Interview with Sam Wurzel

Featured Engineer

Sam Wurzel

Sam Wurzel - Co-Founder and CEO, Octopart Inc.

Sum up Octopart in one sentence.

Octopart solves the problem of electronic part search on the web – we provide distributor stock and pricing information, datasheets, and advanced search features with a focus on speed and simplicity.

What is your value proposition?

Choosing and sourcing parts is hard and time consuming. Octopart exists to solve that problem – it’s the easiest and fastest way to find parts online.

Can you tell us about the early start-up days at Octopart?

The early days were a lot of fun! In the summer of 2006, Andres and I were still in physics grad school. Andres was in Berkeley and I was in Boulder. Every day we’d come home from the lab and log into a linux box in my living room to work on Octopart. At that point we didn’t know anything about databases or web technologies so most of what we did was learn.

By early 2007 we had both quit grad school and I had moved out to Berkeley to work on Octopart full time. For a while I was living on Andres’ couch and we would literally wake up, work on Octopart all day and night and then fall asleep. We had about 5 computers stacked in Andres room and we were running the site from his cable modem connection. I remember the first time we saw a search come in that we couldn’t directly trace to one of us or our friends – I think it came from Turkey. To this day still I don’t know how they found us.

Has the direction or vision of Octopart changed from your initial vision of the service?

Not really. From the beginning the plan was to fix part search and that’s still the goal. The design of the site and the access model has not changed either. From the beginning we wanted a clean layout and we wanted everyone to have access to complete part information without any cumbersome registration process. One of the frustrations we had with existing sites was that they were filled with distracting ads and they required you to register or pay for the service.

What has been the biggest technical challenge in developing Octopart?

The quantity of data we are dealing with is very large and it changes often. There are 15 million parts in the database and we have to keep all the pricing and availability numbers are up to date. We also have to make sure the data is accurate which, given the scale of the data, is challenging.

Also, the search aspect is technically challenging. Maintaining full text and parametric search capability over 15 million parts is tough. Especially when there are many different types of parts, each with their own attributes.

What has been the toughest non-technical challenge you have dealt with or are dealing with?

Establishing ourselves in the industry and communicating who we are and what we’re trying to do has been challenging. When we started Octopart we did not have a single contact within the electronics industry. We just kind of jumped into it. We’ve made a lot of progress on that front but there’s still a lot of work to do.

How do you entice users to Octopart?

We believe that if people find Octopart useful they will tell their friends and colleagues about it. Our entire development process is based around doing what’s best for users.

How do you differentiate yourselves from other competitor search engines?

We take the approach of building a full part database by combining data from lots of different sources. This gives us a few advantages over other part search engines:

You get a full view of a single part. You can see all of the distributors of that part, all of the images, all of the datasheets and a complete set of part attributes.
You can search by category or do parametric search if you don’t know the exact part number you’re looking for.
We provide an API, which allows anyone to develop applications which leverage all of this part information.

Do you plan on integrating social media into Octopart?

Sure, we already allow users to leave comments about parts and we’re thinking of other ways to integrate social media in ways that make sense. Getting help from other engineers is one of the best ways to solve problems so we’re thinking about ways to facilitate that on Octopart.

Where do you see Octopart in the next five years?

I see Octopart as the repository for all part data on the web. By making that data available via API we’ll open the door to lots of new applications, most of which we haven’t even anticipated.

Previous Next

Previous Spotlights

Featured Products

PCB Tools

Passive Tools

RF Tools

Math

Extras