You Put Your Aardvark In My Twitter (Bonus: Interview With Founders)

by editor on Jul.07, 2009, under TechCrunch

Yesterday we sat down with two of Aardvark’s founders, Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, to get an update on the company and learn about today’s integration of Aardvark into Twitter.

Aardvark is a question an answer service with a twist. Instead of services like Yahoo Answers where the anonymous masses try to answer your questions (resulting in mostly spam), Aardvark sends questions to your social graph via email, SMS, instant messaging, etc. Your friends answer your questions (restaurant suggestions, things to do in Paris, whatever). Most questions are answered within 5 minutes.

Last week the service opened up for Facebook users. Today they integrate with Twitter. For now, the integration only includes asking questions – if you add @vark to the end, Aardvark picks it up and adds it to your account. In future versions, they may try to integrate responses from Twitter directly into Aardvark as well.

I spoke with Max and Damon at length about the Twitter integration as well as the service in general now that it has been tested by beta users for the last few months. The video and transcript (provided by SimulScribe, it’s not perfect but they are fast) are below:

Transcript:

INTERVIEWER: Max Ventilla. I pronounced your last name correct. You’re the CEO and co-founder of Aardvark. We also have Damon Horowitz, you’re the CTO and co-founder. And you’re showing us the new Twitter integration.

VOICE 1: That’s right.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

VOICE 1: And so, we are excited to basically allow people to interact with Aardvark over Twitter, the same way that they would over IM or e-mail or any other channels that they’re currently using to interact with their network. This is my Twitter and let’s imagine that…

INTERVIEWER: You only have 677 followers.

VOICE 1: I know. I haven’t been at it too long. So…

INTERVIWER: Will it be OK? You need to do a little more Twitter spamming.

VOICE 1: Right. Would be to say, what’s going on in SF this weekend?

INTERVIEWER: And normally, you’d be typing this into your Instant Messenger or directly on the Aardvark site where you normally use Aardvark.

VOICE 1: That’s right.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 1: Let’s say, something outdoors. It’s like – and…

INTERVIEWER: Are you using a hashtag or – OK. Yeah.

VOICE 1: You can. So, you could put in sort of like, concerts, or if you don’t, Aardvark will sort of pick out from that question about what’s going on…

INTERVIEWER: Really, just because they know you’re a user?

VOICE 1: That’s right. So, essentially, what’s happened now is – let’s imagine that I sent this in to Aardvark…

INTERVIEWER: You actually are just sending this through Twitter?

VOICE 1: This is a regular Twitter. This is like what I might do know and ask like, oh my Twitter followers, what’s happening? What you can do now is you can either send a direct message to vark.

INTERVIEWER: So, Aardvark isn’t aware of it yet.

VOICE 1: That’s right. Nobody can send direct message to vark. Or what you can do is, you can take your normal Twitter message and just put somewhere in the message Aardvark.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

VOICE 1: And then, essentially, that clues in Aardvark the same way if you send that message to anyone else that it should be paying attention to it.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

VOICE 1: And it’ll pick it out of My Twitter Stream and it’ll do what it normally does.

INTERVIEWER: It’ll pick up the original Twitter? Do people start responding to the original Twitter that had no Aardvark at it? Aardvark will see it?

VOICE 1: It would not. So, we want people to be intentional about wanting Aardvark to answer their message. There are some instances where you don’t particularly want that to go out to your network. But, the idea is that if you wanted to sort of in addition to have Aardvark answering the question, then you’ll put an add message, you know, with that Aardvark syntax and if you wanted just to go to Aardvark and for it to answer the same ways it would if you sent it over IM or e-mail, then you send the direct message. And in either case, as the answers come back, they’ll get direct message to me. So, I’ll show to you – so, earlier today, I asked, you know, what’s going on in New York on a certain weekend when I’m going to be there. Sort of other questions that I asked to ask about Twitter. You go to this…

INTERVIEWER: These are all questions you ask.

VOICE 1: Over Twitter.

INTERVIEWER: And if somebody responds, Aardvark picks that up.

VOICE 1: That’s right. So, here’s an example. I said, you know, at Twitter, do try to copy several features (unintelligible), I see your terms, you know, in tags. Twitter, here you see answers coming from different people. Many of these are sort of people that I have friends in common with. Here’s another one and then you have the ability on the transfer page to go and you can thank the person or send a follow-up message to them or to tell Aardvark whether or not the answer that they came back with was particularly helpful to you.

