Nirav Tolia Cofounder, Epinions

Nirav Tolia: Well, I learned a wonderful lesson at Yahoo. That is, you can't influence the external part of your company. You can't concentrate on your competitors. You can't do anything about market conditions. What you can do is build a great product, hire incredible people, and continue to deliver to your users, over and over and over again. I think if you study Yahoo, you'll find that in the early days, when it was Yahoo vs. Excite vs. Infoseek vs. Lycos vs. everyone else, Yahoo didn't really get into this sniping: How are we better than Excite, how are we better than Infoseek and Lycos. They just continued to deliver value to the consumer.

For Epinions, I think we worry a lot more about just creating the best experience at our website. To get specifically to your point, we believe that there are fundamental parts of our model that are different than Deja or PlanetFeedback or anyone else that's really in the space. Those actually create what we call a marketplace for content. What we've tried to create is as close to eBay as we can. EBay is a marketplace for commerce, where there are buyers and sellers of goods. Epinions is a marketplace for content. There are buyers of content — those are the readers who come to read the reviews on our site. There are sellers of content — the review writers, the ones who provide content on our site.

None of the people you mentioned, or really anyone in the space, is really trying to build a marketplace. Many people are looking at message boards, and other people are looking at feedback mechanisms. But no one has really created that true marketplace for content, the way eBay has created the marketplace for commerce. As far as we're concerned, we're just going to continue to try to build that marketplace because we know that if we're successful, we'll hit that inflection point, that tipping point, and we'll have the same sort of returns that eBay has.