With just two days left before his final product presentation at famed startup incubator Y Combinator, then 18 year old Daniel Gross's project had just gotten shut down. The last three months had been marred by failure, his last few concepts showing little promise. This was his final chance. In 48 hours he was supposed to show the world what he had to offer.Desperate for ideas, Gross went to Paul Graham, Y Combinator co-founder who offered straightforward advice: “Just build something that you’d want to use today, not something you think people could use somehow.” For Gross, something clicked.Two days later, he had a winner.Fast-forward six months and Gross has raised upwards of $5 million and his last minute project, Greplin, is the talk of Silicon Valley.In geek-speak, grep is essentially a command for search. Greplin, then is your personal search engine or as Gross puts it, a "search engine that lets you find all of your stuff online." A user logs onto Greplin and authorizes it to access your various online platforms such as Facebook, Gmail, and even Dropbox and aggregates it all in one place.The concept carries a lot of weight. More than a search engine of the future, Greplin will be your headquarters for the cloud. It is perhaps here that Google will feel the most heat. Their goal has always been to be the one-stop shop for everything on the Internet. If you want to find something, check your mail, or even create a document, Google is the place to be.Greplin sort of sidesteps all of that in one fell swoop, cutting in line at the most opportune time. As Google and Facebook continue to battle it out for Internet dominance, Greplin proposes an all too elegant answer: why not have both? Why not have it all in one place.Bombastic words perhaps in what is now considered by some to be another emerging tech bubble. And what's with the use of "killer"? Since when has anything pronounced "killer" ever been successful? Plus, killer, usually denotes some sort of clone, like Facebook-wannabe Diaspora. But they're creating more of the same.But that’s why Greplin is different; it adds a completely new layer, illuminating stuff that Google can’t touch.Seems like college really is pointless.
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