We’re happy to announce that Twitter has acquired the AdGrok team. Starting today, we will be working full-time on Twitter’s revenue engineering team. AdGrok and Twitter? When Twitter approached us and asked if we’d be interested in working on their monetization platform, we realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we just couldn’t pass [...]

  Depend upon it Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. – Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson So you managed to build a prototype, you’ve gotten some traction, and some credulous soul now wants to write you a check to bankroll your startup. [...]

In Jorge Luís Borges’ classic story, The Library of Babel, the narrator describes a vast library, housed in a maze of interlocking hexagonal rooms, containing a copy of every possible 410-page book. Literally every novel-length combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation fills its shelves. Nonsensical gibberish occupies shelf space next to humanity’s greatest literary works, [...]

AdWords At Scale Is A Pain Anyone who runs an e-commerce site can tell you how painful it is to run an effective search engine marketing campaign. For example, let’s take a look at two of our users: Debra Torres, a Cuban wedding shirt store, and Melondipity, a shop for baby clothes. Both of these [...]

    3…2…1… Today, AdGrok emerges from the extended adolescence of beta, into the full-fledged manhood of a paid, production app.1 At the threat of coming off a bit Sally-Fields-at-the-Oscars, we’d like to thank the over 300 advertisers, large and small, who took AdGrok for a spin and gave us their feedback. Interacting with users [...]

Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death. -Hunter S. Thompson An imprudent lark Recently I had the pleasure of an ill-advised midnight ride on the back of a friend’s BMW R850R motorcycle. I was riding in the back of course; I don’t think my general state of inebriation made [...]

Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success. AdGrok (adgrok.com), a Y Combinator startup, is looking for its first non-founder employee1. We just closed a seed round with some distinguished angel investors, have plenty of money in the bank, and are ready to build [...]

Apparently, We’re Certifiable AdGrok is now a Google AdWords Certified Partner. What’s that mean? Google’s got the details, but it basically proves we know what in the sam hill we’re talking about, at least when it comes to AdWords. Chrome GrokBar! We just pushed the Google Chrome version of our GrokBar into production tonight. We’re [...]

Forms, forms, everywhere are forms Filling out an online form can change your life. I filled out two such forms. One, was an online dating profile at Match.com around June 2009. The second was the application to Y Combinator in February 20101. Little did I know then how these two forms would guiltily conspire to [...]

Please note, gentle reader, that this post comes to you from Matthew (the Engineer), not Antonio (the Physicist Quant who’s been a Journalist). Moderate your literary expectations accordingly, if you’d be so kind… Marketer, Know Thy Audience Last Saturday as I walked into Bronstein Music with my 6th-grade son, I knew we were going to [...]

Startup founders are in the unique position of having to seriously ask themselves the following cocktail party question: how much money would you need to live comfortably on for the rest of your life? That amount, whatever it might be, is known in the trade as ‘fuck-you money,’ i.e., the amount of money needed to [...]

Yesterday, AdGrok published its first real blog post. The post was a whimsical look at the New York vs. Bay Area tech scene. To be quite frank, we expected a few hundred page views, at most. Boy, were we wrong. The chronology was more or less as follows: 11:12 AM PST: We post the piece [...]

Last Tuesday, legendary tech investor Ron Conway addressed the glop-eating masses at Y Combinator during our usual Tuesday illustrious-speaker dinner. The question was asked about the New York tech scene, and it’s relative strength vis-à-vis Silicon Valley. Paul Graham took up the question with Techcrunch TV recently, as a follow-on to Conway’s remarks. Chris Dixon, [...]

The road to serfdom I joined Goldman Sachs in 2005, after five flailing years in a physics Ph.D. program at Berkeley. The average salary at Goldman Sachs in 2005 was $521,000, and that’s counting each and every trader, salesperson, investment banker, secretary, mail boy, shoe shine, and window cleaner on the payroll. In 2006, it [...]

For all the Sturm und Drang about Android, Gmail, Chrome, Google News, Google TV and all the rest of it, Google’s revenue stream is more homogeneous than that of an Arab oil republic. Fully 97% of all Google revenue comes from one thing: AdWords, and its close cousin, AdSense. The success of these last two [...]