focus on social software. Before Ludicorp, I worked on or participated in
a bunch of online communities including the WELL, Electric Minds, the
Netscape online communities, and various sites I’d started on my own. At
Interval Research, I worked on a collaborative animation game, which was a
cousin to the Game Neverending idea.
Livingston: It was just the two of you?
Fake: At the beginning it was me, Stewart, and Jason Classon. Jason and
Stewart had started a company together in 1999 that was acquired by a venturebacked
startup out of Boston after about 6 to 9 months. Jason went and worked
in Boston for a year and came back and then the three of us started working on
the game together. I did the game design, Stewart did the interaction design,
and Jason did the PHP for the prototype.
Livingston: Did they fund the game with money that they made from the
acquisition?
Fake: Partially, yes. It was really a friends-and-family investment.
It was the three of us and we added Eric Costello very soon thereafter. Eric
is a phenomenal web developer. He’s recognized as one of the great DHTML
gurus. He lives in New York, so we were working with him remotely. If you
have somebody who’s really fantastic and they live in New York, that’s OK. He
likely wasn’t going to move (he has a family and is very settled there), but Eric
was a phenomenal addition to the team.
He’s a front-end developer. Soon thereafter, we were hiring for a back-end
developer. It was actually very difficult to find that person in Vancouver. We felt
that person needed to be local. We didn’t want to be too dispersed.
There are a lot of companies that are virtual companies—a bunch of people
that are living in different places, but I think that’s tough. You can do it with one
or two people, but I think for the most part, everybody being in the same place
is important.
Stewart, Eric, and I had worked together on a project before, so we knew
how to work with him remotely. The project was the 5K contest, which was a
web development competition. It emerged out of a conversation that Stewart
had with somebody at his web development agency who had said, “Oh, you
can’t make anything worthwhile under 5K.”
Livingston: Where did you start working?
Fake: We had a friend who was subletting a space, and he had a contract job
that kept him out of the office all the time, so we sublet his subletted space.
This was in 2002 and it was still in the great technology bust period. There were
failed dot-coms all over the place, so office space was cheap. And some really

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