We recently spoke with the CEO and Co-Founder of Ziipa (www.ziipa.com), Pamela Starusta. Our conversation hit on a number of timely topics, including where is web2.0 going, the challenges of seeking funding in today’s economic environment and Ziipa’s competition.

The entire interview can be found on Ziipa’s ChubbyBrain company profile on the “Inside Info” tab which can be found here.  Excerpts of the interview with Pamela are below as well, but we highly recommend you check out the company’s profile to learn more about Ziipa and the company’s visual web2.0 search engine.

Ziipa is a visual web2.0 search engine. We’re trying to solve for the massive amounts of information available on search engines and help web2.0 enthusiasts search for and discover web2.0 applications.

How many employees does Ziipa have, and how would you describe the company’s culture?  Are these people dedicated to Ziipa on a full-time basis?

There are just two of us and we work here full-time. I would explain the environment as “c-cubed”: it’s casual, it’s cool and it’s creative. And it’s a very open forum style. We do just about everything in-house, but on occasion we do some forms of outsourcing. Everything major is done within.

KillerStartups (www.killerstartups.com) and Simple Spark (www.simplespark.com) are probably Ziipa’s closest competitors. We differ in regards to our visual display of search results and ease of use. We are also very targeted towards web2.0 whereas others don’t necessarily stay within that niche.

At this point we do not have external funding – we are fully self-funded. However, we are looking to raise funding in the near future. We have never raised funds before and of course we are hitting the toughest fund raising environment, pretty much ever. It also seems challenging in that investors are taking a larger percentages of companies than they were years ago when we could have gotten more money and given away less. That’s unfortunate, but the lessons we will learn during this tougher time will surely benefit us in the future, so I don’t worry about that.

KillerStartups has been our closest competitor for some time, but we don’t worry about competition. They have been around for several years, whereas we have only been around for 10 months so we will close that gap over time. If we had the same amount of time that they have had to date, our numbers would be higher. It’s truly that we’re brand new – we have some new ideas in marketing and you’ll see that the numbers will change. We’ll get there.

Learn more about Ziipa and read the full interview with Pamela by visiting Ziipa’s company profile and going to the company’s Inside Info tab.