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 weekend. I think the title of the
article was something to the effect of “The Dorks Come to the Big City.”
One of the sweetest moments happened when we went to some hip new
club that had just opened and tried to get in. You know how New York is a very
velvet rope culture. Well, the bouncer took one look at us and wouldn’t let us in.
So the writer had been passive for a while watching us trying to get in, and then
he stepped up finally and said to the bouncer, “Hey, you want to let these guys
in. You are a new club, I’m a writer for the New Yorker, I’m following these
guys around, and it would probably be nice if you were mentioned.”
The bouncer responded, “I’ve never heard of the New Yorker.” Finally he
went inside and came back out with the manager, who begged us to come
inside. At that point, Jim and I were like, “This place is lame and we don’t want
it to be mentioned, so we really don’t want to go in there.” And we all walked off
and had drinks at some little pub. It was definitely a nerds-strike-back moment.
Livingston: What would you tell someone who was in your shoes before you
started HOT or NOT?
Hong: I’d say do it. There’s kind of a backwards logic that says: when you are
young, you should learn from people who are experienced, so later on, if you
want to do a startup, you can take the risk. And that’s a myth that was created
from school. You need to learn to get to the next level.
The biggest roadblock to the entrepreneur are liabilities in your life. It’s not
whether or not you can be a good entrepreneur, it’s whether you have to make
a mortgage payment or support other people.
Experience will come when you face certain problems and live through
them. And the best way to do that is to put yourself squarely in the path of those
problems.
Livingston: What drives entrepreneurs?
James Hong 383
Hong: I think entrepreneurs want to make money. It’s not that they do it for the
money, but they want to make money. Because money is the measuring stick;

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