INTERVIEWER: So, any reply is pooled in?

VOICE 1: The replies that come through the Aardvark system are all pooled together on a transcript page…

INTERVIEWER: So many people have to have the Aardvark in their replies as well?

VOICE 1: No, so these are actually people that had answered over IM or e-mail or – so the nice thing is we’re using it the same as we would with any other communication channel. When a question comes in, you can interact with someone no matter what IM network they’re on or if they’re on more advice or anything else. So…

INTERVIEWER: But if somebody responds on Twitter, you’re not picking that up at all.

VOICE 1: That’s right. So, presently, we’re not pulling in the normal app replies you get from your actual followers. You’re already going to be getting those in whatever you know, Twitter appliance you’re using. And in the same way that, you know, if you didn’t ask a question through Aardvark as of yet, you know, we’re only pooling together the answers that you got through the system.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

VOICE 1: And then, similarly, you get the same benefit that when you sign up for Aardvark and you sync with Twitter, it’s using that same social graph that you’ve aggregated from either your web e-mail client like, you know, Gmail or Yahoo! Mail or MSN mail or Facebook.

INTERVIEWER: How do you sync with Twitter when you setup for Aardvark?

VOICE 1: So, right now, you’ll go to a profile page and there’s just a Twitter tab, that’s right there. And you’ll basically put in your username and password through the Twitter site. So, we don’t actually – we get, you know, authorization from Twitter to be synced with your account and then you’ll be able to basically see, you know, on this page how exactly this is going to (unintelligible) what you can do with it.

INTERVIEWER: OK. And what are you importing from Twitter – the people you follow, the people who follow you, mutual follows?

VOICE 1: So, that’s one of the things that we’ll integrate with in terms of – so, that’s the actual answer coming back. I just have it synced so that it gets directly to…

INTERVIEWER: Oh that’s your phone.

VOICE 1: …to my phone as well. But right now, we’re not using the Twitter social graph as something for routing but certainly, you know, if it seems like people want that and it seems like, those mutual follow connections or the transfer to the friendly model that we have, then we’ll look at it.

INTERVIEWER: So, that’s it. That’s a future feature.

VOICE 1: That’s right.

INTERVIEWER: Right now, it’s just…wow, let’s see what’s going on with the phone.

VOICE 2: Let’s see if you got this and yeah, you got these direct messages here.

INTERVIEWER: Let’s see.

VOICE 2: For sure.

INTERVIEWER: So, this is the question you just asked on Twitter.

VOICE 2: That’s the question I just asked on Twitter and Aardvark direct messages response to let them know that Aardvark got the question and then tried to find the answers.

INTERVIEWER: And so, no answers yet. That’s just the…

VOICE 2: That’s the first one.

VOICE 1: Although they’re actually are there’s, I got 3 answers in the first four minutes.

VOICE 2: Let’s see what we got up here. I’ll show this one. So, here we go. Here’s an example of an answer. So, it’s coming in as Eric being a friend of a friend is pointing to a URL where he can go on to the website and kind of have a longer interactive, kind of conversation with Eric about what’s going on.

INTERVIEWER: Who’s Eric, one of the people who answered the question?

VOICE 2: Yeah, so that’ll be somebody…

VOICE 1: In the massive extended social network on Aardvark, so, basically, a friend of a friend of a friend or somebody with a common affiliation. Next time we ask from Google, somebody else (unintelligible).

VOICE 2: And here you see, you know, I got after 3 minutes an answer coming back from Jason Young(ph) plus a number of mutual friends. There’s a pretty great concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley on Saturday with Death Cab, Andrew Burton, Robert Ryett(ph) outdoors and (unintelligible) in Berkeley Station. It’s actually a concert that I’m going to this weekend. So, when we get a recommendation and you can again sort of rate the answer. You have a link there with the person’s Facebook profile so you can actually go there and see a little more…

INTERVIEWER: We’re in regular Aardvark functionality now.

VOICE 2: That’s right.

INTERVIEWER: How’s the Facebook integration going that you did last week? Have you seen a lot of signups to Facebook?

