He has been called a social game guru, an innovator, and a douchebag (by the 77 members of the “Blake Commagere is a douchebag” Facebook group , most of whom are his friends, resentful of their inboxes being spammed with Vampires and Zombies invitations). Outside of social gaming apps, however, he has been called a smart, carefree guy, who is just as adventurous as he is spontaneous. His wildly fun personality comes through his work and keeps his projects entertaining. Always keenly observant of what does and doesn’t work with his market audience, Blake tends to obsess meticulously over how to improve whatever it is that he’s working with, which has proven time and time again to pay off. It took eleven days to make the first working version of Vampires and Zombies, and only a few short years to accomplish everything he’s done thus far. The only question left for Blake is: What’s next?

IntimateMath will be spotlighting Blake Commagere and following him as he works on his next upcoming project, which he will not disclose until it is ready to go public. What he will disclose with IntimateMath is his daily life, work routine, and some tips for building creative social games. This profile will reveal another side of Blake, different from the Zombified one that we already know, that will expose not only his witty personality and humor, but his driving motivation and influences as well. His “next big thing” is a secret for now, but join us as it unfolds and tune into IntimateMath for the latest Commagere updates.

Now, let’s meet Blake!
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Without a fashion degree or any prior experience in the fashion industry, Kim dove head first into the scene, figuring out the details on her own and soaking up all the knowledge she could while her fashion line was developing.

Yumi Kim is more than just another trendy label. Kim Phan shares her closet with the mission to make women everywhere feel beautiful and confident — effortlessly in her hip, fun, and flirty designs. Click here to read more about Yumi Kim: Founder of Yumi Kim Launches Her Fashion Line and Life Online

IntimateMath sits down with Kim Phan to learn about the sacrifices she’s made, the opportunities she’s seized, the dream she never lost sight of, and how she persevered to build her own brand from the ground up.

A Short Clip of My Conversation with Kim Phan from YumiKim
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PROFILE

Kim Phan of Yumi Kim with Yumi (Yes, that's Yumi to the RT)

Companies Founded:
1. Yumi Kim, Founded in 2005
Funding: $50,000
Investors: Self-funded

Hometown: Sacramento, CA
Currently Resides: New York City, New York
Education: San Diego State University, Economics, 2001
Hobbies/Interests: Traveling and eating.
Quality Most Remembered for: Being real and honest. I’m a straight shooter.
In 10 Years…: I see myself doing what I do now. I’m very passionate about what I do. And I would love to see Yumi Kim grow bigger as a lifestyle brand.
Proudest Moment: When I received my first big order from Nordstrom.
I’m Motivated by…: My parents’ sacrifice. They came here from Vietnam with virtually nothing, all so that I had a chance at a better life. I want to make them proud and let them know that their sacrifice wasn’t for nothing.
Favorite Quote: “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” — Confucius
Role Models: My Mom, Hunynh.

Kim Phan’s: Yumi Kim | Blog | Twitter | Facebook

THE MORE PERSONAL INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Kim P. & Kim N. Wearing Yumi Kim

Kim Ngo: Hi Kim. Thanks for meeting with IntimateMath. Tell us about Yumi Kim. What’s the mission, and how did you get started?

Kim Phan: I started Yumi Kim in 2005 while playing with the idea of starting a line. While conceptualizing Yumi Kim, I found part of myself and realized I had a fascination with colors and prints. I started working with silk fabrics. And in the last five years, Yumi Kim went from a line with cute t-shirts with little embellishments to a full-fledged collection of dresses, jumpers, shirts, jackets, and skirts, constructed with beautiful silk fabrics and prints.

I hope that Yumi Kim makes women aware that they can be fashionable and beautiful, all while being comfortable in any situation they may encounter. My line encompasses pieces perfect for dates, work, special events and everyday wear.

I use a lot of bright prints and bold colors in my designs. When you’re wearing Yumi Kim, you’re wearing a statement piece. I want women to feel sophisticated and pretty, like all eyes are on them when they enter a room.

Kim Ngo: Did you get outside funding to start Yumi Kim? How much money did you have when you started and how did you get it?

Kim Phan in New York with Her Stylish Top & Boots

Kim Phan: I had no outside funding. I started with fifty thousand dollars. I was very lucky in getting this money. In 2005, I bought an apartment in the Upper West Side. At that time, New York real estate was hot, and I was able to get a line of credit against my mortgage. I was also approved for a small business loan.

Kim Ngo: So one day you just woke up and said, I’m going to start a fashion line with no degree or training in fashion? How does someone create a line without going to a fashion design school?

Kim Phan: I’ve been making my own clothes since I was very young, and once I realized that fashion was my true calling, I decided that I would design a very small line with only a few prints and bodies to get a feel for the industry. The response was extraordinary, and I gradually built up my line to where I am at today. It’s an ongoing learning process for me.

In 2002, I moved to New York with a dream to go into fashion, but I didn’t know what I was going to exactly do. I just knew I wanted to work in fashion. I thought I was going to work in marketing or be a publicist for a fashion company.

Kim Phan of Yumi Kim, Calvin Tran of Calvin Tran & Michelle Nguyen of Yumi Kim

I interviewed with many companies and received a number of job offers, but I realized that I couldn’t be fashionable with a salary of $20,000 a year. So my objective changed from wanting to work in fashion to needing to pay the bills.

One day, I was eating dinner by myself, and I sat next to this guy who happened to work for the president of a big music company. We instantly clicked, and he told me, “You know what? You seem like a really cool girl. My boss is looking for another assistant. Come in for an interview.” I came into the company’s office, and the president gave me the job.

I didn’t want to go into the music industry, but the opportunity was just too great to pass up. I went home that night saying to myself, “If you don’t take this opportunity, you’re always going to live the rest of your life wondering what could have been.” So, I accepted the position.

Kim Phan, Yumi Kim & Nam Vo, Makeup NV

I still wanted to work in fashion, but I believe that everything happens for a reason. If an opportunity presents itself, you should run with it because you might develop a passion for whatever you stumble upon. But if you don’t find your passion, the experience, itself, is always great, and hopefully, you will learn something valuable.

In my case, I learned something valuable working two years at that music company. Although I made a lot of money at the young age of 22, I didn’t love my job. I woke up every day not looking forward to going to work. I learned that no matter how much money I make, if I wake up not loving what I do then nothing really matters.

Kim Phan Being Kim Phan

I’m glad I learned the lesson that money was not more important than my passion at a young age. I put in two years of my time in the music industry, and now, I am back into fashion. Fashion is why I originally moved to New York City with confidence regardless of my financial situation.

Kim Ngo: Where do you find your inspiration for your designs?

Kim Phan: I like to travel a lot and visit the local vendors at flea markets to see the fabric textures and different colors they use.

One of my favorite places to go is Asia. When you go to flea market in Asia, you’ll find a variety of things such as artwork, fabric, and even, cute little souvenirs. I get inspired by what I see at these markets. When I visited Thailand, the rich colors combinations amazed me. I also went to Malaysia recently and fell in love with Indonesian embroidering.

I use what I see in my travels to help inspire me in putting together a collection.

Calvin Tran of Calvin Tran working w/Kim Phan of Yumi Kim

Kim Ngo: What would you say was your toughest experience in building Yumi Kim?

Kim Phan: Figuring things out on my own was the toughest. There is no manual that can teach you everything about managing your own line.

For example, to become a real brand, you have to move into mass chain retailers like department stores: Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, and etc.

