2001 – 2002
Stumble Upon
In October 2001, I co-founded StumbleUpon with several friends of mine and we released a working beta less than 4 months later. StumbleUpon was a toolbar for your browser which recommended websites to you and would take you to them through a single click of the “stumble” button. These days it’s easy to make a recommendation engine, but we did collaborative filtering and machine learning before it was cool. After a year, I left the company to finish my engineering undergrad at Queens University. My friends continued with StumbleUpon for many more years and ultimately sold it to eBay as a “discovery service.”