VOICE 1: Yeah. Working really (unintelligible) about the Facebook site is we wanted to – since we got past the beta period, (unintelligible) really have its service going to open up more. But we’re also aware that they’re just…

INTERVIEWER: You needed a social graph attached to it…

VOICE 2: We need some kind of social graph attached because it’s about your network that’s really differentiated from just you know, public service…

INTERVIEW: Yeah.

VOICE 2: So, we turned it on but want to make people, the kind of a chicken-egg problem that some people might have in terms of getting their social graph on but we just let people sign up and it turns out that, for the average user joining, they have an average of six friends of friends already on Aardvark. So, that even when you come in right away, when you connect to Facebook, and other people have their Facebook profiles, there’s already some…

INTERVIEWER: Yes.

VOICE 2: There’s already some…

INTERVIEWER: Is that (unintelligible) generally goes, its friends of friends or do you do go deeper if there is a direct match on a keyword?

VOICE 2: Yeah, we’ll go deeper than that if we – especially if we moved past the people that are close to you, the friends of friends of friends and so forth to find something that’s an exact hit.

INTERVIEWER: Do you ask people when they ask a question, at some point, do you say, hey, we’re sort of satisfied with this, you know, the next day or in an hour or two.

VOICE 1: Well. So, one thing you saw there is we do get feedback on the answer pages.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

VOICE 1: So, people are able to, you know, rate for them, how good of a match Aardvark made. In addition, we do exert a constant user research. So, one of the things that has really driven us from the beginning is how are people using the product, technically make the product better and initially that meant, you know, Aardvark is like the sixth idea in the space and it was only after months and months of prototyping things that we sort of integrated those early learnings into something that we actually want to do long term. And then since, you know, we ran for about 6 months with Aardvark, essentially being simulated, there are human beings on the back end doing all the routing…

INTERVIEW: Yeah, we talked about this last year.

VOICE 1: …doing all the conversation there, just sort of see what did people want to do with this kind of service and now whenever we sort of propose a new feature and try something out, it’s extensively user-tested, there’s actually a community page on the web site that – it’s pretty cool. It’s using Uservoice. We built a forum where people can essentially say the things that they would like to see from Aardvark. And different people can vote on it, comment on it and you can see sort of everything on the first couple of pages is actually stuff that we’re planning and building already and the feedback from people is very, very high in terms of when they ask a question, are they getting quality answer quickly from someone in their network, delivered sort of over the communication channel that they naturally are using throughout the base. They don’t have to go back to some third party website and sort of see what came back. Anecdotally, it’s about, you know, a third and a third and a third. Third is like fantastic experiences, third quality experiences and then a third where, you know…

INTERVIEWER: What (unintelligible).

VOICE 1: The answer came back slower or there were some – you know, the number of answers and it’s just a constant iteration and improvement on bringing up all of those numbers and there’s a lot of…

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Are you really focused on new features being driven by the community?

VOICE 2: Yeah, we are. I mean, we can – that was (unintelligible) is for real. I mean, I came from an ad background and there, the way it usually works is you have your algorithm and you push out there and you internalize (unintelligible), users like the algorithm and they don’t. But here, we built the algorithm around, the exact experience that users wanted. So, we were doing all sorts of iteration and that continues today with – every week we have in person interviews with both users and product. New user, we kind of walk him through a sign and post to see what they think. People haven’t seen in yet. We get a flood of mails straight to our feedback address and then also, we have the community forum. Every week, we gather together and aggregate on the thoughts we have and we have something internally in the company that we call weekly learnings where the whole company sits there and we go through – all right here’s what we learn this week from our users. We have our vision for how are we going to, you know, whatever, take over the roof. And here’s what our users told us and that’s what feeds into our like actual prioritization (unintelligible).

INTERVIEWER: How many questions have now been asked on Aardvark?

VOICE 2: A lot.

VOICE 1: (Unintelligible) total users, total questions asked like…

VOICE 2: Yeah.

VOICE 1: Draws some interest there or how many per week now.

INTERVIEWER: You’re not going to answer any of those?

