Daniel Gross: 19-Year-Old Creates a Service thats Indexes Online Life

I discovered a new service by reading about its creator. The service: Greplin, a search tool on all-things-you online. The creators: 19-year-old Daniel Gross and 27-year-old Robby Walker. I specifically read about Daniel Gross who was interviewed by Christine Lagorio of Inc.com in article “How This 19-Year-Old is Taking on Google”. Both creators are from my generation and I love reading stories about young entrepreneurs. Daniel was interviewed because of his age; he hasn’t gone to college and joined Y-Combinator, a start-up funding program, right after high school. Within the last two days of the program, Gross and Lagorio created Greplin. The idea received support and now it has $5 million of funding and the site launched last week.

According to the article and the Greplin website, the service provides an account in which all social media is indexed and users can search for anything within the index. Example: you can search “Inception” and the results will include the word mentioned in all of the your social media from email to Facebook. Gross’s inspiration for the service:

“I had this very long list of things I thought would be cool. Greplin was always near the top…Greplin was the one project idea I had for which I was the target audience…if you look at a product like this, it’s useful. There’s a need. And the question is why hasn’t someone built it already?”

As far as the reference to Google. Gross makes no allusion to setting himself as a competitor. The two services are similar but serve two different audiences. Google searches public info; Greplin searches your indexed public and private info. With Greplin, no one but the users can search amongst their index.

Gross may be young, but in this interview, he is a creator well aware of his product. In his words, he is the target audience. He also stated in the interview that the fear of losing his laptop reinforces the need for a service like Greplin. Thus, Greplin is a way to index, backup, and search your online self. Gross has experienced his first business quickly and I hope he is able to handle the pace. His goal for the next five years:

 “It’d be really great for me personally if we were able to keep growing Greplin in the next five years. If we can create something that’s a household name and that people use every day, that’s a dream.”