When you play with the big guys, there are thick contracts and lots of rules. I’m not a big company, and I didn’t have someone to guide me along the way. If one tiny rule is broken, the retail company will send a chargeback. If you, as a vendor, don’t tag a shirt right, don’t box your items correctly, and don’t ship the package in the right way, the retail company will charge you for every single item. You can lose thousands of dollars for the tiniest mistakes. The lesson I learned is do your homework well. Read everything.

Kim Ngo: Can you break it down step-by-step of what a new designer needs to work successfully with a big department store?

Yumi Kim Exclusively for W Hotels

Kim Phan:
1. Get a showroom and a sales team that represents your line to buyers. You’re a designer who needs to be out there designing and being creative. You have to have a sales rep that has relationships with key people in the fashion industry. Networking is very important.

2. Know a production company that is able to produce on a mass level.

3. Get funding. You might have a factory and access to manufacturers, but how are you going to finance 2,000 pieces of apparel?

4. Get the team to make sure that when the goods are ready, they are tagged and all the buyers’ guidelines and rules are followed.

5. Know your customers. Department store customers are different from specialty shop customers. Understand what those types of customers are and cater to each one.

THE INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Kim Ngo: Where do you think the contemporary fashion industry is going right now?

Yumi Kim

Kim Phan: With the recession, the industry has changed a lot. The recession has made everybody in contemporary and luxury fashion and anyone that’s selling apparel over $20 sit back and think: “How am I going to get someone to buy this dress?” Right now, anyone who is producing a product better make a darn good product — something that convinces consumers that it is worth spending their money.

Kim Ngo: Fashion designers usually hit a trend peak then slowly decline in popularity. Do you feel that applies to Yumi Kim?

Kim Phan: Well, right now I’m more of a downtown New York brand. I am still small and figuring out where I want to take Yumi Kim. Do I want to keep it small? I never know what’s going to happen. Tomorrow, I may get a ton of press. Then I may get approached by some big garment company, like Jones of New York or Liz Claiborne, that says, “Hey, we want to make you bigger.”

That’s part of business; you just have to go with the flow and figure out what’s right along the way. You never know. Life is crazy. I might fall in love tomorrow and say I don’t want to be in the fashion industry anymore. You just take life one day at a time. As long as I’m happy doing what I do, then I want to continue Yumi Kim.

Kim Ngo: I understand that you also leverage the internet really well to get your brand out there. Can you tell us about that?

Kim Phan: My brother works in the web industry. For years, he’s been telling me that I need to get an online shop, start a blog, push Twitter, and do more to establish an online presence.

Most designers are very private about their lives, but I realized that people not only want to know you as a designer but also as a person. When they’re buying a shirt or dress, these customers are curious about who the designer is. What is she all about? Where does she find her inspiration? I started my blog to answer these questions. I wanted to open my world to my customers. I wanted them to get a glimpse of the life of Kim Phan, the designer of Yumi Kim. My blog is real; I’m a regular person. I want to share my passion and the details of living in one of the most amazing cities in the world.

www.IHeartYumiKim.com

Kim Ngo: Do you get a lot of traffic on your blog?

Kim Phan: There’s a decent amount of traffic, but most visitors are part of my loyal fanbase. I don’t want a million users who don’t care about me; I’d rather have a hundred visitors who say, “I love this girl. I love her designs. I love her life.”

Kim Ngo: How does your blog, which features your exciting New York life and traveling experiences, communicate Yumi Kim as a lifestyle brand?

Nam Vo, Kim Phan & Kim Ngo

Kim Phan: I love keeping my loyal customers up to date on what I’m up to! A lot of my blog entries show the process I go through to design my collection, such as my visits to our warehouse and factory in Asia, our shows, and my inspiration. Also, I think the blog helps my readers relate to me and motivates them to follow their dreams and take a chance like I did.

Kim Ngo: Tell us about the online shop, Yumi Kim.

Kim Phan: This past year I launched YumiKim.com; it took about a year. I was a little hesitant at first because you can’t click a button and instantly create an online shop.

Yumi Kim

An online shop requires you to build a backend process. You also have to have a team that manages and monitors the online shop. That’s like having another store. At first, I didn’t know if I was ready to build it because I didn’t know if I was ready to manage a fast growing business in addition to the offline business.

Also, I had to invest more time and money into opening an online shop. I wasn’t sure how good the ROI was going to be. However, I launched the site along with a big promotion with DailyCandy, and I was amazed by the power of the Internet. I remember that on the first day we received 5,200 orders.

Kim Ngo: Tell us about how you use Twitter.

Kim Phan: I signed up with Twitter and started building followers. I imagine my followers to be a loyal group of Yumi Kim fans who want to know when Yumi Kim has a sale, what’s going on, news about sample sales, and when there are new arrivals in the stores.

I noticed that when I announced a sample sale or an online sale, I could automatically see the results.

Yumi Kim Flagship Store

Kim Ngo: Between www.YumiKimShop.com and the Yumi Kim flagship store in New York City, which one do you think will be the most successful?

Kim Phan: I think the biggest will be my online shop which has been in operation for six months. Every time someone shops, we know exactly where he/she is from. I was like, “How did this girl from Alaska hear about Yumi Kim?” The cool thing is that I started to recognize names of returning loyal customers.

Kim Ngo: If you had to give one piece of advice to aspiring founders, what would be?

Kim Phan: My one advice is to not give up. And fight the fight.

Kim Ngo: Thanks Kim of Yumi Kim.

With Sean’s new position at MySpace and a baby on the way, the growing Percival family is still managing to stay on top of the LA tech scene and enjoy the success of their first major project. While many couples might think it is impossible to share every waking moment together, especially those grueling workdays, Sean and Laurie agree that the joy of creating something with one another is a unique connection that few couples ever get to share. The key to making it work? Open communication and a strong sense of mutual respect for each other. The “Tweethearts,” as some have come to call the power couple, look back fondly on the process of creating lalawag and watching it grow, and still get excited to think about its potential to continue on this upward journey. For Sean and Laurie, it’s all about putting passion into your creation, and it doesn’t hurt to have the one who loves you by your side to cheer you on along the way.

THE INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Brangelina, who? This is Laurie and Sean Percival

Kim Ngo: So, tell us, how did you guys meet?

Sean Percival: We met through a friend. One night I was literally dragged out to Hollywood and thrown into a whole new word. I was lucky to meet Laurie that night, and as cheesy as it sounds, it was actually one of those love at first sight moments.

Kim Ngo: Sean, how did you go from being a janitor to a web designer?

Sean Percival: Over 10 years ago, I worked as a janitor. One of the offices I happened to clean belonged to Vegas.com and that is where I got my first introduction to a startup. It was a night shift, but these guys were still cranking away and having a blast in the process. I knew it was for me, so I did whatever I could to get there. I eventually found a better job doing tech support for companies like Adobe and Logitech. I stayed at work late at night (sometimes all night) to use their computers and broadband connections. It was in those late nights where I learned what it took to create a website. I made some of the most awful sites, real crimes against humanity, but I learned a few things and eventually found full-time work building websites for companies.

Kim Ngo: Is lalawag something you guys mutually created? How did you guys come up with the idea? What obstacles did you guys face?

The lalawag Home Office

Sean Percival: Lalawag is something I initially created. Laurie,as always, was there to support my crazy idea. At the time, Valleywag was closing down and the Los Angeles tech community had started to develop. It seemed like the perfect timing to start something like lalawag.

So one night while drinking, I loudly called former Valleywag writer Alaska Miller and pitched the idea. He didn’t think it was horrible and that was all the confirmation I needed. The next weekend I built the site and launched it soon after. After running the site for a few months, I turned it over to Laurie.