VOICE 2: Yeah. We’re keeping the specific numbers under (unintelligible) for a little while. What we are doing though is focusing on kind of, you know, here’s what you can expect when you join. So, right now the majority of questions are answered in every five minutes which is the huge thing for us. There are roughly quarter million topics represented in terms of what people who joined to that and you know, willing to answer questions to that. You know, we show little teasers to ask for status message sometimes because our community is really interested on how the product is doing. Sometimes we’re putting our Aardvark status message hey, you (unintelligible) messages were sent into Aardvark yesterday.

INTERVIEWER: OK, so what are some of those since you’ve (unintelligible)?

VOICE 2: Yesterday, there’s 27,000 or something. I mean, that’s…

INTERVIEWER: 27,000 what?

VOICE 1: Of interaction that people are having for the system.

INTERVIEWER: And that’s growing.

VOICE 1: Certainly, yes.

INTERVIEWER: You guys are a fairly secretive company. (Unintelligible) teeth to get you to admit your funding last year.

VOICE 1: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Remember that?

VOICE 1: I mean, I think that our…

INTERVIEWER: Are you running down or running away from me?

VOICE 1: Our idea is that this takes a long time…

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 1: It takes a long time to figure out what you should be building. It takes a long time…

INTERVIEWER: Oh, no. That might be perfect for your business…

VOICE 1: No. And I’m just saying…

INTERVIEWER: Which is not good for mine.

VOICE 1: Well, I’m just saying that whenever you sort of go out and you put numbers, you say hey, you know, start benchmarking me today, like see how much I improve tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And in fact, a lot of our focus, you know, was on quality and growth…

INTERVIEWER: Perfecting the user experiences, yeah.

VOICE 1: Over a year – I mean, the thing that really kept us back from doing open sign ups was not the fact that the (unintelligible) wasn’t there. It was much more that we wanted people to come in and actually stay and have – you know, even if one-tenth of the people stay, for most startups, they say that’s great. That’s what I want to be doing. You know, forget about the rest. For us, we really want, you know, to hook you that first experience…

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 1: That you have (unintelligible) and answer. We view it incredibly negatively if, you know, if 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent of the users die out. That’s something that causes us to go back and really reflect on why they’re leaving and what we can do different.

INTERVIEWER: Would your iPhone (unintelligible)?

VOICE 1: So, we’ve had a test for a long time.

VOICE 2: And finished for months.

VOICE 1: It got finished for a while.

VOICE 2: Apple just won’t let it…

VOICE 1: No, no, no. It’s not Apple. Apple has been incredibly helpful. It’s just again, we want to have a lot of user testing. We want to figure out, you know, what does it take for…

INTERVIEWER: So, you really – they don’t want it to be like that.

VOICE 1: No. We wanted to be live when we see…

VOICE 2: When it’s absolutely perfect…

VOICE 1: Hundreds of cases, not perfect. But when we feel like in order to learn more…

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 1: We need orders amounting to more usage. So, we went for a long time with sort of thousands of users and we were learning a tremendous amount. It was only like after six months, 12 months of that that we said you know what, we’ve sort of saturated the learning we can do at this scale, like we need to be in order (unintelligible), towards the magnitude more and then we’ll start learning new things. Similarly, we’re at the stage of the iPhone app where, you know, with the number of testers that we have now, we’re learning as much as we can possibly deal with at any given week to fix. Maybe we should get to get it out, we’ll say OK now, it’s ready to – for a wider audience.

INTERVIEWER: I’d love to talk to you both for a second about this sort of product iteration by scientific method and the idea of, you know, testing something, pulling it back, asking your readers what they want, looking and trying things out and it’s always been a Google way to do that, obviously. And some people have argued, me among them, Robert Scoble, and others that sometimes you can end up with a Volvo that way instead of a Porsche or the other funny one is a camel as a horse designed by the committee. And that sometimes if – the real challenge to users and like Facebook has (unintelligible) done, outraged their users, and three weeks later, the same outraged users could not live without whatever feature they were complaining about three weeks ago. What are your feelings on that in general and specifically to Aardvark? Do you feel like, you know, it’s important to continue this inner process? Do you occasionally try to challenge your users? What are the plans there?

