Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has invested in Santa Barbara based FindTheBest, a comparison engine founded by DoubleClick cofounder Kevin O’Connor. This is the first outside funding for the new startup, and one of the first investments made by Kleiner’s sFund, announced in October. Randy Komisar from Kleiner will join FindTheBest’s board of directors.
So what does FindTheBest do? “It’s Kayak for the other thousand things,” says O’Connor.
Want to compare smartphones, and filter by reviews, price, carriers, etc.? Go here. Or take a look at ski resorts and filter by vertical drop and average snowfall. Users can also edit and add data on their own as well. The site is just starting to also take direct user ratings.
This is the kind of data curation and slicing that’s extremely useful (we do some of this on CrunchBase, for example, and see gdgt). And in certain commerce areas it’s incredibly profitable. It still feels like we’re in the nascent stages of all this, though. And it isn’t just great technology that will win – Eventually someone will have the depth of data to create a gravitational pull and win this space for good. And that will be one heck of a useful service.