Kimbal Musk: serial entrepreneur tackles culinary and tech worlds.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn

Kimbal Musk has come a long way since camping out in the offices of Zip2, the Palo Alto, Calif., Internet company he co-founded with his brother, Elon. They'd eat at Jack in the Box and shower at the YMCA while building the content-management giant they sold in 1999 to Compaq for $307 million in one of the biggest transactions of its kind in the Internet industry.

Elon stayed on in California, founding PayPal, the electric car company Tesla Motors and SpaceX, a satellite launch firm. Meanwhile Kimbal advised and helped found several software and technology companies, and graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York. In 2004 he moved to Boulder where today he is CEO of OneRiot, a real-time search engine that recently secured $7 million in additional funding from venture capitalists.

"It's a challenging environment, and angel investors are going through massive change not knowing quite what to do," said Musk, 37, who left his native South Africa at age 18 and came to the United States via Canada, where he earned a business degree from Queen's University. "But what we're doing is exciting, and we're doing phenomenally well, so this was a vote of confidence in the real-time search market."

One Riot, which evolved from a startup formerly known as Me.dium, employs 28 and is hiring search engineers. The company is growing its partner network and has seen searches zoom from 4 million per month in June to 1 million per day as it marks its first anniversary. Its partners Yahoo and Microsoft recently released a version of Internet Explorer bundled with OneRiot real-time search.

"We're growing faster than expected," said Musk, choosing not to disclose financials but eager to talk about his other passion--cooking--which not only led him to enroll in culinary school following the sale of Zip2 but to open The Kitchen, a community bistro in Boulder that has been named among America's best restaurants by Food & Wine, Zagat's and the James Beard...