VOICE 2: It’s a great question. And it’s something that – it’s really important because much that goes internally (unintelligible) react strongly against the tradition of economy like oh, you’re either one of these vision companies who are doing crazy stuff or you’re doing (unintelligible) customers. That’s really not – we don’t see that respect (unintelligible). And we’re a vision company. We think like – we think there’s tons of information on the web and it’s a fraction of what’s on people’s heads and we’re enabling this full new thing. It’s a paradigm, so there’s a lot. It’s driving us forward in terms of why, if this is worth I’m trying to do. But that means, OK, in terms of the actual surface, in terms of what people are interacting with, your users know better than you do about what their experiences are like in the wild. So, we really do them both at once. Now, in terms of how you innovate in that type of context, one of the things that happened is we do a lot of early – like AV testing and also kind of highjack testing where there’s something innovative and what we want to do, not just throw in front of everybody. Well, first, go through like a paper stage where we send and we check internally with the team, the people we bring in, you know, users we solicit, hey do you who want to come in and have an interview with us. We talk to them there. We also contact users who have given us feedback in related areas to see if what we’re proposing is going to work with them. And then we’ll actually go and we’ll have a test run this (unintelligible) with individual conversations, kind of work through how features would go and what have we responded this way as opposed to that way. It’s only one who’ve done a fair amount of the stuff and validated that the crazy idea that we have is worthwhile.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 2: And then we push it out and we have a quick followup even after we put something live, a quick followup with users where we interview users with different – in different segments of our audience and say what happened when you used this? So, that’s not something that’s gone away for us. We want to continue to say there’s this vision where we’d subject the search to be about, what would it be like if you could tap everybody in your extended network, you know, 40,000 people at the same time, you know, better if users tell us if we step over those (unintelligible).

VOICE 1: And you have to be careful about becoming radically different things because lots of people are asking you to do that. So, you know, the two big things for us have always been point systems and sharing content like making all other content explicitly public and…

INTERVIEWER: You haven’t done that yet?

VOICE 1: We haven’t done that.

INTERVIEWER: That’s something (unintelligible).

VOICE 1: Well, it’s something that people are constantly coming to us saying like hey, do this and then it would really be great. And it’s – for us, you know, fairly different from the brand. We’ve always positioned Aardvark to be more like a communication channel where, you know, I’ll ask you something over e-mail. I’m asking you over e-mail, you know, it’ll be a little bit weird if A, my question and your answer showed up publicly on the web.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 1: And B, if Gmail sent me back, you know, similar conversations that other people have had in Gmail.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 1: That said, there’s certainly a place for it, there’s a way that you can selectively share the content, there’s a way that you can give people sort of personalized…

INTERVIEWER: Maybe de-personalized it a little bit, too.

VOICE 1: Potentially.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 1: I mean, there is certainly a subset of the content, which is less personal or there certainly might be a scale. It’s just, you know, we haven’t found the really clear way to keep doing what we want to do well and yet, address sort of that comment that the users have come to us. What we keep in the back of our mind…

INTERVIEWER: Make it public, searchable, index.

VOICE 1: That’s right.

INTERVIEWER: Yes. So, when do that happen?

VOICE 1: We just don’t know yet.

INTERVIEWER: Because you haven’t quite figured how to do it?

VOICE 2: Well actually, we want to quite end up that way. I mean, we try to figure out what’s – if our users suggest a feature to us, say what’s the urge behind that? Sometimes the urge is – well, other sites do it this way. And that’s not sufficient for us to do it. Sometimes there’s an urge like, well I want to learn the terminology(ph) of the communities.

INTERVIEWER: Sort of, you want Aardvark to start answering questions directly based on the database. It’s all this artificial intelligence stuff that you’re so good at.

VOICE 1: Now, it’s exact. Now, we want humans to answer the questions.

VOICE 2: We want Aardvark to be better at routing them. So, their database…

INTERVIEWER: Just better at routing them.

VOICE 2: In the database we used to figure out who’s best in answering and seeing over time what happens.

INTERVIEWER: But let’s say that I asked for a really good restaurant recommendation in San Francisco. And it turns out that a month before, one of my best friends asked the same thing on Aardvark and got stellar answers that he marked just like they’re perfect, perfect, perfect. Well, you turn back and say, hey, this is Aardvark, we think that actually you might like these restaurants. I mean, you must be thinking about that as an AI guy, right?

