Jacob Hall, founder of Agingo and a former ‘Innovation Wrangler’, and his team plan to revolutionize the way we use the internet via their patent pending trustworthiness, search algorithm.
Jacob Hall, CEO and co-founder of Agingo mentions, “Today, searching and discovering on the internet is – to us – very fundamentally broken. That’s because search engines really control what you see.”
Hall continues, “People manipulate the search algorithms, and they change over time.”
Because of this, you get a significant amount of unwanted information that is very invasive without any privacy – “a lot of advertising and tracking follows you around the internet.”
“So if your company is trying to show up at the top search results, there’s a limited number of spaces. There’s only one front page. And so we think that should change.”
To alleviate this, Agingo – pronounced ah-ginn-go – is building a more private, organized, and personalized internet experience.
“We are organizing all the domain names by their focus and how trusted they are – so the more focused the domain name and the more trusted they are by the community at Agingo – they higher they rank.”
“We give people a way to control which results are going to show up at the top of their search results.”
You can think of it as having a search engine for every context or market.
Hall provides an example. “Instead of searching the entire internet, you could have a search engine that just searches kid’s websites. The most focused [and] the most trusted websites for kids.”
“The way we do that is by giving you something that feels like an app store, but it’s for domain names. We let you trust them, and when we do a full search of the entire internet we take the results and reorder them based on the domain names you trust.”
The Agingo team is building machine learning into its core functionality so as a customer uses Agingo more frequently, it will start to better understand the user’s trust of a specific company. As more people use Agingo, they are able to accurately assess in real-time the public’s trust in that given company. They then complete the feedback look by providing this trust index back to the company as a way to inform them of their public perception online. “They’re going to see their position moving up and down.”
“We’re giving consumers a way to influence [the] behavior of the companies by trustworthiness.”
They’re initially focusing on the retail space and are considering the consumer finance and entertainment markets for expansion.
This idea really came about over ten years ago for Hall.
Back in 2001, he was returning to First Union – from working at startups and consulting firms – as they were merging with Wachovia. He had a passion for technology and innovation, so all the while working in technology architecture, managing labs and R&D within the bank, he also worked on a philanthropic venture on nights and weekends.
On the side, Hall helped build, “an organization called Survivor Networks which is non-profit to help survivors of abuse. So we built the secure anonymized chat in 2001 – which I think of as SnapChat now.” That is purely from a technology perspective. “Our intention was very different – it was on creating a secure online hotline to help people who had been abused sexually or physically.” They ended up partnering with RAINN and Hall became the organization’s CTO.
“While I was working on [RAINN], I thought how important privacy was to the internet. If you didn’t feel a sense of privacy and security then you’re not going to share information to get help. And we need people to come forward whenever bad things happen so it doesn’t happen to more people.”
The more you trust, the more you’ll share.
He was with the bank – now Wells Fargo – up until this past November. After Wachovia merged with Wells Fargo, he helped build an innovation process in a lab where every employee could innovate. He labeled himself as an Innovation Wrangler – this was literally on his business cards and was formally listed by HR in his annual reviews.
He mentions that this lab became a crossroads for innovation, and well known within the company. “It was wonderfully successful because we focused other people.”
“In terms of entrepreneurship, it’s about serving other people – whatever you do. I think the entrepreneur, CEO or founder puts their hat on as ‘I’m going to be here to serve other people through my idea.’”
His advice to young innovators and ambitious entrepreneurs is to find great people to work with.
Also, “stay committed to your idea. [Write] your vision down and a year from now, two years from now, always reflect back on that original vision so that you don’t get lost.”
Regarding Agingo, Hall has a big vision. His goal is to not just build company – “I want to build a big company and leave it right here in Charlotte.”
