Likewise, proud investor! And totally addicted user.

Rahul, Sam and Martin are really capable and some of the best at listening to users and to the market.

Congrats to the Rapportive team!

Thrilled to be on board as an angel investor.

proud to have you on the team. let's crush it.

How do you get away with removing the ads from Gmail? is that not against their TOS?

We believe the context we provide is a much more valuable use of the limited sidebar space than the ads it replaces; and we think that adds value to the platform, both for Google and for its users. People evidently agree, as (nearly) nobody complains about the loss of the ads, but lots of people love the utility we provide - and indeed have switched to Gmail to get it.

We're not interested in cheating Google out of their ad revenue, although we suspect the Gmail ads aren't making that much revenue anyway.

We have a good relationship with Google, and we were a launch partner for their contextual gadgets platform: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-email-i...

That didn't really answer the questions.

Actually it does. Google thinks replacing the ads is fine, because they are adding more value to Google's email product than they are taking away.