Martin Kleppmann

But even for them, it was a pretty slow running business.

I think it was not an easy business to be in.

It was mostly bootstrapped.

So I did a bunch of consulting in order to fund hiring some people and then hired some friends on the cheap to help contribute to actually building the product.

And so it was done all very cheaply.

I had a very small amount of angel money in there, but mostly bootstrapped.

Yeah, the second one was reportive.

That went a lot better.

So that was putting social media inside Gmail, basically.

So the idea was that if you get an email from someone you don't know, we had a little browser extension which manipulated the Gmail web interface so that on the side next to the email, we'd show you a summary social profile with like a

profile picture and like a job title pulled from LinkedIn and recent tweets pulled from Twitter and maybe recent Facebook posts or things like that.

Just whatever we could find about that person and put that as a social summary next to the email.

We

started in 2010 or something like that it was then pretty quickly became quite popular um and so on the back of that we were then able to raise some money from y combinator which was still fairly young at the time that was very young that you must have been one of the very early batches

Yeah, I can't remember exactly when they started, but it was certainly in the early years.

I think Y Combinator had already built up quite a good reputation at the time, but it was still fairly small.

So we initially came for the three months or whatever it was of the

Y Combinator, but then we were able to get US work visas for ourselves and set up permanently in San Francisco.

It was very exciting because it felt like going to the center of where it was all happening, really, and

We, at the start of that, not knowing anybody at all, we knew like one or two people in the entire Bay Area, but we like contacted them and they introduced us to more people and they introduced us to more people.