Question: What is Answers.com, and How Did They End Up in U. City?
ST LOUIS MAGAZINE / MARCH 2013
They called it Project Snuggie. The goal: Dispatch an army of interns to contact 40,000 businesses. And so the interns went forth, sitting in cubicles, dialing many numbers and sending many emails. And as they feverishly phoned and typed, they evolved into Team Snuggie, “because we wanted to have full coverage,” says design manager Mike Hunigan, whose goal was to boost offerings for Coupons by Answers from 3,000 retailers to tens of thousands. So at the end of the fall 2011 semester, after the team had prevailed, the interns were rewarded
with Snuggies.
They were blue Snuggies, to be exact. Specifically, Answers Blue—a sort of friendly, Cookie Monster hue used for the logo at answers.com. It’s a Q&A site that draws 10 million visits a day, more than The New York Times. The company has satellite offices in New York, California, and Beijing,
but it’s based in University City.
At the local office, Hunigan stands in a huge, sunlit room full of desks. It’s quiet, the only sounds typing and mouse-clicking. It feels ministerial, the digital version of hyperfocused 13th-century monks illuminating manuscripts. Hunigan points out tiny rooms equipped with just a desk and phone, where people can make personal calls without disturbing the hush of the main room.
Yet the environment is anything but all-work-and-no-play. Elsewhere in the office are foosball and ping-pong tables; a Segway; a gorilla suit with a horned Brunhilde helmet; a Lego room with an Answers.com logo made of Legos on one wall; and the newest acquisition, a full-size, blindingly chrome Terminator statue (a T-800 endoskeleton, that is).
“We act like big kids,” Hunigan says. “It’s like a San Francisco office was transplanted here in St. Louis.”
So how did this little piece of Silicon Valley land in St. Louis?
Answer: David Karandish, the company’s 29-year-old CEO. A Maplewood native and Washington University grad, he was the youngest contestant to appear on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart, at age 21.
“I finished my last exam, which was in competitive strategy, and then jumped on a plane and did the TV show,” Karandish recalls. “I would have liked to have won the show, but right afterwards was when I helped to incubate this business. I think everything ended up working out for the best.”
In fact, the domain has existed since the ’90s. A search on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at archive.org, a digital library of Internet sites, reveals answers.com’s various iterations during the past 15 years. In 1997, it tried a model similar to the now-defunct Google Answers, where users paid a small fee to have a question answered. By 1999, it was a long, micro-fonted list of questions in various categories. (For instance, the question “How many wings does a flea have?” was under the category “Interesting.”) It was then sold to Jerusalem-based GuruNet. By 2004, Answers Blue had made its appearance in the logo; the site had billed itself as “The Answer Engine” and assumed a Google-like minimalism. By February 2011, when the domain was acquired by AFCV Holdings, founded by Karandish and business partner Chris Sims, it had become a sprawling Q&A site with a robust community of users.
Today, Answers claims to draw visitors am-
ounting to about a third of all U.S. Web users every month and boasts 200 million registered users, says Karandish. Questions on the site are broken into categories: Entertainment, Technology, Animals, Sports… They range from technical inquiries about Excel spreadsheets to offbeat queries like “How do you know if your parrot is pregnant?” To a casual visitor, it might seem like the point is just questions and answers—but as Team Snuggie demonstrated, the site’s willing to expand its mission.
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