Kim Ngo: What were your expectations when you started the site? Did you guys ever expect the site to be as popular as it is?

Sean Percival: I didn’t have many expectations when I started lalawag. I wanted to capture some of the spirit of tech in Los Angeles, and I’m just happy I’ve done that to some degree. I’m still shocked when people come up to me and tell me how much they love the site.

LOVE AT FIRST SITE

Kim Ngo: Does working together ever cause a strain on your relationship? If so, how do you guys deal with those problems? If not, let us in on your secret!

Sean Percival: Of course it does. We are both stubborn Virgos and often bump heads over the direction of lalawag. I wouldn’t say it puts a strain on our relationship, though. Actually, I look back at some of our debates over lalawag with fond memories. Laurie is basically brilliant so I love the back and forth and eventual compromise we typically make.

On Laurie's Desk at lalalwag

Laurie Percival: Fortunately lalawag was not the first time we worked together; we actually had an ecommerce site that Sean built and then turned over to me. We have always had amazing communication with each other and through that first website, we learned how each of us handles business situations and how we could compromise or make decisions that would be best for where we wanted to take it. Working with family or friends is always hard, but if you respect the other person’s opinions and realize that you are working towards a common goal, it can be really fun too.

Kim Ngo: According to the site, as well as Sean’s blog, you guys are always at events and in meetings. How do you find time for each other?

Sean Percival: Recently we’ve scaled back the amount of events we personally attend. We try to make it to the big events, but it’s just not possible to make everything. With my new job at MySpace and a baby on the way, some open bars will just have to be missed. Although thanks to the LA tech community’s over-sharing, we can still read all about the events via Twitter.

Kim Ngo: With your new role as the Director of Content Socialization with MySpace, and a baby on the way, how is the future of lalawag looking?

Sean Percival: Busy! Laurie manages to take care of lalawag and we’ve started to expand our writer roster so she can focus on the baby more. Lalawag is and always has been a great pleasure for us. I imagine and hope it’ll live on and continue to grow as Los Angeles tech also continues to.

Kim Ngo: Laurie, what’s it like being married to a “web micro-celebrity,” as you call Sean in your blog?

Laurie Working

Laurie Percival: Oh wow, you found that. When I wrote that it was kind of my own personal joke. I was new to the tech scene and it very much seemed like Sean was a celebrity. Anytime we would go to events, people would continuously come up to say “Hi,” and anytime I met someone new and they saw my last name was Percival, they would say “Oh, you must be Sean’s wife.” Once Sean turned lalawag over to me, I was finally able to gain some of my own identity in the scene. Being married to Sean is awesome, I am very lucky to be with such a smart, talented and loving man.

Kim Ngo: How is it being a well-known, married couple on the tech scene? Do you guys ever feel the pressure to live up to your title as The Tweethearts?

Sean Percival: Yes and no. It’s not too difficult because we still genuinely like each other. I do get concerned some may feel we have the perfect relationship and everything is all rainbows and unicorns. Of course, we go through the same challenges as any couple. Of course, we’re less likely to broadcast those moments online.

Laurie Percival: It’s a lot of fun. I get to spend more time with Sean, and we can have conversations about things that are going on in the community or with tech in general. Most couples have one spouse that is not involved in tech, so it must be hard for them to relate something happening that they feel is important. Try explaining Twitter to someone who has never used it!

I never feel pressure to live up to anyone’s opinion of us, we have our ups and downs like any couple, we just don’t broadcast them in public. We also do a good job of communicating with each other. If something is bothering me or Sean we talk about it and come to a resolution.

Kim Ngo: Would you say that working together on lalawag has strengthened your relationship?

Sean Percival: I’d be interested to hear Laurie’s answer first, but I’ll go ahead and say yes. For one, it has made me a million times prouder of Laurie. She took over the site with no experience managing a blog. The fact that she has done such an amazing job is totally hot, no? Some guys get turned on by skimpy outfits, but I don’t mind a woman who can handle WordPress. Okay seriously though, I love that we’ve created something together. Few things we do together can ever really compare to that.

Laurie Percival: I’ve never looked at it that way. Lalawag is just another chapter in our relationship, something that we have put our hearts into and have grown together. Our relationship is solid and will continue to evolve and strengthen, regardless of what obstacle we are currently tackling. Overall, I am sure that some of the challenges we faced did help us to get through situations we may not have otherwise. It did make me proud of Sean—he always has great ideas—and to see this one become a reality with such support from the community behind it was great.

Kim Ngo: Last question, so many of us look to find that one special partner, can both of you give us some advice and tips on finding that special someone?

Sean Percival: It’s cliché, but I always say, “… to find the one for you, don’t look.” I say that because it worked for me, and I’m pretty sure if you’re looking too hard, you’ll probably miss it. I also always recommend to find that person organically somewhere way outside of your comfort zone. Break out from your circle of friends, or business circles, and see what else is out there! I also have this personal theory that the grocery store is the ULTIMATE place to meet someone new. Look there!

Laurie Percival: My advice would be to forget about whether or not you like the same movies or music—things in common are honestly not that important. The perfect partner is one that “gets” you. After that, nothing else matters. Though make sure you agree on religion and politics—those two subjects can cause issues no therapist can fix. Go out and mingle, try to meet someone new every time you are out. I don’t think you’re going to meet the love of your life sitting on your couch.

Kim Ngo: Thank you for sharing your story with us – Sean and Laurie! It was very interesting and entertaining. And of course, heartfelt.

Michael working on the first of his rating sites, RateMyFace, in the summer of 1999.

More like a virtual white pages for the internet than a typical search engine, PeekYou scours the vast reaches of the web for information about an individual, then consolidates that information into one neatly compacted and easy-to-navigate package. A PeekYou profile makes it effortless for people to find the links to all of your social networking profiles, personal websites, blogs, news articles—you name it—by putting it all in one place. Users can find who they’re looking for by using any number of descriptive characteristics, starting with first and last name, known aliases, location, and keywords. Results can be further refined to the point of distinguishing between two John Smiths from the same town, who attended the same high school at the same time– this can be done by noting an interest in skydiving or the other’s current employer in the search inquiry. Not only is the breadth of information remarkable, but the tags and links are conveniently organized into helpful subcategories that make surfing a breeze.

PeekYou

One primary goal of Michael’s is to make it easier for people to monitor their own identity on the web. PeekYou is an index of the information that is already publicly available online, compiled from social networking sites, new coverage, blogs, and more; Michael brings it all together so a user can see his/her online footprint. Profiles are largely user-generated and anyone who becomes a registered user can add a new profile or edit existing results. Whether you’re tempted to see what your friend is up to or want to sneak a peek at yourself, PeekYou does the searching for you, so all that’s left for you to do is point and click.

Meet Michael Hussey in an exclusive one-on-one interview that features Michael’s thought process behind creating PeekYou and his previous experience in building RateMyTeachers, RateMyFace , RateMyProfessors (which sold to MTV), and other rating sites: Michael Hussey and IntimateMath

While working for companies like Veoh and Powerset in product management and software engineering, Siqi discovered an opportunity to capitalize on an emerging market in social media. When Facebook Platform was initially launched in May 2007, developers were able to make headway in the market by means of creating apps and games that were engaging and amusing to users. Siqi Chen and Friends for Sale co-founder, Alex Le, then took the real life dilemma of finding a date and solved it through social gaming.

Friends for Sale is a profitable social game on Facebook where facebookers buy and sell friends to make profit with virtual currency. With this virtual money, users can buy other game players who are more expensive, poke them, give them gifts, and even nickname them. Click here to read more about the Friends for Sale game: Siqi Chen is Selling Your Friends to the Highest Bidder.

