CEO Spotlight on Surf Canyon’s Mark Cramer
ASE is thrilled to feature Surf Canyon’s Mark Cramer. I had an opportunity to sit down for a lively face-to-face chat with Mark this week at the SES Conference in New York. I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed getting to know Mark.
Mark Cramer has more than 14 years of technology industry experience, from engineer to executive. At Hewlett-Packard in Grenoble, France, he was a Project Manager in charge of international manufacturing and distribution for PC-workstation product lines. Mark was one of the early employees at Keynote Systems, where he successfully incubated and launched their professional services practice. He was later hired as CEO of NetGeo, where he developed the early business plan, brought the first product to market and raised capital from existing and new investors. Mark went on to NexTag, a vertical search engine, where he directed the launch of the mortgage category. Mark earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where one of his projects included developing a search engine from scratch, and his MBA from Harvard Business School.
ASE: Mark, please give our readers the Surf Canyon pitch. How will Surf Canyon change their lives?
Mark: As content on the internet explodes, it’s becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to match two- and three-word queries to the tens of billions of items indexed by the major search engines. Naturally, it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to put all of the most relevant results on page one. Therefore, users need something to help them quickly and easily find those “nuggets” of relevant information buried in the search results. Surf Canyon’s browser extension, by applying a real-time implicit personalization layer on top of Google, Yahoo! and MSN, accelerates the search process by figuring out the user’s “at the moment” intent, while the search is taking place, and then going deep into the results and fetching what the user needs.
ASE: Please talk about your background- where you were born, and how you ended up in San Francisco running a start-up?
Mark: I was born in Chicago and grew up in Florida. I have an Electrical Engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Harvard. In graduate school I was really inspired by the international students, so I decided to go to France to expand my horizons. Learning the language was very difficult, but I was practically obsessed in my desire to learn it, so à la fin, je peux dire que j’étais bilangue. Anyway, after four years it was time to return to the US. The internet thing was just getting going and I decided that I wanted to be a part of it. So after a number of different startups - some good, some less good - I came up with the idea for Surf Canyon and decided to start a company myself.
ASE: Surf Canyon is a beautiful, unusual name. How did you come up with it?
Mark: I knew that picking a name for the company was going to be a difficult process, so I enlisted the help of my mother and sister. The idea was to come up with a name for a search engine (we didn’t really consider what it was supposed to do, besides search) that was 1) easy to pronounce, 2) easy to spell when someone pronounced and, perhaps most importantly, 3) available as a domain. We spent four days coming up with all kinds of crazy ideas when we decided to stop and pick. My sister, Merryl, came up with the one we chose. It has elicited some strong responses, positive and negative, but I think it works. “Surf” is for surfing the internet and “canyon” depicts depth which relates to how our technology goes deep into the result set to fetch information.
ASE: Describe a typical day in your life.
Mark: I worked hard before the launch on February 19th, but since then things have become a bit crazy. There is no limit to the number of people that I could contact regarding PR, business development or fundraising, so I’m been doing a lot of communicating via phone and email. There’s not a lot of travel, outside of SES NYC, but I’m almost constantly connected to my laptop. Fortunately I have a very understanding and supportive fiancée.
ASE: Please give us some links to searches that are visibly enriched by Surf Canyon.
Mark: This is difficult to answer because everyone searches differently, and the results sets are constantly in flux, however, the video demo at www.SurfCanyon.com and description at http://blog.surfcanyon.com/2007/10/11/discovering-discovery/ both offer good examples of what the technology can do.
Nevertheless, earlier this month I spoke at an event called “March Geek Out.” If you search for that on Google, the first result is http://031208sfnt.eventbrite.com/, which is the page where you buy tickets. If what you’re looking for, however, is the actual event page, then if you navigate back to the search results page, Surf Canyon will have dug out http://sfnewtech.com/ from page 8. Much improved. Even better than that, if you select that result Surf Canyon will dig out http://newtech.meetup.com/15/calendar/7420423/ from page 12. Page 12! Interestingly, this meetup.com page is where I first learned about, and signed up for, the event.
ASE: Who inspires you in the business sector? Personally? Why?
Mark: I think we’re all inspired by the amazing things the major search engines are doing. They’re tackling enormous, complex problems and it’s exciting to see the innovation. That being said, efforts of all of the Alt Search Engines provide inspiration. It’s wonderful to see so many different companies, with so many different, and sometimes strange, yet most always creative, solutions to the same problem: helping people find what they need.
ASE: When I’m not working I’m ________ (please fill in the blank).
Mark: Recently my life has been mostly working, sleeping (a bit) and (sometimes) eating, but I have been able to get out on the bike a few times. That being said, I make time to be a math tutor for a couple hours a week and I perform my duties as a Director of Libraries Without Borders, a new non-profit created to distribute books to third-world countries. Most importantly, I’m looking forward to getting married in April.
ASE: We talked about the difficulties of getting publicity for alt search engines- and you seem to have a good sense of how to do it. Do you have any tips to other alts that are starting out?
Mark: Getting publicity can be difficult, especially when you consider all of the different, passionate people vying for attention. Of course it helps to have a compelling product with a persuasive message, but I don’t have a sense for how it’s done, besides being persistent. This is one of the reasons that Alt Search Engines has been so valuable. Without a tireless advocate, enthusiast and evangelist like you, there might be very little chance for many search engines to ever get any recognition, which is, more often than not, justly deserved.
ASE: Why, thank you Mark. We’re so honored to work with innovative CEO’s like you. Good luck to you and SurfCanyon!
