When it comes to selling business success stories, the media likes to inform us of the brilliant product innovator who strikes it rich in one fell swoop or the investor who takes an absurd risk but manages to pull it off.
We're enamored by these stories.
There's the story of the brilliant product inventor Jan Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion. It's the rags-to-riches story of a humble immigrant from Kiev, Ukraine.
Then there's the story of Elon Musk, the immigrant from South Africa, who nearly lost all the money he made from the invention of PayPal before he saved Tesla Motors from going out of business. It's the story of nerve wracking risk-taking.
Unfortunately, while these stories are undeniably inspiring, they are not an accurate representation of what it takes. They make us believe that it is easy to do and doesn't focus on how much hard work, courage and intelligence goes into a successful business.
The Superfish Story
The story of Adi Pinhas, the co-founder of Superfish.com, gives us an idea of how much hard work and dedication goes into a company. Adi co-founded Superfish which is a visual search company based out of Palo Alto, California.
It's the story of someone who noticed a problem that nobody else appeared to have noticed and then solved it in a unique way; and although, it's a story that changed the world for the better and earned high profits, it's not a glamorous, fast-paced story. Instead, it's the story of painstaking research and working for years to turn the company into what it is today.
An Interesting Problem
The Internet is a collection of billions of websites, since each of these websites have a number of images on it, there are five to tenfold billion more images online.
While Google and the other major search engines have invented a technology for finding important keywords, the same level of search capability does not work for images. If, as a web-surfer, you found the image of a pet that you would like to adopt but did not remember the website or the name of the breed of dog, it would be almost impossible to find online again.
Extensive Research
While most people would have shrugged off the lost opportunity of not finding the image of what they glimpsed online, Adi Pinhas took the problem seriously. He spent eight years trying to figure out how someone could find a visually similar image through search. Is there an algorithm that could capture the essential qualities of an image and then find similar images through a unique search engine?
He founded the company Superfish to answer that question. During its first five years, an army of PhDs worked hard to find the right solution. Although no single algorithm was ever found to crack the problem, the software engineers did eventually realize that a combination of algorithms working in synergy could compare and contrast images until they were able to match them with remarkable accuracy.
Ingenious Technology
Dedicated visual search works in the following way:
1. The algorithm focuses on a query image and splits it into thousands of cross-sections.
2. Each cross-section, like a bacteria culture under a microscope, is identified for distinguishing characteristics. For images, distinctions might be patterns, textures, edges, dashes, smudges, or dots.
3. This information about unique defining qualities within images is then used to scan the web. If the query image, say, happens to be dots, then the target images must find dots of similar size and distance from each other.
Unparalleled Products
At present, Superfish has 2 products in the consumer market: Petmatch, and LikeThatDecor and plans to release up to 12 more over the next year.
PetMatch:
PetMatch works in much the same way, except now it searches for dogs. When a dog-lover looking for a particular breed of dog clicks on an image of the dog the search engine finds a dog just like that who needs a good home.
LikeThatDecor:
LikeThatDécor is a huge hit for interior designers. When an interior designer likes a particular piece of art or furniture, he or she has to click on an image of it to be shown similar objects for sale.
Looking Back
If Venture Capitalist Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Vintage Investment Partnersand a number of small seed investors who raised approximately $20 million had not been patient enough to wait for half a decade to get a return on their $20 million investment, the story might have had a different outcome. It would have been the story of what might have been rather than the story of one of the most unique technology companies in the world.