While looking for a job in 2000, James Hong launched a website with his friend
Jim Young just for fun. HOT or NOT lets users submit photos of themselves and
have others vote on their “hotness” on a scale of 1 to 10.
The site spread virally, and within hours their server was swamped. Hong
and Young sensed there was a business in it, and worked frantically to scale the
site to handle the load.
A few months after launching, they found the way to generate revenue from
the site: they added dating...

walked into the room and saw me playing with the site and he asked what I was
doing. I didn’t want to admit that I was spending time on this thing since I
was unemployed and should have been looking for a job, so I told him it was
something Jim was doing. My dad was the first person that ever saw HOT or
NOT besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-yearold
retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s
...

already $60,000 in debt from grad school. I had turned down a consulting job
paying around $170,000. I did it to roll the dice, but I was poor. I knew we
couldn’t afford this and thought seriously about shutting it down.
Livingston: So what did you do?
Hong:We were panicking at this point. There was no plan for a business, it was
just, “How the fuck do we keep this thing going?” We weren’t trying to figure
out what kind of boat we needed to build, we were trying to keep from drowning.
...

wasn’t planning, it was survival mode. I can’t tell you enough how much it was
survival. Desperation is a good word to describe it.
So between 12:30 and 3 a.m. on the day we launched, we moved all the pictures
to Yahoo and solved the image problem.
James Hong 379
But the Salon.com article was coming out the next morning. I called the
writer and asked her if she could push the story back, but she said it was a slow
news day and she couldn’t. So the article came out and the...

and, based on an algorithm, we would kill any picture that got clicked on too
much. So it was community-regulated and that worked pretty well.
I sent an email to the founder of DoubleClick telling him about us and
requesting his help getting into 24/7. He responded saying that unfortunately
the first picture he got when he went to our site was a naked woman. He said
that right now we were innocent until proven guilty, but we needed to move to
a guilty until proven innocent model in order to get advertising.
...