growing at such a fast rate, we were barely keeping up on the back end. You
know, all those scaling issues that come with rapid growth.
Livingston: What else happened?
Fake: Tagging really revolutionized the way that the product behaved. Tagging
is an incredibly simple concept: you just add a keyword to the photograph, and
once it’s networked with all of these other people, you can see not only all the
things that you’ve tagged (so it acts like this organizational system for yourself)
but you can also see what everyone else in...

and only save five. So people started taking more photographs, but sharing
them became an increasing problem. Then, the next step in the evolution in the
photograph was when it was attached to a delivery mechanism. A camera is now
in a phone and you can send the photo immediately.
There are cameras everywhere now. Nokia is apparently the biggest distributor
of cameras in the world. And people are taking photographs of things that
you would not normally take photographs of—maybe a funny thing that they
see on their way to work. One...

competition wasn’t apparent.
Livingston: You weren’t worried that Ofoto would try to copy you?
Fake: Well, we knew they wouldn’t because they wanted to acquire us.
Livingston: Is there anything that you would have done differently?
Fake: We may be the most boring startup that you interview for your book
because our path was fairly smooth. There were times when we were really
broke before we had our angel investment, when only one guy who had children
was getting paid. One of the big risks of startups is that they’re inherently
unstable....

what I’ll be talking about and I come to the meeting and a bunch of guys show
up and say, “Hey, so what’s this meeting about?” They haven’t done any of the
preparation or work.
Livingston: Do women bring any advantages to a startup?
Fake: I was talking to another entrepreneur, Judy MacDonald Johnston, and
she said that women are much more passionate about their businesses. They’re
doing it less for the money and more because they love it. There’s something
about that that really rings true to me. Women are able to...