Hunch

Hunch operated as a pioneering recommendation platform, founded in 2007 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs: Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon, Tom Pinckney, and Matt Gattis. The company's public launch occurred in June 2009, introducing a service designed to provide personalized recommendations by understanding user tastes. The founding team brought a wealth of experience; Fake had previously co-founded the photo-sharing site Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo, while Dixon had co-founded the web-security startup SiteAdvisor, which was sold to McAfee. This prior success in building and exiting technology ventures provided a strong foundation for their new endeavor.

Hunch's core technology, described as a "taste graph," was engineered to make predictions and offer customized suggestions for a wide array of topics. It functioned by aggregating and analyzing data from various online sources, including social networks and users' answers to a series of questions on the platform itself. Initially, the system used a decision-tree model to guide users, but it later evolved in January 2011 to focus more on product referrals and tagging. The primary business model was centered around lead generation, where Hunch would receive compensation from vendors for directing users to their products and services. The platform's strength lay in its ability to generate non-obvious recommendations, moving beyond simple item-to-item suggestions to incorporate a broader understanding of a user's interests.

The company's trajectory culminated in a significant milestone in November 2011, when it was acquired by eBay for approximately $80 million. The acquisition was a strategic move by the e-commerce giant to integrate Hunch's sophisticated recommendation engine and its team of data scientists into its own platform. The goal was to enhance eBay's merchandising capabilities and personalize the shopping experience by better connecting buyers with relevant products. Following the acquisition, the public-facing Hunch.com website was shut down in March 2014, with its underlying technology being fully subsumed into eBay's global platform, where it continued to power search and recommendation features. Keywords: recommendation engine, taste graph, decision making tool, Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon, eBay acquisition, personalization technology, data mining, predictive modeling, machine learning, user profiling, product recommendation, lead generation, e-commerce technology, social recommendation, consumer data, startup exit, interest graph, decision tree, online platform