VOICE 2: Well, there are two ways to look at it. I’m an recovering AI guy. What that means is, I no longer think that my machine is intelligent as any human in terms of understanding what the other human really wants. When I ask a question, I want you to understand me. It’s the same reason when you go to a store and there’s something that really helps you and listens to what you need. So, in this situation that you suggest, Aardvark will do two things. One, it will go to your friend and say, hey, you know, we think you can answer Michael’s question about restaurants. You see, just received these answers, and we’ll go to these answers. There is a different channel where on the (unintelligible) angle we’re saying, hey, here’s an opportunity to…

INTERVIEWER: Bypass actual results…

VOICE 2: …to bypass (unintelligible) answers we have clearly labeled, when we think that’s useful for our users. But, right now, our users are getting a really good experience without any recycled comment.

INTERVIEWER: But this is not – I’m sorry, I just finished what you – all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the sort of stuff someone likes, have you guys seen that, the new Battlestar, yeah? But, I mean if you think about it, you could just be having all these users sort of training the big Aardvark mind right now towards eventually being able to answer things intelligently.

VOICE 2: It’s one way of looking at it.

INTERVIEWER: You just refused. You don’t think that’s the future.

VOICE 2: I don’t think that’s the future. In some ways, they’re trying to figure out our mind to learn how to tap them better. The same way that the web isn’t, you know, the same as human intelligence, it has a different sort of knowledge. And right now, we think of the web, it’s a great browser of factual information and getting static content. But, it is also really good for indexing the real world and so, with Aardvark as it’s using all of these stuff that people publish and saying, can you in the world could you have it…

INTERVIEWER: So, when do you use the data other than just learning how to route stuff better? When do you actually use the questions and the answers and make it available somehow to generate lots of pages and then add units(ph)? You are going to do that some day, right?

VOICE 2: You know, it’s not our near-term focus in that we really see the value proposition that we’re providing as a life connection in the moment through whatever communication channel you’re already using with someone from your network. And, you can’t automate certain things, right, or a lot of the pleasure goes away. If I go out on the street and I find a flyer for a restaurant, it’s exactly the same content as if I stopped someone and I said, hey, you know, I’m pretty hungry, what’s a good place to get a sandwich around here? But it feels very different when a human being sort of looks me in the face and tells me, this is where I’d go, and I feel like, OK, that’s an actual result.

INTERVIEWER: Or looks at you on Twitter.

VOICE 2: Or I mean interacts with you absolutely interacting with another person. And part of it is the latency dimension. So, it was very important for us to get, you know, average answer rate down to five minutes, below 5 minutes, you want to…

INTERVIEWER: Is that what it is now, it’s below five minutes on average?

VOICE 1: Most questions are getting the answer in under five minutes.

INTERVIEW: Even last week, I’m sure you had a huge fight with Facebook and people trying it because they’ve been able to….

VOICE 1: Well, the nice thing here is that questions are broadcast. So, I just got four answers to that question I asked in, I don’t know like…

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you have the interns back in the office doing it, right?

VOICE 1: …minutes. Well, we’ve never answered the questions ourselves. Even though, we were sort of, even when we were actively, you know, posting every question. It wasn’t to answer them, it was to figure out, you know, what the individual in the community will be able to provide an answer. Here, you’re seeing…

INTERVIEWER: So, a legitimate answer?

VOICE 1: Yes, three minutes, four minutes, four minutes, five minutes, you know. And the nice thing here is there were only about a half dozen people paying for this.

INTERVIEWER: And you have four answers.

VOICE 1: Yeah, and I mean, I’m asking a question which I’m, you know, very sure the system will be able to route reasonably well and part of that is for learning, you know, the fact that longer questions are better, right. If you give a second sentence to your question, it will almost always get you more answers, better answers, faster answers. It’s because it’s easier for a human to answer which by the way is almost exactly the opposite as any sort of static content database, where the more filters you put on what you want, the less actual content you get back.

INTERVIEWER: But it makes sense that if you have a little more context to give, it should give you a (unintelligible). What’s a good restaurant in San Francisco is different than –

VOICE 1: Exactly.

INTERVIWER: I’m taking my parents off for their anniversary, what’s you know, they love sushi and Italian. Where should I go?

VOICE 1: Exactly.

INTERVIEWER: It’s much easier.

