History of Famous Startups. HOT or NOT

If I have

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

If I have low expectations for material things in my life, then I’ll be
happy. If I get used to fancy meals all the time, not only will it ruin McDonald’s
for me, but even the fancy food would become normal, and then it’s not meaningful.
So I’ve been careful not to change my lifestyle too much.
I’m not in debt anymore, and I have financial freedom, but the first whatever
million is all you really need to get that. If you had the opportunity to cash
something out for x million, but you thought with some hard work you…

could. You have

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

could. You have to hustle; you can’t just have a plan and cakewalk it. You just
have to know what direction you’re going in and run around like a rat in a maze
trying to get out.
Livingston: Now that you’re out of the maze, do you get asked out on a lot
dates through HOT or NOT?
Hong: Yeah. I actually stopped using my dating service a long time ago as a way
to find my own dates, because everyone on there knows who Jim and I are, and
many of the ones who seek us out are crazy....

it’s how they

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

it’s how they know if they’ve won or not. And I think a lot of what drives entrepreneurs
is the kind of legacy they are going to leave. They want to make a mark
in the world and feel like their life mattered. Entrepreneurs are the kind of
people who love ideas and want to build things, and add value to the world.
Part of that is to quench their ego’s thirst and say, “I matter.” That’s why
people like Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla spend a lot of time doing nonprofit
things. It was never about the money. Carnegie…

Hong: Most techies

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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…

mentioned the site

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

mentioned the site on his show and called it “Am I Hot?” Next thing we knew,
we got a cease-and-desist letter from a site called Am I Hot that claimed they
predated us. We couldn’t believe it! Because we thought we might try to sell,
we knew we had to keep this thing clean, so I went down to LA and tried to
work it out with them. I let them keep the “Am I Hot” name, and they agreed
to let us redirect our traffic to hotornot.com for at least 3 months.
So now I had to rebrand the…

was all an

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

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…

and, based on

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

and, based on an algorithm, we would kill any picture that got clicked on too
much. So it was community-regulated and that worked pretty well.
I sent an email to the founder of DoubleClick telling him about us and
requesting his help getting into 24/7. He responded saying that unfortunately
the first picture he got when he went to our site was a naked woman. He said
that right now we were innocent until proven guilty, but we needed to move to
a guilty until proven innocent model in order to get advertising.
So we decided to build a moderation…

wasn’t planning, it

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wasn’t planning, it was survival mode. I can’t tell you enough how much it was
survival. Desperation is a good word to describe it.
So between 12:30 and 3 a.m. on the day we launched, we moved all the pictures
to Yahoo and solved the image problem.
James Hong 379
But the Salon.com article was coming out the next morning. I called the
writer and asked her if she could push the story back, but she said it was a slow
news day and she couldn’t. So the article came out and the server got slammed.
My brother needed the…

already $60,000 in

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

already $60,000 in debt from grad school. I had turned down a consulting job
paying around $170,000. I did it to roll the dice, but I was poor. I knew we
couldn’t afford this and thought seriously about shutting it down.
Livingston: So what did you do?
Hong:We were panicking at this point. There was no plan for a business, it was
just, “How the fuck do we keep this thing going?” We weren’t trying to figure
out what kind of boat we needed to build, we were trying to keep from drowning.
But we did know a few things:...

walked into the

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:29:00 -0700

walked into the room and saw me playing with the site and he asked what I was
doing. I didn’t want to admit that I was spending time on this thing since I
was unemployed and should have been looking for a job, so I told him it was
something Jim was doing. My dad was the first person that ever saw HOT or
NOT besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-yearold
retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s
saying, “She’s hot. This one’s not…