A Short Clip of My Conversation with Siqi Chen
Trouble Viewing? Visit: Watch Siqi Chen, Friends for Sale

PROFILE

Siqi Chen

STATS
Companies Founded:
1. FluidPlay – 2006
Title: Founder

2. Serious Business (makers of Friends for Sale)
Title: CEO & Founder
Fundraised: $4M
Investor: LightSpeed Venture Partners
Highest Numbers of Employees: 32
Sold To: Zynga, February 2010

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Hometown: Dalian, Liaoning, China
Currently Resides: San Francisco, CA
Age: 26
Bachelors of Science:
Mathematics, University of California, San Diego
Favorite Book: How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis
Role Models: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Dennis Felix

Favorite Quote: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt in “The Man in the Arena”

Siqi’s: Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook

THE INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Kim Ngo: Hi, Siqi. Thanks for meeting with me today. Your company
Serious Business is the maker of Friends for Sale.  To be honest, I was really engaged with your Facebook app for a while, but then I fell off.

Friends for Sale

Siqi Chen: Why did you fall off?

Kim Ngo: It was fun and cool in the beginning, but there was no real life value for me. Friends for Sale virtually allowed me to buy and sell my friends. Yes, I made profit with virtual currency, but I just didn’t see the real world value in it.

Siqi Chen: Interesting. Did you play with people you didn’t know?

Kim Ngo: No, only with friends.

Siqi Chen: Friends for Sale is a social game that allows you to buy people (within and outside of your network) and make them your pets with virtual currency. The more virtual currency you earn, the more you can do. You can buy more pets and potentially get a return on your investment if they get purchased. You can make money as a shrewd pet investor or as a hot commodity! Friends for Sale allows you to engage with friends and meet people outside of your friends list.

For a social game, Friends for Sale retains users extraordinarily well, relatively speaking. And the reason for this is because a lot of people play to meet new people.

Facebook is all about connecting and interacting with your friends, which by design, makes it very hard to meet new people. When Facebook Platform originally came out, we realized it could also be used to connect people across different social graphs. On Friends for Sale, not only do you buy your friends, but you can also buy and get bought by people you don’t know. As this happens, people start forming new relationships.

The Serious Business Team

Kim Ngo: So Friends for Sale is a dating app in disguise?

Siqi Chen: Definitely. When we designed it, we thought of it as a stealth-dating site. We explicitly wanted to make a dating site without calling it one. Friends for Sale is a social app, and people are more likely to tell their friends about a social app or game than a dating site. Nobody wants to tell their friend that they’re on a dating site. When we called Friends for Sale a game instead of a dating site, it became a lot more palatable.

It’s a game you play with your friends, but it also happens to be an easy way to meet new people; Facebook users really latch onto that. Not only do you meet new people, but you can also see who the hottest person (generally the most expensive person) is. Our features allow people to form new relationships. Users stick around for the people, not the actual game.

Kim Ngo: What’s your pitch for Friends for Sale?

Siqi Chen: We have a bunch of ways to describe it, but I think the one I use the most is “Hot or Not with a market economy.” We liked Hot or Not, but it only told you who was hot or who was not. What you want is a fluid supply and demand environment, so we added a market economy to the idea which keeps everything up to date.

Kim Ngo: So how did you come up with the market economy?

Siqi Chen: Funny story—it was an idea my co-founder and I came up with in Las Vegas. I was there for the two-year anniversary of Club Tao. While waiting to get into the club, I was looking at the line which was mostly comprised of middle-aged dudes who had just bought a table. Every guy looked like he was thinking, “This is going to suck; where are all of the girls?” My friend pointed to the other side of the room where there were fifty really hot girls just hanging out.

It was a microcosm of life. Everyone knows it’s awesome to be a hot girl or rich guy. I thought about how we could fuse that into an app, which is how we came up with Friends for Sale. In our app, it’s awesome to be a hot girl because you make money by being bought, and it’s awesome to be a rich guy because you can buy people.

Serious Business Lobby (Prior to Zynga Sale)

Kim Ngo: Where does Friends for Sale stand in Facebook App rankings?

Siqi Chen: It stands in the top twenty. We were in the top five at one point, but that was two years ago. The competition has definitely increased since then.

Kim Ngo: Can you tell us what the top two apps are, and why you think they are ranked so high?

Siqi Chen: Farmville and Cafeworld are the top two apps by the numbers, because Zynga, the developer of these games, has been more aggressive than anyone in investing in Facebook Apps.

Kim Ngo: Do you think Friends for Sale will ever get back to being a top five app?

Siqi Chen: It depends on how fast we grow. It’s hard to say. But what I can say is that we are bigger than we have ever been. We didn’t go from number five to number twenty because we’re smaller. We’re actually three times larger than when we were in the top five. It’s just that the platform ecosystem has expanded so much, and it takes a lot more traffic to be in the top ten than it did two years ago.

Kim Ngo: Where do you see Friends for Sale going from here? What do you have planned for the future?

Siqi Chen: We’re planning to create more ways to earn money, more ways to spend it, and more ways to meet and interact with friends, new and old.

Kim Ngo: Where do you see the industry of social gaming in five years?

Siqi Chen: Games will be more social, beautiful, and immersive but just as simple and casual as they are today.

THE MORE PERSONAL INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Kim Ngo: It sounds like you’re really passionate about what you do?

Siqi Chen: I would say so. I feel like I was always meant to do what I do now. I’ve always known I wanted to build things that lots of people would use.

Kim Ngo: What are your hobbies and interests?

Siqi Chen: I tend to play a lot of video games, but my hobbies involve what I do in my job. If I weren’t working, I’d still be doing the same things I do now: building and making cool things that people love.

It’s funny though. I was in a board meeting, and the board told me that I needed to play more video games. So I did. I was spending a lot of my time building the company and not actually playing games. The board felt that the company would benefit if I were to play video games. They recommended everything from Xbox to casual games. I bought a Nintendo DS and started playing more games. It was really educational. As usual, the board was right.

Siqi Chen

Kim Ngo: What’s your biggest fear?

Siqi Chen: My biggest fear is not living up to the potential that this company and team holds. Considering the many things we’ve done wrong over the past couple of years, one of the things we’ve done right is putting together a great team. Bringing failure to the team is my greatest fear.

Kim Ngo: Tell us about your first taste of success and proudest moment.

Siqi Chen: Shortly after we launched Friends for Sale, the initial reaction was explosive. After a month and a half, we were the largest Ruby on Rails app in the world, despite being just two guys with day jobs.

It was an idea we came up with on our own, and we had all of these theories about why it would work. Ultimately, most of them have proven to be true, which rarely happens when you’re building a web app. It was a combination of a small amount of good judgment and a very large amount of luck. It was very rewarding to see all of these assumptions that were put into the idea come to fruition.

Kim Ngo: What did you guys do to make sure those assumptions were right?

Siqi Chen: We got lucky. We did the best we could in thinking about how people are currently meeting new people and fused this into an app about buying and selling. What would people want to do with this app? We thought about how it’s a funny idea to buy your friends, but we also asked ourselves why people want to own anything in the first place. We needed to allow people to do things to someone they owned that they couldn’t have done otherwise in the real world.

Kim Ngo: So one day you were like, “Alexander (the co-founder of Serious Business), let’s leave our jobs and create this app?”

