I spoke with Max Ventilla of Aardvark to learn about his company that came out of stealth mode in March 2009.

Max drives Aardvark's strategy and business development. He came from Google where he focused on strategy for Google's marketing and monetization initiatives around Adsense and web applications. Previously, he was VP of Business Development for Trader Classified Media and founded Krypteian Systems, an enterprise email data mining tool powering expertise and contact directories. Max has a BS in Math and Physics and a MBA from Yale.

According to Aardvark's web site, the company's current product concept is:

"A real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) can provide much better information than a web page. Think of all the knowledge and experience that you have in your head, but haven't published on the web!

With Aardvark, there's nothing to download or install - just send Aardvark a message through IM, like you do when talking to a friend!"

Below is our conversation about Aardvark:

Erik Levy: Can you provide some background on the company?

Max Ventilla: Sure. I left Google about 18 months ago, primarily because our CTO is at the top of a very short list of people I'd quit my job to start a company with. We were joined from the beginning by Robert Spiro (an incredibly talented UX researcher and user-driven designer) and Nathan Stoll (an early Googler who had been heading Google news the last few years).

Erik Levy: What were you doing at Google?

Max Ventilla: At Google, I was mainly working on marketing and monetization initiatives in a pretty small corporate strategy group.

Erik Levy: So, it was the four of you?

Max Ventilla: It was the four of us.

Erik Levy: What's the idea?

Max Ventilla: We had a very general idea to try to help people make subjective decisions (in particular to answer the kind of highly contextual questions where personal taste is important). We also had a notion that there had been a tremendous amount of data, functionality, and engagement built up across web applications in the last 5 years (chiefly social networks) that no one had really tapped to bring people that kind of utility.

Erik Levy: So, your background is engineering?

Max Ventilla: My background is in math and algorithms.

Erik Levy: Who wanted to start the company first?

Max Ventilla: Damon (our CTO) was finishing a PhD in summer of 2007 and looking for what to do next and I was just about to transition to work on monetization for YouTube and figured it was a good time to make the switch to smaller digs.

Erik Levy: Have the others started companies before?

Max Ventilla: I started an enterprise software company around data mining for knowledge management back in the web 1 era. Damon started a number of companies in the 90s around AI and Natural Language Processing being applied to communication and information related problems.

Rob had started a company to deliver streaming music to cell phones (a few years too early) and a video blogging site. Nathan had been at Google since early borg days but had been the main person to build out the Google news team and take the product internationally.

Erik Levy: So, what has been the hardest thing so far starting Aardvark?

Max Ventilla: In some ways it's all been hard. Figuring out what product to do was a five-month process of prototyping different ideas in the space to see what things worked and didn't work. Finding generalist engineers that cleared our bar, especially while we were in stealth, has been really hard.

Climbing the ladder of Silicon Valley angels and eventually getting to a pitch that attracted top VCs was hard. Finding a pitch for users and getting them to think of Aardvark for needs that they usually went to manual alternatives to meet has been hard.

Developing a process where a company of 16 can make decisions collaboratively without grinding to a halt and getting data and user feedback for every decision has been hard. At the same time, a startup should be hard and the main priority is just to be getting better and better and we've managed to do that (off a low base :)

Erik Levy: I didn't ask - do you have an official title?

Max Ventilla: Zoo Director

Max Ventilla: Everyone at the company has a Zoo title.

Erik Levy: How did that come about?

Max Ventilla: We came up with the idea for Aardvark (an animal was a really good thing for our brand and "aa" puts it at the top of the buddy list) and figured we would in time come out with a number of products that would be named after animals. Because our business was to work on these animals, we called our headquarters the Mechanical Zoo and gave everyone zoo titles.


Erik Levy: It is interesting that goes back to the days of phone books with companies using A1, AAA for names.

Max Ventilla: In the end it all comes around...

Erik Levy: Do you have a chief cheer officer - I mean my experience is that all startups go through high ups and low downs - does someone act as the person people go to so they are brought back up and in focus?


Max Ventilla: To a large extent I feel like my job is to insulate my team from ups and downs and bring back the incredible enthusiasm for what we're building that I experience when I interact with people externally. In general, we have hired people that are really passionate about what we are doing. We use the product pretty obsessively internally. That goes far to keep morale high. We've also been incredibly fortunate to have advisers and investors that constantly make us feel encouraged.


Erik Levy: Where do you want things to go - do you see this as a product to build on or more as a starting point for what could develop into something else?

Max Ventilla: I've become most excited about the fact that Aardvark can be the gateway to the thousands or tens of thousands of friends, friends-of-friends, classmates, and colleagues that you'd want to get information from. Over the low resolution communication channels that you have with you all the time, you can suddenly be connected to the right person in the moment.

You aren't just limited to the small handful (Dunbar number) of people that you know well enough to have the social cost of reaching out be bearable and where you can recall enough about in the moment to know that you should contact them.


In time, we think we can connect you to the right person around any social need, not just for information sharing. At some point, use cases might cause us to actually branch the product into a new animal.

Erik Levy: A last question: Any advice for those thinking of starting a company in the technology industry?

Max Ventilla: Pick an idea that you can be user driven around. When you do a startup you take on a tremendous amount of risk. From the point of starting something onwards, everything should be about de-risking. Restricting yourself to ideas that you can put in people's hands without having to spend months building something lets you discard ideas that you shouldn't be pursuing.

Constantly seeing what people actually think of your product lets you correct problems quickly. For us, picking a product where people are interacting with high latency text lets us test everything before we devote an ounce of our most precious resource (engineering time). Also, be user driven and be humble that you have any idea what your users want and don't pick a product that requires months of development before you can see if it's worth doing.

And consumer startups are much more fun than enterprise :)