Wordnik
Erin McKean, CEO of the seven-employee, San Mateo (Calif.) company that runs a Web site about words, including definitions, images, and other interesting facts:
I was editor-in-chief for American Dictionaries [at Oxford University Press]. I had been invited to give a talk at a conference. I spoke about how language changed every day and how dictionaries were a 400-year-old technology. Afterward, Roger McNamee (co-founder of private equity firm Elevation Partners) asked me how I would make it better. I thought of a bunch of ideas. And we talked about it for a year. A year later we incorporated Wordnik. It was painful but we took everything we thought about how dictionaries work and stress-tested it.
