One-time Google reject Mark Cummins on launching Pointy

Pointy
founders Mark Cummins (l) and Charles Bibby
(r).
Pointy

• Irish entrepreneur Mark Cummins is the founder of
  Pointy,
  a startup that helps bricks-and-mortar
  retailers show what they have in stock online.
• Cummins is a serial entrepreneur and sold his first
  startup, visual search app Plink, to Google in 2010.
• Ironically, he was rejected for a job at Google years
  earlier as a graduate from Oxford University.
• Pointy has announced a major partnership with Google
  and has won investment from the founder of Google
  Maps.
• The startup says it has signed up thousands of US
  retailers.

LISBON — As an engineering and computer science graduate from the
University of Oxford, Mark Cummins fancied his chances of landing
a job at Google.

Oxford is one of the most prestigious universities in the world
and ranks highly on global league tables for computer science.
Cummins had graduated top of his year from Balliol College and,
as he put it, “thought I had a pretty good CV.”

Cummins filed his application and, like any Oxbridge graduate
with a top-tier degree, expected the offers to roll in.

“I didn’t even get a phone call,” he told Business Insider during
an interview at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. “I had a
back and forth with a recruiter, but I never really understood
it.”

Cummins had the last laugh. Five years later, Google would go on
to buy his first startup. And a few years after that, Google
would also be integral to the success of his second.

Mark Cummins’ first startup was Plink, an app that recognised
artwork

After several more job rejections, Cummins opted to stay at
university and do a PhD in the then-unfashionable area of
robotics and machine learning. This was before breakthroughs like
DeepMind’s AlphaGo made AI sexy again, and the entire field of
learning was still emerging from a second “AI winter.”

The interest in robotics provided the germ of a startup idea.
Cummins was working on place recognition for robots for his
thesis, specifically around how they process images to determine
their location.

“My PhD work was on a robot [that] would collect images as it
drove along to determine: ‘Have I come back to a place I’ve been
before?'” Cummins explained. “The first iPhone had just come out,
the first Androids were just coming out, and mobile was just
starting to take off. I thought, this seems interesting, maybe we
can do something with photo matching, so we launched a company
around that.”

The company, Plink, was a kind of Shazam for art. Users would
photograph a piece of artwork, and the app would identify it. The
app garnered 50,000 users in its first six weeks and Cummins and
his cofounder, James Philbin, won $100,000 during an Android
Developer Challenge. That brought the app to the attention of
Google, Cummins’ one-time dream employer.

Hugo
Barra, once the face of Android at Google and now a Facebook
executive.

REUTERS

Google began courting the startup and the young Oxford founders
ended up meeting senior execs at the time, such as Android
product spokesman Hugo Barra and Google+ architect Vic Gundotra.
They impressed the top brass enough to field an offer.

The pair accepted what Cummins described as a life-changing
amount of money, and took jobs within Google. While Plink’s
consumer app shut down, its technology ended up being used in
several Google image recognition services, such as Google Lens
and Google Photos.

Cummins hit on his second startup idea while working at Google

Three years later, Cummins had moved to Australia and was still
working for Google. He had an inkling for his second startup when
he realised there were still elementary questions the search
engine couldn’t answer for users.

Specifically, he was drinking craft beer at a party one night,
and then wasn’t able to find a nearby shop that sold the same
brand. “Where’s the nearest store that has this product
available? It seemed like a basic question,” Cummins told
Business Insider.

The problem is that most small local retailers don’t bother to
log all the inventory they have. Their cash registry, as Cummins
put it, can “look like it’s from a Western.” There’s no way for
consumers to know for sure whether a local shop is selling an
item they need — and so they turn to Amazon and deprive the
smaller retailer of valuable footfall.

Cummins began nosing around small retailers in Australia, asking
what it would take for them to upload their inventory and make it
searchable online. He concluded that some hardware would be
required and set about looking for another technical cofounder.

Philbin, his Plink cofounder, had a young family and was not
available. Cummins rang up another old friend from his Oxford
days, Charles Bibby, a sailing expert who was in the middle of a
yearlong sailing trip around the Mediterranean.

Bibby found the vision so compelling that he cut the trip short
after three months and sailed home to start Pointy.

Pointy helps people find what their local shops have in stock

Pointy

The end result is the Pointy box, a small device that looks a
little like a 9-volt battery.

It plugs into a retailer’s barcode scanner and logs items as
they’re being scanned for purchase. Eventually, Pointy’s software
logs what a retailer is selling and can take a good guess as to
when it’s out of stock.

That information is then listed online on a dedicated page hosted
by Pointy, so anyone trying to find a local shop that sells, for
example scotch tape, can click on a Pointy link and see whether
it’s available nearby.

Pointy
gives offline retailers dedicated online pages showing what’s in
stock
Pointy

While it’s easy to see on Google when your local hardware store
is open, it’s currently quite difficult to check what it might
have in stock. “It’s not ecommerce, it’s more about driving
footfall,” said Cummins.

The box costs $499 for US retailers. Pointy also offers to place
local ads for retailers on Google, and takes a slice of the ad
revenue.

It feels like a strange decision to focus on bricks-and-mortar
stores in the age of Amazon, but Cummins argues that online
shopping
only accounts for 10% of US commerce. The majority of the
population still prefers to a trip to a local store when they
need something.

Cummins says that Pointy “ranks very well” on Google. And over
the summer, the startup announced a partnership with search firm
that means product information appears on the “knowledge panel”
in search and Google Maps.

To date, the firm has raised $19 million from Vulcan Capital,
Polaris, Boston Ventures, LocalGlobe, Seedcamp and well-known
angels such as Google Maps founder Lars Rasmussen, TransferWise
cofounder Taavet Hinrikus, and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.
It is headquartered in Dublin — Cummins is Irish — and
manufactures the Pointy box in Ireland.

For now, Pointy is focused on persuading retailers to adopt its
technology. Cummins says that 1% of all US retailers are on
board,
citing US Census Bureau statistics. That amounts to around
10,000 US retailers. It also has some pickup in its home market
and across the UK.

On the consumer side, it looks like the startup is pretty reliant
on Google — which is fine, as long as the firm plays ball and
integrates Pointy’s data into its search results. The current
partnership is a blessing, but the startup might need to branch
out to defend its turf. Cummins says Pointy plans to build out
its offering so that retailers can do more than just have a store
page online, but he wouldn’t give any further detail at this
point.

And could another Google acquisition be in the offing? Cummins
said his former employer came sniffing around to be involved with
Pointy early in its development, but gives a firm denial that
there might be a buyout. “There’s nothing on the cards,” he says.