The brains behind Yahoo Boss, a young engineer named Vik Singh, is leaving Yahoo to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. Earlier this year, Singh was named to Technology Review’s 35 Under 35 list at the age of 24. Singh is exactly the kind of talent Yahoo should be trying to hold onto, but that is hard to do now that it is ceding search to Microsoft.
Singh is more diplomatic. Contacted for comment he confirms, “I’ll be starting next week actually. I’m really pumped but I’m going to definitely miss Yahoo! It’s been such a great company to work at but I just got this really bad case of the entrepreneurial bug.”
Yahoo Boss, which was largely Singh’s idea, is one of Yahoo’s most successful projects among developers. It <a href="“>opens up the power of Yahoo’s search index and algorithms to other sites. Yahoo Boss is a set of APIs and Web services which let people build their own customized search engines. (We use it for our search engine here at TechCrunch). Since it launched a year and a half ago, upwards of one billion search queries a month are powered through the service.
Prior to Yahoo, Singh cut his teeth at Microsoft Research in the lab of computer scientist Jim Gray, who was tragically lost at sea two years ago.
Singh already has some ideas about what he wants to work on at Sutter Hill, but he is keeping them close to his vest at this point. He does offer this: “There’s a line my mentor Jim Gray used to say to me all the time: ‘We gotta party on the data!’ I know it’s vague, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” Party on, dude.
Vik Singh is the creator and architect of Yahoo! BOSS (Build an Open Search Service). He developed several supporting BOSS examples such as TweetNews and delicious.com’s Fresh homepage. As of April 2009, the number of queries issued through BOSS surpassed the search traffic on Ask, Amazon, and Facebook combined. MIT’s Technology Review listed him as one of the Top 35 under 35 Innovators of 2009 for his contributions to open search. Vik previously worked at Google and Microsoft, both...
BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start- ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives users access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. Combining a client’s assets and ideas with Yahoo’s search technology, BOSS...
Sutter Hill Ventures has financed technology-based start-ups and assisted entrepreneurs in building market-leading companies since 1962. Through their decades of experience, they have developed strong industry networks, considerable operating and venture capital experience, and an understanding of the challenges that early-stage and high-growth companies face. They offer expertise in developing business strategy and partnerships, building management teams, and financing companies in both public and private markets. They are experienced operating executives who love building companies. Their approach is straightforward. They...
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