Under The Sun

Hello– My name is Sid Steward. I created Foundd, and I hope you find it as supremely useful as I do. It is the result of 16 months of tinkering and development. When I started out, I wasn’t sure exactly what I would end up building, but I figured I would recognize it when I (*ahem*) found it. Now, here it is! I love it — I hope you do, too.

I want to tell you about Foundd by telling you a little bit about myself. I studied math at Cal Poly, SLO, California and entered the workforce as a programmer in the midst of the dot-com boom. One thing led to another and I became a specialist in Adobe’s PDF file format. Who could have guessed?
Anyhow, that’s how I came to write my book, PDF Hacks, for O’Reilly. And that’s when my DNA changed.
Writing a Hacks book is a crazy, mad-scientist marathon, and the experience has altered how I think. I can’t take off the lab coat any more. I’m always dissecting, tinkering and creating — looking for novel solutions to interesting problems. It’s usually fun, sometimes frenzied, occasionally profitable.

Foundd got its start in February, 2005, when I hit upon a new idea for an online service. After many months of odd hours, I had built GoJot. I showed it to my friends and we started kicking it around.
In the course of these debates my passion for GoJot gradually dimmed. I had wanted to build something so useful that ordinary folks (not just geeks) would use it every day — and this just wasn’t it. The debates around GoJot, however, had sparked a wildfire of new ideas. I had become the mad scientist again, passionately persuing an elusive notion.

A succession of little online services followed, each one an experiment. One Friday I hatched a new idea that was so compelling that it made my heart skip with excitement. After many long nights, ListMixer was online. I love ListMixer, but I knew it could grow into something greater. ListMixer was almost it.

With great care I started work on the online service before you now: Foundd – Re-search Engine. And I feel I have finally discovered what I set out for, over one year ago. Olé!
But this isn’t the end of the story. Rather, the passion I used to discover Foundd will now go into developing Foundd into something even greater. That’s where I could use your help.
I hope you will try Foundd, and I hope you will love it as much as I do. Most of all, I hope that you will write me to let me know how it works for you — how I could improve it. Foundd’s success depends on how well it serves you.

Thank You–
Sid