Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch has taken another run at Powerset, which has been hitting the headlines in the blogosphere because the company continues to raise giant sums of money and get all sorts of attention with very little to show for it. Mike figures that the “natural language” search startup could be a “house of cards” and that CEO Barney Pell seems to be staffing the thing with Yahoo engineers, in the hope that the company will eventually be acquired by Yahoo in its eternal quest to beat Google.
That’s all fascinating and everything, but I have to say the most interesting part of his post is the video clip, which features platinum-haired Valley girl Sarah Myers of d7tv.com doing a feature called “PartyCrashers” (Matt Marshall has the video at Venture Beat too). She gets giggly with several staffers and has a brief interview with Barney Pell — in which he says he will probably raise more money this year — but the video really gets good near the end, when she interviews some poor schmuck who has either been hit on the head with a large object, is mesmerized by Sarah’s platinum bob and party dress, or has had way too much to drink (or possibly all three).
His explanation of what Powerset does is so incredibly obtuse that it is hard to believe. At one point, he says: “We have a demo where you can, like, search web pages and, like, get results.” It’s incredible. I don’t know who this guy is, but he is just about the worst advertisement for the company it is possible to imagine. One investor who says he put $100,000 into the company posted a comment on TechCrunch that said he was “very worried about this company.”
Admittedly, an offhand comment at a party by some faceless staffer who has consumed too many free beverages isn’t a fair judgment on an entire company, but still. It’s hilarious and painful at the same time. And a warning for startups: everyone who works for you is part of your sales team.