The Mascot

Siqi Chen: In May 2007, I built a game called Mafia. Though it wasn’t an extraordinary success, it attracted 100,000 users, which is pretty good on the web. It was barely existent on Facebook, but through advertising, I was making a good chunk of cash on the side—about the same amount as my salary.

One day, I decided I should make something viral. I was talking to Alexander Le about it, and we came up with Friends for Sale. We spent ten nights building and designing it before it was launched. About a month later, we had one million users.

Kim Ngo: What do you think you do better than your competitors?

Siqi Chen: There are things I know we do very well, but I wouldn’t say I definitely know there are things we do better. There are things we understand very well, like data driven and iterative development and metrics. We are an extremely data focused company. We have a very good team, and we understand product design and sociability. We make games that allow you to interact with other people, which is something I think we do better than other companies.

Kim Ngo: What do you enjoy most and least about being a CEO?

Siqi Chen: That’s a tough one. My favorite and least favorite parts of being a CEO are in the management of the people—the hiring and firing of employees. It’s never pleasant to fire somebody, and it’s always rewarding to hire somebody extremely talented.

Kim Ngo: What was your toughest experience in building Friends for Sale?

Serious Business Bored Room

Siqi Chen: A month after we launched, I had already quit my job, and I was the only full time employee at Friends for Sale. At the time, it was the largest Ruby on Rails site in the world. We were getting 10 million views a day. It was nuts! The site was barely up because with only one person, it’s very hard to scale a site that size, especially if you’ve never done it before. I was only getting about two to three hours of sleep a night. It was just awful!

Eventually, we migrated to a different hosting center, got better hardware, and fixed some of the architecture. Things definitely improved around January, but the whole month of December was rough.

Kim Ngo: Was there a point where you felt like you couldn’t do it anymore? Did you ever want to give up?

Siqi Chen: No, I felt like I didn’t have a choice. This thing had a life of its own with hundreds of thousands of users. I had to make it work. I knew of other sites that were a thousand times bigger that worked, so I knew that running Friends for Sale was doable. But it was something that I had never done before, and we had to build everything from scratch.

Kim Ngo: What does it take to succeed in your field?

Siqi Chen: I think it’s a combination of ego, drive, and innate design that makes an entrepreneur successful. Another thing that works for me is that I am technical so I’m able to understand what’s possible and what’s not possible. I can also talk to our engineers. In fact, I’m on the line with our engineers probably an hour each day and I actually do write code—that’s definitely a plus. I’m also really product oriented.

Serious Business

Kim Ngo: What motivates you?

Siqi: Chen: I wasn’t especially hardworking in high school or college, but I’ve always known what I wanted to do. I had this feeling of knowing what I wanted to do and that I would make it happen.

Kim Ngo: Why were you so sure you could make it happen?

Siqi Chen: Because I was able to see and hear about other people who have done it – I felt if other people could do it, then there’s no reason I couldn’t.

Kim Ngo: What inspires you? And what makes you happiest? Is it money or a sense of accomplishment?

Siqi Chen: It is building things that have a lasting impact in this world — things that are beautiful and useful. Things that fuse form and function into something that affects people’s lives on an everyday level.

Kim Ngo: So this is why you moved to Silicon Valley?

Siqi Chen: Yes. Moving to Silicon Valley allowed me to meet people that I needed to in order to do what I wanted to do. And that proved to be absolutely true. Moving here was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Kim Ngo: What advice would you give to the young aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start something?

Siqi Chen: Stop reading, stop watching videos, and just do something.

THE OFFERING by Project X Films
Trouble Viewing? Visit: THE OFFERING

In this interview, I talk to Mike about:
- His dreams of becoming a director of an animated feature film
- What he’s given, and given up, on his journey thus far
- How far he is willing to go to make his dream a reality

STATS
Companies Founded:
1. Gravity 3D
2. Huber Films
3. Project X

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Hometown: Sierra Vista, AZ
Currently Resides: San Jose, CA
Education: San Francisco State University Film School and CADRE San Jose State University

Hobbies/Interests: Motorcycles, making margaritas
Quality Most Remembered For: Very goofy
In 10 Years, I see myself…: Directing A list films
I’m Happiest when…: I am directing
I’m Motivated by…: Beauty, the thought of doing something unique
Biggest Fear: Economic failure and heights
Favorite Quote: “Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Role Models: My Dad, Richard Huber

LINKS
Linkedin
Facebook
Project X

Click Here for The Interview with Michael Huber

Below are some short video clips of our meeting.

As of late, Enlai’s focus has shifted to his company’s latest offering, “3jam Numbers,” also known as Cloud Numbers or Virtual Numbers. Enlai elaborates and explains the nature of 3jam’s products in this interview, while pitching in his own two cents on what he believes it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur, and what drives him to keep innovating.

STATS

Number of Companies Founded:
1. 3jam (2006)

Fundraised: $5.5M
Investors: New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners
Highest Number of Employees: 20

2. Number Networks (2004)
Bootstrapped
Highest Number of Employees: 8

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Home Town: Vancouver, Canada
Currently Resides: San Francisco, CA
Age: 34
Bachelor of Science: Electrical Engineering, University of British Columbia – 1996
Master of Business Administration: Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley – 2003

ENLAI CHU (CENTER)

Hobbies/Interests: Snowboarding, trying hole-in-the-wall restaurants
First Taste of Success: Making my first “business dollar” promoting parties in Vancouver
Proudest Moment: Winning Forbes Future Capitalist award in 2003
Worst Habit: Not sleeping enough
Quality Most Remembered For: Upbeat, can-do attitude
Where You See Yourself in 10 Years: Something productive – creating products and giving back through education and mentorship
I’m Happiest when…: Hard work and smart planning yield successful results
I’m Motivated by…: Building cool products and improving the way things are done
Favorite Quote: “Go Big or Go Home!”
Role Models: My mom for her compassion and dad for his work ethic and principles.

Linkedin
Twitter

Click Here for The Interview with Enlai Chu

In this interview, Igor Shoifot, COO & Co-Founder of FOTKI opens up about some of his struggles on the path to success. His whimsical attitude and serious entrepreneurial background paved the way for superb development in the quest to create FOTKI. Shoifot has an impressive record as a CEO of Epsylon Games (Microsoft’s largest WebTV entertainment portal), as well as a co-founder of several startups in digital video, VoIP, document management, and software development, but his hectic lifestyle hasn’t managed to take away from his colorful sense of humor. Read on to discover Igor’s take on usefulness and the importance of choosing to surround yourself with good people.

What’s Igor’s favorite quote?

What two categories?

Being innovative?

STATS

Companies Founded:
1. FOTKI
2. Sundera
3. Epsylon Video
4. Epsylon VideoMost
5. Vinternship

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Hometown: Born in Novokuznetsk (Siberia), grew up in Moscow (Russia), was adopted by Boston and married to New York, until San Francisco seduced me
Currently Resides: San Francisco, CA
Education:
Moscow State Pedagogical University, Bachelor of Science – 1991
Central European University, Masters of Arts – 1993
Russian Academy of Sciences, PhD – 1996
Boston University, Masters of Business Administration – 1999

Hobbies/Interests: Books, writing, acting, theater, philosophy, boxing, martial arts, arts in general
First Taste of Success: Tasted like a cheap strawberry lipstick with a faint note of vanilla ice cream
Proudest Moment: The night we elected Barack Obama our President
Worst Habit: Reading too much (not like I will ever change it)
Quality Most Remembered For: Ability to make people laugh, scream, love, feel warm and happy (or so I hope!)
Where You See Yourself in 10 Years: In a theater near you
I’m Happiest when…: I am at a book store
I’m Motivated by…: this guy and his kitties
Biggest fear: To waste my life
Favorite Quote: The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody . . . would be to not be used for anything by anybody (Kurt Vonnegut) – it used to hang above my desk, I gave it to a good person as a goodbye gift
Role Models: None that I know of, because nobody is perfect, but I admire Einstein, Nietzsche, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Freud, Wilde, Twain, Paglia and many more amazing people

THE INTERVIEW

IGOR BEING IGOR

Kim Ngo: Hi Igor. Thanks for meeting with me. Before you start telling me about FOTKI, tell me why you want to be used? I understand the want of wanting to be valuable… but being used?

