was all an accident.
Another thread of what happened was that I was trying to reduce our costs.
Though we weren’t being charged yet by Rackspace, I now knew how much we
needed to cover those hosting costs, plus enough to hire someone to manage
the site. After running into a guy who worked at Ofoto at an office-warming
party, I talked to Ofoto about how we were sending people to GeoCities, and
since many of our users have digital cameras, maybe I should send them to
Ofoto instead of Yahoo to host...

mentioned the site on his show and called it “Am I Hot?” Next thing we knew,
we got a cease-and-desist letter from a site called Am I Hot that claimed they
predated us. We couldn’t believe it! Because we thought we might try to sell,
we knew we had to keep this thing clean, so I went down to LA and tried to
work it out with them. I let them keep the “Am I Hot” name, and they agreed
to let us redirect our traffic to hotornot.com for at least 3 months.
So...

Hong: Most techies would dream of that, are you kidding? People in Silicon
Valley are entrepreneurs, they’re not the risk-averse types that would think I
was wasting my education. I was the first among my MBA classmates that made
it into the Wall Street Journal.
Livingston: Can you remember a really funny moment?
Hong: We were on the Entertainment Weekly It List, and we got invited to a
celebrity party in New York. By chance, the New Yorker found out about it and
got one of their writers to chronicle us for the...

it’s how they know if they’ve won or not. And I think a lot of what drives entrepreneurs
is the kind of legacy they are going to leave. They want to make a mark
in the world and feel like their life mattered. Entrepreneurs are the kind of
people who love ideas and want to build things, and add value to the world.
Part of that is to quench their ego’s thirst and say, “I matter.” That’s why
people like Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla spend a lot of time doing nonprofit
things. It...

could. You have to hustle; you can’t just have a plan and cakewalk it. You just
have to know what direction you’re going in and run around like a rat in a maze
trying to get out.
Livingston: Now that you’re out of the maze, do you get asked out on a lot
dates through HOT or NOT?
Hong: Yeah. I actually stopped using my dating service a long time ago as a way
to find my own dates, because everyone on there knows who Jim and I are, and
many of the...