General Sentiment

» see generalsentiment.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

General Sentiment read the internet for a living. Its software crawled something over sixty million sources, from forums and blogs through to comment sections, then pulled the named entities out of the text and scored how people were talking about them. The company's patented contribution was a metric called Media Value, which converted all that talk into a dollar figure, so a brand manager could put a number on a week of being discussed.

The engine underneath was academic work. Steven Skiena, a professor at Stony Brook, had built a natural language system called Lydia and a news analysis project called TextMap, and General Sentiment was the company spun up around it in 2008 with Skiena as a founder. An early National Science Foundation small business grant of one hundred thousand dollars helped get it out of the university.

It worked well enough to generate the kind of story trade press likes. In 2011 the system called the winner of American Idol correctly. Clients over the years included NBCUniversal and Research In Motion, and the Romney presidential campaign bought it in 2012. For a Long Island startup in a field dominated by companies in San Francisco, that was a genuine run.

~ the case file ~

~ the money ~

Canrock Ventures, based in Brookville like the startup itself, put 3.2 million dollars into General Sentiment. Five hundred thousand of that came from Innovate NY, a fund whose money originated with the US Treasury and passed through New York State to venture firms chosen to back promising Long Island technology companies.

Mark Fasciano founded General Sentiment and sat as its board chairman. He had also helped start Canrock, where he was one of three managing directors. Investigators spent years on the question of whether directing public money from one of those seats into another broke federal conflict-of-interest rules. Fasciano denied it and said he had disclosed his ties to state officials before investing. The Treasury audit opened in the fall of 2013 after Newsday started asking questions, and grew into a wider examination of the whole Innovate NY program, which by then had put 22.3 million dollars of public money into 61 startups through eight firms. Empire State Development suspended new Canrock investments and asked for nearly two million dollars back across four companies with close ties to the firm.

~ the arithmetic ~

None of that is what killed it. The shareholders' letter of 24 June 2015 says the company could not be sustained by customer revenue alone and had failed to attract capital from new sources, so the board terminated the staff and suspended day-to-day operations. Six people lost their jobs. The bills outstanding came to two hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

The letter described the company as in a holding pattern, seeking outside offers to license or buy the technology. Asked about it the night before a shareholder meeting was due, Fasciano declined to comment and said the company had no information. Among the largest shareholders was Russell Artzt, a co-founder of CA Technologies, whose son had run General Sentiment for a period, and who had defended the public investment in it the year before.

~ what the number was for ~

Media Value existed because marketing departments needed a number they could put on an invoice line, which is a reasonable thing to sell them. Crawling sixty million sources to produce it was real engineering, and that part outlived the company inside Skiena's academic work.

The closing balance is what stays with you. A company whose entire output was a dollar value assigned to what people were saying went under owing two hundred and twenty thousand, while federal auditors worked through where its own half-million had come from.

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