VOICE 1: Think about how much easier and more satisfying it is for someone on the other end. And that sort of what we generally say is like you know, use the golden rule – ask the question in same way that you would want to receive a question with all the detail and all of the context and you know whatever else you could think of. And you absolutely see it in people’s responses based on the quality of what they come back with. And again, and that’s what you lose when you’re saying, you know what, the end goal of all of this is just to get a huge amount of generic like reviews and then just find different ways to sort of slice and dice stuff and return it to people. And again, it’s not to say that that is not fantastically useful. Not only is it usually useful and it’s a hugely useful thing in compliment to this. As soon as I get back a restaurant recommendation, I love going Yelp and seeing what everyone says about it -

INTERVIEWER: Taking the next step, you know.

VOICE 1: And seeing you know, what their store hours are and everything else.

INTERVIEWER: Which is why Yelp should be paying you to get their stuff on there.

VOICE 1: Or we should be paying Yelp to make our answers, you know, that much better. In any event -

INTERVIEWER: I’d start the discussions which they should be paying you and go from there. But…

VOICE 2: So, I guess one of the kind of like cute, I just have a new paradigm to kind of like focus on what we’re working on, what wouldn’t work. It’s to really think about the answering experience because that’s what made us certain we wanted to build Aardvark. When we were trying the different prototypes that were similar, we found answers were extremely responsive when we send in a little IM saying, hey you there, you know – a friend of Max Ventilla has a question about, you know (unintelligible) everything. People loved to be called upon in the moment, when somebody has a need right then that they can help us.

INTERVIEWER: So the people who answer quickly, I assume you intend to go back to them.

VOICE 2: Yeah and we favor people who respond and have been answering. And so, it’s that moment, it’s the same moment, you know somebody introduced you, probably your friend who needs a hand like, oh I know all about that, I can just help you. So, all of our decisions are kind of driven by that experience and you say there, what would preserve that experience? If I say well, it’s a different thing if I’m posting a static review on a site. It’s much more like I’m helping somebody live in the moment.

INTERVIEWER: Have you ever thought of paying people? Like giving them say those Facebook credits or something? Sort of something they can actually use.

VOICE 2: In a sense but we…

INTERVIEWER: You don’t wanted to get…

VOICE 2: In any systematical graph, it’s the really the human experience that we want to drive it. For instance, we don’t a point system or a reputation systems, you are the best answer. Instead, what those are really useful for is for the flood of user generated content to try to distinguish it, it has some authority for some and not others. But we found, there’s another dimension for dealing with content which is if you’re just having a one on one conversation with somebody in the moment, you know, you tell them the truth, you’re honest with them. And that’s a type of intimacy that you know comes along with that. So, that’s how we approach the issue instead of saying, hey, for that (unintelligible) they can spend 10 hours a day on an answer site, rack up your points, that’s a very different audience. And when I ask some question, I don’t want an answer that’s solely for that kind of audience like we get for some things. But usually I want somebody in my network who’s not spending their days kind of, just focusing on web content but they’re going about their affairs. We catch them at a convenient moment and they answer, if they want to.

VOICE 1: And the final dimension too is that the referrals really compliment the routing that are worked out. So, I’d probably answer as many questions as I refer to other people that got answered. And this is a channel in which referring questions feels very natural. You know, if you sent me a direct email, you know, asking me, you know whatever you’re going back to Hawaii for lobbying like what are places that are worth checking out if you stay for a few extra days. You know what? I’ve been to Hawaii twice but my buddy lived for six years, you know, on the big island. I’m going to email it to him. And here because it’s coming directly to you because you know that you’ve been selected, it’ a small number of individuals, it’s not like put on the web page for anyone to see. We actually do find that people refer to the question on to someone else. So it just points to the fact that there are very different motivations here going on than you know, I want to get paid for it, I want to get points for it, or like this is actually going to be my full time activity. What we like about Aardvark is that it doesn’t have to be like something that you know you’re going back to this website on a regular basis and it’s like one of the major things you do. It just fits pretty seamlessly in your day-to-day interactions over IM or email or Twitter in this case.

VOICE 2: Yeah, on that side, a big theme(ph) to us is although there’s a lot of, you know, we talked about this. There’s a lot of complexity in the technology for how we are going to figure out the routing, you know, these situations from the point of view, you know, the user is supposed to be just that simple like, you type a question just like you’re sending it to a friend. Instead, it goes to Aardvark and he finds the right person to answer. So, that simplicity is really important to us and we want to kind of keep that. Oh, it’s interactive but like, you are in contact to it. It’s closer to a telephone than it is to a website.

