The Spokeo Perspective

Upon the release of Spokeo 4 in early March of this year, a surprising controversy sprang up among the blog communities and media. Our new product unexpectedly seemed to strike a nerve in some, eliciting powerful and sometimes harsh responses. Suddenly we were the focus of overwhelming attention. There was much misplaced trepidation, and startling [...]

For those of you who may not have heard, The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) – a non-profit public interest group that, interestingly, bills itself as “working to keep the Internet open, innovative, and free”– filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, alleging that Spokeo’s practices violate the Fair Credit [...]

When we use Google Maps, we can see our own house, but we probably don’t mind that other people can see it, too.  When we flip through a Whitepages directory, we can find people’s phone numbers and addresses, are we are fine with it since Whitepages directories have been delivered to our homes for decades.  [...]

As most of you would agree, the Web 2.0 era is long over.  Web 2.0 was categorized by ad-based business models.  Everything has to be free, and advertisers would somehow pay the bills.  We entrepreneurs chased after user counts, and the ad dollars were assumed to flow in. We started Spokeo with the standard "Google [...]

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet some interesting new start-ups and demo Spokeo at the Plug and Play Expo in Sunnyvale. Plug and Play’s Expo is hosted twice a year to give up and coming start-ups a chance to gain exposure for their products or services. It was nice opportunity to get out of [...]

I hear that question all the time. And I have finally made my peace with it. User growth is good. However, obsessing over user growth in a product under development is bad because it breeds unhealthy stress and leads to shortsighted decisions. I read an interesting interview from Eric Schmidt months ago. In it, he [...]

There’s a proverb, "Birds of a feather flock together" (Chinese has a similar proverb, "one takes on the color of one’s company"). When you see many of your friends have started their own ventures, you’ll feel an inexplicable urge to do the same as well. These friends are more than drinking buddies; rather, we exchange [...]

If you happened to check out our company page today, you’d notice that Spokeo got a great marketing boost in Mital. She is very lively, a fireball of energy, a human Mount Vesuvius. She is exactly what we are not, so it’s a great fit, and we’re super excited that she is with us. A [...]

Ten rules is a wonderful post for startups written by a great web entrepreneur. I’ve read it many times and even taped it to my wall, but I am still not happy with our performance on several rules. I only present the rules here. Please refer back to the original post for descriptions of each [...]

Slow creeping growth… Does that even sound like a good thing? Yes! After months of reworking the idea, tweaking the usage flow, and streamlining the interface, we have advanced out of stagnation. During our monthly review today, we officially declared that we are indeed seeing some pickup. Stagnation (stage cleared) Slow Creeping Growth (current stage) [...]