Sphere

About Sphere

The Who, Why, and How of Sphere

The four of us (Martin Remy/ CTO; Steve Nieker/ CIO; Toni Schneider/ Advisor and Tony Conrad/ CEO) founded Sphere to help readers more easily discover great blog content — and perhaps inspire more people to read blogs and maybe even become bloggers.

Along the way, we met with some angel investors with halos — Doug Mackenzie, David Mahoney, Kevin Compton, Mike Winton, Phil Black, Vince Vannelli and Will Hearst — who helped us get started. We were able to hit the ground running because Martin and Steve had been working on blog and content matching technology for a long time. We had a successful first private beta release of Sphere in late 2005. Around the same time we raised some money from a couple of great partners and venture capitalists: Darcy Bentley at Hearst Publishing and Venetia Kontogouris at Trident Capital.

In addition to our investment partners, we're quite lucky to have several superlative advisors: Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Automattic/ WordPress, a blog content tool leader; Josh Macht, former Editor of Time.com and now Managing Director of new publishing ventures at Harvard Business School Publishing; Ron McCoy, former Chief Technology Officer of New York Times Digital and About.com; Mary Hodder, Founder/CEO of Dabble and a blog user experience expert; and Scott Kurnit, Founder and former CEO of About.com who did some amazing work creating community there.

Our private beta was well received and we used the feedback to add some advanced, intuitive features . We believe these push the quality of blog discovery to, dare we say, a new level. It took us a while to add those features and beef up our infrastructure, but we wanted to do it right, rather than rush a product out the door. Delaying our launch was a very hard decision. We debated it for weeks. Ultimately, we decided to take a step back and trust our instincts. We've been involved with several start-ups (Oddpost; Post Communications; Iconoculture; Waypath and Automattic/ Wordpress) and we believe in good instincts.

Our team is tiny, but starting to grow. We're based in San Francisco but most of us work virtually (in Seattle; Denver; Vancouver; New York; Phoenix and the Bay Area). For more personal details, see Sphere Team. We're looking for top coders, great business minds and others who are impassioned about the possibilities of great blog search.