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 them, and now Ofoto would have a lead. So I did
an affiliate deal with Ofoto.
It’s funny to think that we took something that was originally costing a lot of
money, to making them free, to actually making money on some of them. Again,
all of this wasn’t planned or brilliant, we were just trying to survive. At this point
we thought, “OK this deal buys us more time.”
On top of all this, we were constantly fixing the site to scale. We were working
like madmen, only getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night for a long time. It
became a race between Jim and me; could I bring in people faster than he
could keep up with? It was a good challenge for both of us. My job was to make
a bottleneck and his job was to clear the bottleneck, technically. So we didn’t
really get to breathe until we had the Meet Me system and it was making
money. I think it made about half a million a year when we started, and we now
had a scalable business model.
But we still didn’t think it was going to be a business at that point; we didn’t
think it was going to continue growing. We thought it was just going to be there
James Hong 381
and we would hire someone to run it, and then I would go back to working on
XMethods and Jim would go back to his PhD.
Livingston: At one point did you think you were really in it, you would have this
startup and be the CEO?
Hong: To be honest, I never considered myself the CEO, even up until the
point I quit. It was really a partnership between Jim and I. I carried the CEO
title because I was the one running around talking to people. What is the
CEO of a two-person company where the two people are equal shareholders?
What does that mean? It just means that we had to call someone a CEO.
Livingston: So you never took any money from the outside?
Hong: It was just me, Jim, and my brother.
Livingston: What were some other hair-raising things that happened?
Hong: When we first started, we were called Am I Hot or Not? and I had been
sure to check if anyone owned any similar domains. One day Howard Stern