History of Famous Startups. Flickr

what I’ll be

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

what I’ll be talking about and I come to the meeting and a bunch of guys show
up and say, “Hey, so what’s this meeting about?” They haven’t done any of the
preparation or work.
Livingston: Do women bring any advantages to a startup?
Fake: I was talking to another entrepreneur, Judy MacDonald Johnston, and
she said that women are much more passionate about their businesses. They’re
doing it less for the money and more because they love it. There’s something
about that that really rings true to me. Women are able to put their hearts and
souls into it…

competition wasn’t apparent.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

competition wasn’t apparent.
Livingston: You weren’t worried that Ofoto would try to copy you?
Fake: Well, we knew they wouldn’t because they wanted to acquire us.
Livingston: Is there anything that you would have done differently?
Fake: We may be the most boring startup that you interview for your book
because our path was fairly smooth. There were times when we were really
broke before we had our angel investment, when only one guy who had children
was getting paid. One of the big risks of startups is that they’re inherently
unstable. They don’t have an established business; they’re often…

and only save

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

and only save five. So people started taking more photographs, but sharing
them became an increasing problem. Then, the next step in the evolution in the
photograph was when it was attached to a delivery mechanism. A camera is now
in a phone and you can send the photo immediately.
There are cameras everywhere now. Nokia is apparently the biggest distributor
of cameras in the world. And people are taking photographs of things that
you would not normally take photographs of—maybe a funny thing that they
see on their way to work. One completely new behavior that we saw was…

growing at such

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

growing at such a fast rate, we were barely keeping up on the back end. You
know, all those scaling issues that come with rapid growth.
Livingston: What else happened?
Fake: Tagging really revolutionized the way that the product behaved. Tagging
is an incredibly simple concept: you just add a keyword to the photograph, and
once it’s networked with all of these other people, you can see not only all the
things that you’ve tagged (so it acts like this organizational system for yourself)
but you can also see what everyone else in the system has tagged themselves in
the…

Fake: We were

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

Fake: We were extraordinarily fortunate in that the road was pretty smooth.
The tide completely turned for us with Flickr. We’d been trying to get the game
off the ground. Raising money for the game from outside investors had been
really grueling. Raising money is very hard, especially in that market. We were
building something that was not really known to people. If it wasn’t a shrinkwrapped
game sold at Best Buy, they didn’t know what it was.
Livingston: Were you talking with VCs or angel investors?
Fake: At that time we were talking to venture capitalists and they didn’t…

made businesses in

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

made businesses in this area, like Ofoto, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. Basically
their model was that photo sharing was a loss leader for photo finishing services.
It was all about the funnel to get you into buying prints. Photo sharing
Catarina Fake 259
wasn’t seen as a valuable enough activity that people would pay for that itself.
So I think that our na?vet? was what made the whole thing possible.
Other things were happening too. Stewart and I were longtime bloggers. I’d
started blogging back in 1999, and had had a personal site on the Web since
1994. At the time…

awesome developers (like

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

awesome developers (like Eric) were available, who wouldn’t otherwise have
been out on the open market two years earlier. So it was actually really well
timed.
I think that the timing was really important because you could operate in a
much more independent mode. The money was scarce, but I’m a big believer
that constraints inspire creativity. The less money you have, the fewer people
and resources you have, the more creative you have to become. I think that had
a lot to do with why we were able to iterate and innovate so fast.
Flickr was kind of a…

focus on social

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

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…

Caterina Fake started

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:10:54 -0700

Caterina Fake started Ludicorp in the summer of 2002 with Stewart Butterfield
and Jason Classon. The company’s first product, Game Neverending, was a
massively multiplayer online game with real-time interaction through instant
messaging (IM). In 2004, they added a new feature—a chat environment
with photo sharing—which quickly surpassed Game Neverending itself in
popularity.
The team knew they were onto something big and put Game Neverending
on hold to develop a new photo-sharing community site called Flickr. Flickr
became extremely popular and was acquired by Yahoo in March 2005.
With its emphasis on user-generated content and its devoted online
community, Flickr…