Igor Shoifot: Being used is being valued. My favorite quote is, “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody . . . would be to not be used for anything by anybody,” by Kurt Vonnegut. I think it’s a brilliant quote. It would be the worst thing – if you lived your whole life and nobody ever used you for anything. You’d be considered useless. I think people are focused on the wrong things when they hear the word “being used.”

FOTKI started in 1998, long before most other photo sites.

FOTKI is a community of people that are in love with photography and come together to share their life and world through pictures. It’s a social photo-sharing site where picture are shared globally. A person’s life is shared through photos that express a million words.

IGOR @WORK

Kim Ngo: How did FOTKI gain such a huge following internationally?

Igor Shoifot: FOTKI started in New York, which is such a diverse area – with people from all over the world. Our team was also diverse. Because of that diverse network of friends outside of the US, FOTKI has big communities in, Canada, Europe, Brazil, Russia, Japan, and South Korea.

Kim Ngo: What do you think you do better than your competitors?

Igor Shoifot: Competitors? What competitors? =) (Laughing) Well, most photo sites are very unique – we are uniquely combining numerous, and very sophisticated photo options with social networking features – that’s what sets us apart. But each user probably loves Fotki for some very personal reason – you’ve got to ask them – we have over 1,400,000 of them.

Kim Ngo: Why do you think your customers continue to stay with FOTKI both paying and non-paying?

FUNKY IGOR

Igor Shoifot: “Once a Fotkin, always a Fotkin.” It’s the power of community. And it’s not only a virtual community here at FOTKI… a lot of our users are building great relationships outside of the web all because of photo-sharing. We’ve made it really easy for photo-obsessed people to connect. There are so many real-life friendships that have been made on FOTKI, and even marriages, even though, for a while, we used to frown upon any “dating activities” on the site feeling that some people don’t feel too comfy about it – we were wrong.

Kim Ngo: How did you get started with FOTKI?

Igor Shoifot: FOTKI started as a hobby by my good friend and business partner, Dimitri, the CEO of FOTKI. He initially built it so his friends, including me, could store and share photos with each other. Then, after when he turned it into a business, he asked me to drop all the many fun things I was doing, and join FOTKI to expand the business. So, we call me a co-founder in the sense that we co-founded the business together and thought up the whole FOTKI strategy between us, and it’s been quite a few years since I’ve been “co-founding” FOTKI.

Keep in mind that FOTKI started as a photo-sharing site, and then naturally grew into a social network where people were actually connecting because of photos and through photos. Frankly, we weren’t geniuses who came up with a great idea to build a social network. It just happened because we needed a place to share our photos.

Kim Ngo: Why do you think Dimitri wanted to make you a founder?

IGOR

Igor Shoifot: We make great business partners. The great thing about our relationship is we come from very different backgrounds. I am the business development and marketing person; and I love explaining the way things work and closing deals. Dmitri, however, is also a businessperson but a much more technical businessperson.

And as much as we like each other and have a true friendship, we disagree more often than not – which is awesome, because if you have two people in a business who always agree, one of them has to go – he just brings no intellectual value then.

Kim Ngo: What was one of the most painful things you had to go through here at FOTKI?

Igor Shoifot: Being dismissed as a company. The worst feeling is when you tell people about your company and product – with over a million users, with paying customers, with employees, and with profits, and people respond, “Well, who needs you if there’s F____ or P___, or S_______ or S_____?.”

There are probably two categories of companies:

1) People who are creating something new, which includes people who are struggling (not necessarily *financially* – but conceptually.) These people are pouring their hearts into something (and Flickr was in this category; they had an amazing – amazing team who built a truly great technology). So this category builds a company, like ours, to develop something new and amazing while at the same time has the pressure and stress of paying salaries and competing with no outside help or investment.

2) The second category is still cool and innovative, but they have lots of money to burn. They don’t need to care about the business model. They actually give away their money: You want unlimited storage? No problem. You want big photos? No problem. You want unlimited traffic? No Problem. And there’s nothing wrong with those companies, and it’s great that they exist. I think in many ways they are helping the progress, but they are also killing it in many ways.

For example, Google killed the whole online calendar space. There were so many great calendar startups until Google came up with The Calendar, which I am using, but the way (its great!), but it killed that industry. Google Calendar is integrated with about everything, and it’s free, ads-free, not even a hint at the “freemium” model – just an (expensive to develop and maintain) totally FREE for all product that burns Google millions of dollars per year, so, how do you compete with that? That’s kind of a killing innovation. And there’s very little that anyone can do anything about it. It’s just a fact of life.

That’s sad! Anything that stops progress is sad.

Kim Ngo: Yeah I know, but you guys are profitable.

Igor Shoifot: We are! But we are just in low seven-figures in terms of revenues, and we are not exactly doing what we WANT to be doing – we have wonderful ideas for FOTKI, and we have a long list of features and services that over a million people have been waiting for – but we need to constantly keep our eyes on the money, NOT on the innovation – and that kind of sucks. Being innovative is not good enough anymore. Being a good orange juice is not good enough anymore. You’ve got to be like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon – fighting lots of guys coming at you from all sorts of angles – and you’re bare-handed, and it’s all in good fun, of course, but you have just your bleeding fists on your side, and maybe a good warrior scream.

Kim Ngo: Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Igor Shoifot: No. When I was a kid, I honestly thought I would be an actor and a writer.

Kim Ngo: Are you disappointed that it didn’t happen?

IGOR THE STAR

Igor Shoifot: No. I’m sort of an actor; I played in a movie. I’m also a writer; I’ve written a lot of stuff…I haven’t published yet, besides a small history book in Russian. I also think being an entrepreneur is similar to being an actor and a writer – like a writer, you invent reality, and try to tell a compelling story to your audience, and like an actor, you take part in a “dramatic affair” – and what can be more dramatic than a start-up life? It’s William Shakespeare meets Dave Chappelle, most any day.

Kim Ngo: …but in real life. There are no rewrites, cuts, re-dos, or go backs. Your decisions will determine the fate of your company. There is very little room for error if there’s any room for it at all.

Igor Shoifot: That’s why the Bay Area is so awesome. We are surrounded by these kinds of people everyday who are really fighting and standing up for what they believe in and worked so hard for.

Kim Ngo: What are you afraid of?

Igor Shoifot: My mom! (Laughing)
(Gets serious) I’m afraid of wasting my life and not accomplishing something meaningful. I am not BS-ing! I seriously mean it.

Kim Ngo: What do you get nervous about, besides your mom and not having enough time? Are you easily intimidated by your work?

Igor Shoifot: Not really. I spent my whole childhood trying to answer this question. I did lots of stand-up comedy back in school, which is also why I had to go into boxing and martial arts, because not everybody shared the skinny boy’s sense of humor. Lots of things make me nervous, to be serious: business decisions, the wrong way the whole world is going, not being able to accomplish what I want to accomplish, not finding the True Love, and – I was joking about Mom, of course.

