Greplin Founder Daniel Gross on his amazing story behind building the company [Interview]

Last week I spoke with Daniel Gross, the founder of Greplin, a Y Combinator (YC) funded startup that is generating a lot of buzz in Silicon Vally right now.

Greplin allows you to search though your social-networking accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and online services such as Google Docs and Email. It recently announced a $4 million venture round funding from Sequoia Capital, arguably the best VC firm in the world.

Gross is one of the youngest people to launch a YC startup at the age of 18. We talked about the inspirational journey behind Greplin’s creation.

The tale is intense and powerful: Gross was flown in from a different country, where his original idea for YC was dumped, leaving him with no startup. Shortly after joining his co-founder abandoned him. When he did eventually find a product he believed in and built, Amazon ‘killed’ it 48hrs before Demo Day and when Greplin was born he almost ran out of money to keep it alive.

Now Greplin is one of the hottest startups in the Valley. Here is his story:

Could you just give our readers a quick introduction?

I originally did Y Combinator about 13 months ago. I flew out here to the states from Israel. I think at the time I was actually the youngest YC founder. I’m 19 today. I was 18 when I did Y Combinator. Unfortunately I’m not the youngest anymore because I think they just funded a 17 year old.

At some point they’ll be hanging around the incubators in the hospital just poking at the next founder.

So I flew out here to do YC. When I submitted the application, I didn’t really expect to get in. I was looking forward to a paid weekend in San Francisco at the very most.

Were you in college at the time?

No. I was right out of high school. I flew out, did the interview. It went fairly well. And we were one of those people who, during the interview with Paul Graham, the idea that we were pitching received very unfavorable reviews from him. He sort of hated it.

When you say ‘we’ who else was with you?

I flew out here originally with a co-founder of mine, who is a buddy from high school. But who I am not working with today. We were in the interview and Paul was not really liking the idea and we were sort of getting bummed out. I remember after the interview feeling pretty much set to head home. As we were leaving YC, post interview, Paul comes out of the room and says “Hey, could you come back in for a second?” We went back in the room and he said “You sound really interesting and like you like building things. We don’t like what you’re working on now. How about you come do Y Combinator. We can build something different together”. It was a tough decision to stay and dump what we were building because I liked what I was working on back then. But in hindsight, it was not the best product.

How did you become a programmer?

I guess the story is rooted with my father. He is a CS guy from Columbia University and he teaches a lot both in high school and higher education. Computers were always something that were around at home. And I was always intrigued by them. Most of what I’ve learned today is self-discovery or me having  an interesting question, and his ability to answer it and educate me on the spot. I was probably around 10 years old I when I started programming, nothing major, just basic stuff.

What was the product you originally came to YC with?

It was a social marketplace a little bit like eBay. You could actively see who was bidding on certain items and who got a good deal and who got a bad deal. It’s one of the those ideas that sounds intriguing but no one really wants to use.

So we decided to start a new idea with the help of YC. We came into YC fresh, with no startup. We had our office hours with Paul and we started thinking about what to work on. And we iterated on a few different things with varying degrees of success. Nothing stood out. At the same time my then co-founder was getting tired with this cycle of testing ideas.

How long did it take you to go through office hours and decide on something?

The general space that we were working on at the time was around products built for shopping online and catalogues. Paul had a few different ideas in this space. Many of them were good. We probably just, in all honesty, didn’t execute very well on them. Mostly because we were building products that we wouldn’t consume. I feel like everyone’s talking about this with startups. It becomes very hard to execute correctly on the products when you’re not the user.

You’re sort of shooting in the dark. You don’t really know what’s good and what’s bad. For example, one of the things we were building was a way for people to build their own stores online. I’ve never built an online store and I’ve never had a need for one. And in a situation like that you end up making product decisions based on zero information and experience.

We were doing that for awhile. I think my then co-founder got a little frustrated with various things. When you read about startups when you’re not in the valley, it feels as if everyone comes out here, does something very simple and it succeeds. You don’t see all the hard work. So when you come out here you expect that very quick response and when you don’t get it, it can be very frustrating.

So he decided to leave. And then I was on my own. And I was working on this product that I was pretty excited about. It was essentially a new way for people to donate to charities online. What you do is you install this browser extension on Firefox or Chrome and once you install it you can pick a charity you want to donate to. And every time you bought something online, money would passively get donated to that charity. It was an online affiliate system, which essentially let retailers like Amazon or Zappos reward publishers for clicking on certain links. So if I show you a link to some pair of shoes on Amazon and you click on it and you buy the shoes, Amazon will give me a cut of the sale to charity. So that is what my extension did. That was quite popular and people used it and it made money. Things were going fairly well for the time that it was alive.