INTERVIEWER: What is your most popular interface?

VOICE 2: IM (unintelligible).

INTERVIEWER: IM before. What’s second, e-mail?

VOICE 2: Yeah, I think e-mail comes in second now.

INTERVIEWER: All right. Great, so anything else we’re talking about right now on video? Any big announcements?

VOICE 1: Well, there’s a lot stuff coming down the pipe.

INTERVIEWER: Like what?

VOICE 1: We’re actively developing.

INTERVIEWER: It’s probably off record.

(Soundbite of laughter)

VOICE 1: It’s going to be off record. Well, this is off record. You know, the icon thing it’s going to be a big thing which we’re not talking about. You know people know it’s in my hair but, you know, we’re not going to give any timeframe for that kind of thing now.

INTERVIEWER: So, when do you think that will launch?

VOICE 1: Exactly right.

(Soundbite of laughter)

INTERVIEWER: Is there a problem with, you know, just push notification for background apps and that kind of stuff or is it literally just -

VOICE 2: Push notification, I thought we’re going to, I mean, it (unintelligible) fine. It always will.

VOICE 1: That was certainly you one of the things we were excited about you know coming out this year to be able to use that functionality. I mean, it’s totally fundamental to what we’re trying to do. And the other thing that’s exciting is just you now how much that platform has taken off And the fact that it is totally natural for people to install an app they’ll be going to be using on a regular basis. It’s not like the (unintelligible) thing that a few techies with the iPhone are doing.

INTERVIEWER: Are you guys – do you wear these t-shirts with that the tiny Aardvark logo? Do you wear this everyday like the whole office or just when you go out for meetings?

VOICE 2: You know, except again we’re clearly off the record and we’re definitely you know. My sister, excuse me, she’s an animal psychologist and she designed this logo. So, that’s why I wear this all the time. It’s a little aardvark.

INTERVIEWER: Is an animal psychologist –

VOICE 2: …particularly qualified to design Aardvark logos? I think so.

INTERVIEWER: Is there something on the bank?

VOICE 2: Of the t-shirt?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

VOICE 2: No.

VOICE 1: Actually nothing. It’s very, very small. (unintelligible)

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, there some things going on with that. Okay. (unintelligible)

VOICE 2: But, I do wear it everyday.

INTERVIEWER: Really? He has multiple shirts.

VOICE 1: I have like a shelf full of these shirts so that we do wear it everyday.

INTERVIEWER: Really.

VOICE 1 & 2: Yeah.

VOICE 1: Yeah. You’d be hard pressed to find me not wearing this t-shirt. On the weekend, I don’t wear it. But during the week, I wear it.

INTERVIEWER: I was following your chin there at the end. I was getting criticized for my camera work which is nonexistent. All right. So, there’s absolutely no major announcements. I mean, we’re doing Twitter but here at the end of the video nothing like super juicy like – oh by the way, Google just acquired us or we just raised another round of funding at a $500 million valuation or –

VOICE 2: But, that would be newsworthy.

INTERVIEWER: Just a slow and steady building of business listening to you (unintelligible).

VOICE 2: There are some exciting integrations coming out with a bunch of different services because we sent on top of all these services but, that stuff has -

INTERVIEWER: We have Facebook now. We’ve got Twitter.

VOICE 2: I think by process of elimination, you’ll be going to be able to like them. Yes, we’ll go and sit on top of all the social networks and the remaining IM networks.

INTERVIEWER: OK. And the iPhone would it be – are we thinking this year, I mean are you allowed to say when? You may not even know exactly but definitely thinking.

VOICE 2: Absoultely.

INTERVIEWER: OK. Thanks very much, guys.

VOICE 1: Thanks, Michael.

VOICE 2: Thanks, Michael.

VOICE 2: It’s great having your thoughts on these ideas, you know, and push back under different areas. It will be interesting.

INTERVIEWER: And TechCrunch by far your favorite blog?

VOICE 2: That’s exactly what I meant to say.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, you have been to TechCrunch, right?

(Soundbite of laughter)

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