s, a lot of ‘please come back later’s, and only a few ‘tell me more’s. That is simply because for investors there are hundreds and thousands of opportunities to invest, as a lot of startups compete to get funded. (If you want to experience that imbalance for yourself dress so that others think you are an investor — I suggest suit and sneakers — and walk across a startup fair. I guarantee you pop star attention. I did that once by accident.)

In this world, usually, the time you have with an investor is very limited. All startup founders are training to convince an outsider during an elevator ride. Being quick is vital at our stage. (Indeed, we got our first real money following a 6-min presentation I gave at Innogy’s 2017 IPRIZE competition.) Like it or not, in these rushed situations, there is little time for a real conversation and often, while I think for myself that there is something wrong with the underlying logic of what has just been said, it does not seem appropriate to start a dialog about fundamental beliefs.

That is why I decided to start this series “Dear Investors, I think you are wrong.” In it, I will address some of the issues that we come across with greater frequency and that I think deserve a proper debate, for which such blog probably provides a better place than our own pitching sessions.

So, let’s get started.

David and Goliath, Caravaggio, 1599. Oil on Canvas, 110 cm × 91 cm

“You don’t want to compete with Google”

is a sentence that we have heard quite frequently following our presentations. Interestingly, while you could arguably say that we compete with a number of other giants, too, we only hear this sentence about Google. Nobody says for instance, “Do not compete with Microsoft”, although they, at least for the moment being, have a larger market cap. In a world where we have seen giants come tumbling down (think Nokia), where everybody talks about disruption, investors tell us not compete with Google. Isn’t that ironic?

Behind this is, most likely, the idea that Google not only dominates search, but also combines almost unlimited resources with great agility (for such a behemoth, at least). Maybe, subconsciously, there is more to this. Google, after all, knows everything we want to know. If Amazon won the game of capitalism, Google won the internet championship. If there was such thing as an internet god then, clearly:

Google is God.

And no sane person would start a fight with god, after all. We get that.

I, however, think there are some good arguments for competing with Google.

First, not everybody fails to compete with Google.

Many of the big successful social networks in one way or another compete with Google and have been very successfully doing so. Google’s own attempts to catch up have more often than not been unsuccessful. Google+ is shutting down. Dropbox is still around and even DuckDuckGo manages to grow a (small but quite important for the world) business right at the core of Google’s search offering. Recently, Google even quietly added the competitive search engine as an option to their Chrome browser. As the recent EU antitrust rulings show, for Google competitors can be vital and they might need to support them in the same way that Microsoft prevented Apple’s bankruptcy back in the 1990s. Overall, Google cannot be interested in a monopoly situation.

Second, Google is interacting with startups in many ways.

We greatly enjoy the startup support they offer to us. Their cloud services are excellent and they have given us a lot of resources that help us with the next steps, they also offered more help to come. While we don’t plan in this direction, Google is also a lucrative exit option for startups, even though in many cases, unfortunately, Google has been more interested in talented teams than in the products they had created.

Third, and most important for us, we believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the concept of search.

In a world where the available amount of information is growing exponentially, searching for the needle in the haystack simply makes less and less sense.

You can check different statistics and studies but people spent a lot of time for search, some say more than 20%, for others searching is a full-time job. Indeed, among our users are companies that hire analysts whose main job is search: What is going on with different technologies? How are markets distributed? Who is the right person to contact? What are competitors doing? Since everything changes quickly, finding answers to these questions turns us into hamsters stuck in a search wheel.

More and more, with the growing amount of information, the problem is not to find the needle in the haystack, because, indeed, there is not only one needle and not only one haystack.

The question is rather: How many needles are there? What are they made of? Who made them? Is there a growing needle trend? Who are the people that can design needles? Which other haystacks should we look at? Etc. Search has the idea that the answer is on a single web page (listed on page one, of course). Today, that is simply often not the case. Finding an answer to more advanced questions today requires a full team of analysts who search, analyze and monitor for us.

This is why, at OWN.space, we do believe that competing with Google is a good thing. Check our News Agent, it is like Google News on a silver tablet: market selection, automatic translation and no, it doesn’t blow up your email inbox.

Check our Science Agent, it is like Google Scholar for people who are not scientists, but wish to be cleverly informed about what the world knows on any given topic. It creates in a few minutes what could takes days using Google Scholar. Even as a niche player for now, we can create extraordinary value for people whose job does not stop when the list of search results pops up.

And there is one more thing. Overall, as Alan Kay famously said: The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Especially when it comes to AI, we envision a future where different vendors offer their solutions so users have a real choice which artificial agent they prefer to trust and work with. That is the future we are working for and it will make all the difference.

I am very much interested in your comments, whether you are an investor or not. Feel free to tell us whether you think we are insane … or not … and stay tuned for the other topics to come.

Sebastian Denef

CEO and Co-Founder at OWN.space