Kim Ngo: What keeps you up at night?

Igor Shoifot: Business. When you’re an entrepreneur, there is this constant tension. You can’t ever relax; you envy the people who are relaxed. You go out, and you see those who are happy and carefree. You see people who are less tense, and my best guess is they are not entrepreneurs. As an entrepreneur, I am constantly checking my email, voice messages… making sure projects are completed, if someone replied, etc. This is the nasty side of entrepreneurship; the side I could live without. There’s a very exciting side also.

After FOTKI, my business partner and I would like to open a nonprofit and do something meaningful and not have to worry about profits, deals, or contracts. We actually have a really awesome idea for it!

Kim Ngo: What are you passionate about?

Igor Shoifot: Women (laughing).

Love … making a difference… creating something that is meaningful – to me.

Kim Ngo: You don’t fit the exact stereotype of a COO…

Igor Shoifot: I guess I shouldn’t be a COO then (laughing). I was always a great sales and marketing person, maybe I should stay one? But as to not fitting the stereotype, I think… as the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument in Nebraska says:

The cowards never started
The weak died on the way
Only the strong arrived
And they were the pioneers

Kim Ngo: If you can tell future founders one thing, what would it be?

Igor Shoifot: Work with people you love, respect, and have fun with. Never work with people whom you can barely tolerate.

One of our VC friends said, “The first day you meet with a founder, you better be completely in love with them because its downhill from there.”

Kim Ngo: Besides FOTKI, what’s your favorite website?

Igor Shoifot: Facebook. You can find me there easily; I’m the only Shoifot in the world.

Kim Ngo: What’s your 2^nd favorite site?

Igor Shoifot: IntimateMath. (Laughing)

Kim Ngo: (Laughing)

After receiving an MBA at Stanford, Dan worked for various companies in the high tech industry and in naval engineering for 18 years. In 2004, Dan worked at Friendster and then went off to start a lustrous consulting firm, Olsen Solutions LLC. Olsen Solutions consulted numerous Internet startups companies such as Box.net, YouSendIt, and Moodlogic. In 2007, Dan took a bold leap by creating his own startup, which was operated out of his very own house. The passion and dedication of Dan and his team led to YourVersion’s thrilling launch and success at the recent TechCrunch50 conference. Dan discusses the unspoken nature of the first years at a startup and advises that it is better to accomplish something than achieve nothing.

STATS

Number of Companies Founded: 2
1. Olsen Solutions, LLC
2. YourVersion

Funding: As of Oct 2009 – Fully Bootstrapped
Number of Employees: 5
Awards: 2009 TC50 People’s Choice Award

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Hometown: Rota, Spain
Currently Resides: Palo Alto, CA
Bachelor of Science: Electrical Engineering, Northwestern University – 1991
Master of Engineering Administration: Industrial Engineering, Virginia Tech University – 1995
Master of Business Administration: Stanford Graduate School of Business – 1998

Hobbies/Interests: Sailing, playing poker, and wine tasting
Biggest Fear: Not having enough time
Favorite Quote: “Responsibility is a unique concept: it can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If the responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point the finger at the person who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”

- Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, USN

Role Models: Admiral Hyman Rickover and Albert Einstein

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danolsen98
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SVdan
YourVersion Profile: http://www.yourversion.com/profile/dan

DAN OLSEN'S OFFICE DOORWAY

THE INTERVIEW

Kim Ngo: Hi Dan, nice office … and home. Thank you for meeting with IntimateMath today. Can you start by telling us about YourVersion in the simplest and hottest way possible?

Dan Olsen: YourVersion is a “real-time discovery engine” — real time is very hot now. YourVersion goes out and finds content that’s tailored for your specific interests . It finds what is new and relevant on a continual basis. It’s a great way to stay updated on the latest news and topics you’re interested in: poker, sailing, HTML, calculus, etc.

Kim Ngo: So it’s ranked in terms of most current?

Dan Olsen: The term we use for that is “recency.” That’s what real time is about. In contrast, Google sorts information by relevance. The best way to sort is with a combination of these two. We do both. We do recency, so results are presented in an updated order, but we make sure that they are relevant to the specific interest that you typed in.

Kim Ngo: Why would YourVersion be useful for me?

YourVersion's OFFICE DOORWAY

Dan Olsen: It would be useful for you if you had hobbies or interests, and you wanted to see cool new information on the Internet without doing any work. YourVersion goes out to the web, fetches all the recent and relevant information and brings it to you, and then makes it easy for you to scan and select. You can see which articles you would be interested in and which ones you would not.

Kim Ngo: How are you planning to get traffic?

Dan Olsen: The most important thing is to have a great product, because at the end of the day, if people love the site, they’re going to tell other people about it. I’m a big believer in the old school “word of mouth” method.

For example, when we wanted to go from private beta to public beta, we decided to launch it at TechCrunch50– a large event, where if you win, you get a lot of PR out of it. That’s what happened to us; we won the TechCrunch50 People’s Choice Award.

Once a good product has users, it becomes viral. For example, our engine makes it really easy for users to share information with friends.

YourVersion @TC50 2009

Kim Ngo: After TechCrunch50, did YourVersion’s traffic spike?

Dan Olsen: Yes, by a lot. It was funny to see because I knew it was going to spike so our team worked really hard on getting ready for that massive traffic by moving to EC2 to get more servers. Everything held up great. There was definitely a spike but then I wondered where it would end up.

Kim Ngo: Where did it end up?

Dan Olsen: It ended up higher than where it was before. To this day, YourVersion site traffic continues to have a positive slope. And throughout the month we have follow up events to continue to get the word out.

Kim Ngo: How did you win everyone over that day at TC50? Outside of the presentation, what did you do differently?

Dan Olsen: I think our team accomplished this. We all had our company t-shirts on, and acted like a team. Everyone felt like this was the event where we finally got to unveil our baby that we had been working on for two years. We were so excited to show off the results of all our hard work to people.

YourVersion HAVING FUN @TC50 2009

My advice to other entrepreneurs who come to events like these is to make sure that you bring a couple of extroverted people on your team. You need people on your team that are going to walk around and approach people asking them if they have seen your product. People can become infected by that energy and excitement.

I didn’t even realize where we stood in the People’s Choice Award until this other entrepreneur said, “Hey, your booth has a lot of chips compared to the other booths.”

Kim Ngo: I know you’re planning to rely on advertisements, but are there any other potential revenue streams?

Dan Olsen: Yes, definitely. In addition to listing ads to target specific interests, we will also experiment with selling sponsored results.

DAN @TC50 PODIUM

I have also worked on several “freemium products” in the past. I consulted for YouSendIt and Box.net. These sites have service levels where they charge users $5/month or $10/month, but they also have basic service offerings that are free for some users. I’m fine with applying this type of pricing for YourVersion. If we get into it, what we end up doing is an analysis, and we might notice that ten percent of our users are power users. With that information, we then would find ways to set limits on free usage because these people are using the site the most.

Many people don’t mind paying a little money to suppress ads. If your users are very passionate about your product, they’ll pay that $5/month. So freemium is a potential business model.

Another good business model for sites that have many users is to create a database with all the information that can be mined, for example, for a given topic, what sites people are clicking on the most. This database can be monetized with advertisers seeking to improve ad relevance. This is a bigger, longer-term strategy that YourVersion can adopt.

Kim Ngo: How did you get started?

