You gotta remember, this was over 10 years ago. The VC/tech game was a lot different back then. The "search engine for apps" pitch kinda made sense back in those days.
A "search engine for apps" sounds stupid nowadays because it's impossible on iOS. But back then, jailbreaking was quite popular. Many Quixey employees (and many people in silicon valley) had jailbroken iPhones. iOS 3 was pretty limited and limera1n worked on every iPhone. Piracy was still mainstream. Spotify sounded stupid back then because Grooveshark was so much better. It was inevitable that Apple would cave in and open up its platform any day. And if Apple didn't do that, Android would eat their lunch.
Then Steve Jobs died, and Tim Cook released the iPhone 4S, the first iPhone you couldn't jailbreak easily. The rest is history.
Mobile was a new landscape, and it was a tough problem to solve. Plus they were going up against Google so there was a sense of FOMO if you weren't in on it. The thinking was, maybe there's a 1% chance it pays off and Quixey beats Google.
Another former employee. I'll add that once search engine for apps clearly wouldn't work there was an attempt to pivot to something like Google cards but directly linked to the app (so yelp reviews for restaurants instead of Google reviews). This wasn't a bad idea but they raised the money for a large scale product (1000s of apps) and so invested in scale before proving the market fit. Combine that with Alibaba money splitting focus again and there never was a useful product launched.
His LinkedIn page has "Hebew" as a language he's fluent in. Given his background/interests, he obviously means Hebrew, but this lack of attention to detail is at least a yellow flag for me. I also am surprised that LinkedIn allows free text with no corrections in that field! :)
