How Spokeo is taking on Whitepages by bringing social data to people search
I remember back in the mid-2000s the VCs and people in the tech community were really excited about the idea that just like Google searches for web pages, there were going to be these new search engines for people. They were so hopped up about it. That’s the thing that was going to be huge. I remember when it launched. It got so much attention. Michael Arrington, back when he wrote for TechCrunch wrote about it. VentureBeat wrote about it. So many people talked about these sites. And then I never heard anything.
I assumed that today’s guest’s business just disappeared, that it failed. But it didn’t. It transitioned. It just transitioned into something different and has been doing really well. I didn’t know about it because TechCrunch didn’t tell me it’s been doing really well because no one told me.
Well, my team did tell me and I’m so proud to have today’s guest on to talk about how he built up the business. His name is Harrison Tang. He is the founder of Spokeo, people search engine. Let me tell you what that means.
You can search someone’s phone number and find out who owns that phone number or you can search someone’s name and find out their address. If you’re looking for someone and Facebook isn’t helping you reconnect, this is the way that you can actually find out where they are and what they’re up to. It’s kind of big. It’s kind of a big thing and we’re going to find out how big the business is.
Harrison Tang is the cofounder of Spokeo, a people search website that aggregates data from online and offline sources.
Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. It is, of course, home of the ambitious upstart.
You might know that I started Mixergy back when I lived in Santa Monica, just like four blocks away from the beach, beautiful environment. Santa Monica is also known for having a startup community. I remember I lived six blocks from the water. Four blocks from the water was Clearstone Venture partners, the VC firm.
I remember back in the mid-2000s the VCs and people in the tech community were really excited about the idea that just like Google searches for web pages, there were going to be these new search engines for people. That’s the thing. They were so hopped up about it. That’s the thing that was going to be huge. I remember when it launched. Man, it got so much attention. Michael Arrington, back when he wrote for TechCrunch wrote about it, VentureBeat. So many people talked about these sites. And then I never...
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