James Currier came up with the idea for Tickle
(founded in 1999 and originally called Emode) after
taking a personality test in one of his Harvard
Business School classes.
A former venture capitalist with a passion for digital
media and social sciences, Currier believed that
the Internet could be used to help people learn more
about themselves. People could visit www.tickle.com
to take several different kinds of personality and selfassessment
tests, most backed by scientific research,
to understand areas of human behavior (and also to
find out what breed of dog they most closely resembled).
Tickle was acquired by Monster in 2004 for about $100 million. Shortly
after this interview, Currier founded Ooga Labs, a digital media studio that
develops consumer Internet applications.
Livingston: How did you come up with the idea for an online testing company?
Currier: After college, I got an early introduction to digital media before there
was Internet: I worked in Hollywood for a venture group that invested in companies
involved in digital media for the movie industry. A lot of digital content
was getting pushed over AT&T’s broadband network, which was proprietary at
the time. I worked at Star TV in Hong Kong and did more digital media, and
got back to venture capital in Boston where the company was investing in the
early-stage Internet companies like Infoseek.
When I was at business school, I would think about the media companies
that were popular at the time—like Broadcast.com, Women.com, and iVillage—
and they didn’t make any sense to me. They were basically trying to put old
media experiences online. For example, Spinner.com was putting radio online,
and they got sold for $340 million. I thought that was crazy.
I knew the Internet was going to bubble up its own unique media form. It
was probably going to be user-generated, and it wasn’t going to be like anything
that we see on the other mediums. So I was looking and looking for what that
was going to be at the same time I was getting my degree at business school.
At class one night, they gave us a few pieces of paper and a number 2 pencil,
and we filled out circles for a Myers-Briggs corporate personality test, which is
something they administer to Harvard Business School students. Eleven days
later, we got our results in manila envelopes—all in black-and-white text with a
little graph—and soon we exploded into conversation. People in that community
talked about the test for about 2 weeks—at dinner conversations, on the

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