The idea may have occurred to Venky Harinarayan or Anand Rajaraman during a conversation or while deep in thought. In any case, it came in mid-2006, two years after they founded the company Kosmix. They had built a specialised search engine, and the new concept was to organise the results in neat categories, just like a homepage on the Web. If hundreds of thousands of people can have homepages on the Web, why can’t a search topic have a homepage?

Venky and Anand were mates from Stanford. They were known in the Silicon Valley for founding Junglee, a company that helped people shop on the internet, among other things. They were also known for not buying Google in 1997 when it was offered to them for $1 million. “We did not have a million dollars then,” says Anand. After Amazon bought Junglee, and they worked in the new company for two years, Anand and Venky set up Cambrian Ventures in 2000. Both of them may have become venture capitalists too early in life; they were soon itching to set up another company.

Kosmix was born out of a problem they had encountered while doing research at Stanford: categorising the information on the Web. Computer scientists in the academia had been working on this problem for a while, but they had been using small sets of data. Categorising the entire data in the World Wide Web was too big a challenge. Kosmix was an attempt at solving this problem, and aggregating content using the intelligence of the Web. “It is a very ambitious idea,” says Jonathan Miller, former CEO of AOL, who was looking for precisely such websites when their paths crossed.