Welcome to Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box!
Vivek Wadhwa introduces the key note speaker of Big Think’s Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel.
First off in Big Think’s Farsight 2011 Conference is Clarium Capital founder and original Facebook investor Peter Thiel. “It is difficult to produce a new search company,” says Thiel. “Bing has 24% market share, but as far as I can tell it’s still not breaking even.” The trouble with search, as Thiel learned while starting Powerset, is the enormous fixed costs associated with starting such a company. Until you fix the so-called “‘fixed cost problem,’ you have to be garnering about 35% of the search market to break even.”
Next up, Part 2: Who Will Win the Spam Wars? A Roundtable Featuring Google, Microsoft and Blekko.