THE YourVersion TEAM WITH SCOBLE FROM BUILDING43

Dan Olsen: I worked at Intuit for five years after business school. In 1998, I graduated from Stanford Business School. A lot of my classmates were going to startups, but I just wanted to go to the best place to learn how to develop consumer software. And everyone said Intuit was the best place to go so I began working there. I learned a lot. After that, I felt that I had enough experience and wanted to join a startup to learn what startups were like.

My first startup experience was at a bootstrapped startup in Madrid. We worked out of the living room of my friend’s apartment. Then I joined Friendster. After Friendster, I felt like I had the skills and experience to create my own startup, but I just didn’t have an idea I was excited about.

I’m not one of these people who can say, “Well! Wireless networking is hot. Let me get involved with that.” I have to do something that I feel internally–I’m referring to being passionate about what I do and what I create. If you knew the amount of hours I’ve put into YourVersion, there’s no way I could do this much work for something I am not really excited and passionate about.

DAN OLSEN, YourVersion

I came up with the idea for YourVersion two and a half years ago. I realized that there were all these sites that provided a good solution to a user problem but didn’t take advantage of the user data they generated as a result. If some sites actually paid attention to the data from their users and used the information to make personalized recommendations, they could provide even more value to their customers. For example, OpenTable does a great job of making it easy to make restaurant reservations. However, if they analyzed my reservations, they could make personalized recommendations about new restaurants. So I asked myself, why don’t we apply personalized recommendations to the problem of connecting people with relevant information? The Internet is exploding with information and there’s not a good way for people to stay on top of their interests on a recurring basis.

That’s how the idea for YourVersion started. I did a little proof of concept for a few months. Then I basically tried to juggle consulting half-time with working on my startup. My startup was not receiving enough attention , so I decided to stop my consulting business to focus solely on YourVersion.

Kim Ngo: What made you say, ”I’m going to leave a paying job and go straight into creating my own startup?”

THE OLSEN'S SAILING - One of Dan's Hobbies

Dan Olsen: I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier: having an idea that I was so excited and passionate about. And an idea that has long legs.

Kim Ngo: What’s makes you nervous?

Dan Olsen: I don’t get nervous. Though, on nights where I can’t go to sleep, I’m thinking about the critical things my company needs to complete, and how to make sure we have enough time to get them done. One thing that has allowed us to do so much at this small startup is our team which is ruthless about prioritization. We have to be realistic; there are only five of us. We can’t do everything, so we strategize to get the most done.

Kim Ngo: Are you afraid of failure?

Dan Olsen: I’m a big believer in not worrying about things that are out of your control. It doesn’t do any good. When you have a small team, you can only work on what you have control over. Although there may be twenty things you want to do, there’s not enough time to do those things.

DAN WITH HIS BEAUTIFUL WIFE

I use the concept of “continuous forward progress”. If you keep chipping away at something and keep making continuous progress, you will get closer and closer to your goal. At the end of the day, all you can do is prioritize and work on the top things that you think are the most important at that point in time. And if you’ve done that and worked hard all day, how can somebody criticize you? When you’re in a startup, there’s definitely low lows and high highs. Hopefully, there are more highs than lows. Like at TechCrunch50: when we launched, we were flying on cloud nine. All our hard work paid off.

Kim Ngo: What would you say was your toughest experience so far?

Dan Olsen: When you’re building a website from scratch, there’s a lot of slogging you have to do to get the basics built. Before you even get to the sexy part of the product, it’s just grunt work. At first, it was just me coding. Then I recruited several friends who would help once in a while.

In February 2008, after a lot of hard work, YourVersion reached a rough private beta. After reaching that milestone, my friends moved on to other projects and it was me coding again. That was the low point for me: realizing that the progress was too slow. At the time, I told myself I needed to recruit two full time developers to help me out, and I probably had to pay them salaries. So I incorporated and was getting ready to look for a seed round. But at the last minute, I decided to test the assumption that I had to pay people cash. I gave myself two weeks to try to recruit people for equity. So I started emailing people and posting job listings. Six people responded to me within a week but two were willing to work for equity. My reaction was, “Cool, let’s delay the fundraising and let’s start cracking.”

DAN ENJOYING THE BIKE RIDE

Kim Ngo: How do you get your teammates to commit without a paycheck?

Dan Olsen: Basically, it’s a fit for my teammates to be a part of YourVersion. The product and company resonate with them. Everyone here is hardworking. I think what they like is the ability to learn. And every engineer loves it when their work launches. They are plenty of places where they don’t launch stuff, or they don’t launch it frequently.

Kim Ngo: Why do you think that is?

Dan Olsen: There are lots of reasons. The vision may keep changing, or they might never feel ready, or their work may not be a

YourVersion GREW A "LAUNCH BEARD"

high priority.

You need to say, “Innovation is important to our culture, and we have to launch every day or every couple days.” Iteration happens because you get feedback on the new feature you just launched which informs the next release. So if you have a long time between your launch cycles, you aren’t getting the feedback to make your product better. And you always HAVE to make your product better!

Kim Ngo: If you could tell future entrepreneurs one thing, what would that be?

Dan Olsen: I would say surround yourself with a good team of people. No one person, no matter how great or smart or talented, can do what it takes to run a startup. You can get the ball rolling and be the leader, but you really need a team of people to surround yourself with because you do get synergies where when there’s one other person, it is more than double the output and when it’s triple, it’s more than triple the output. I would tell future entrepreneurs to find the right people, but this can be tough. Luckily, there are a lot of free networking events in the Valley; you can get out there and meet people that share your vision and dreams and who you also get along with. And complement your skills. That would be my one piece of advice.

THE YourVersion TEAM

THE INTERVIEW

Kim Ngo: You seem really confident. Are you afraid of anything?

Rick Marini: I am especially confident right now because things are taking off for us and we are getting stronger everyday. After a year of hard work for the team, we are starting to have some real fun.

Rick Marini on Vacation

Kim Ngo: Do you fear you might let them down? It is normal.

Rick Marini: I see it differently… it’s not about me letting them down; we are all in this together. And we are all working hard to make SuperFan the best social media site on the web. If you’re not an optimist, if you don’t think you can take on the world and win, don’t be an entrepreneur. Seriously.

Kim Ngo: But that’s not human.

Rick Marin: Most people who have done truly great things in life aren’t balanced people. They’re not normal people. Look at star athletes, look at Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson or Dwight Howard. Guys like that don’t have normal lives. They spent all their time on the basketball court becoming the best players in NBA history. These athletes are not balanced and entrepreneurs are not balanced people either. We spend 80 hours at work each week and the rest of the time thinking about work. It’s hard but you have to believe that you can create a significant company and work hard to succeed.

Rick skydiving in Queenstown, New Zealand

Kim Ngo: But is it okay to have fear?

Rick Marini: Sure, it’s fine to have fear and to be realistic. I am a realist. I didn’t go into this venture thinking it would be easy to sell another one for $100 million. I have high goals and a plan to get us there, but this is hard stuff. If everyone had the ability to become the next Larry and Sergey of Google, then everyone would be doing it right now. Being an entrepreneur is similar to being an actor in Hollywood. There’s Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, who both get paid $20 million a movie. And there’s a lot of actors who are waiting tables in LA that just aren’t going to make it. It’s not easy to make it as an actor or entrepreneur but the success stories keep the dream alive for everyone.

Kim Ngo: I want to get into your personal life now. Like, who are you as a person, what drives you?

Rick with his brother, Kyle

Rick Marin: I have a strong internal drive to succeed plus my family and friends who continually contribute to my drive. For example, my dad was really into sports and he coached me when I was a kid. He drove me hard. I would come home from school and I would have a new schedule each day including running, practice, chores, homework, etc. My background in sports has driven me to be super competitive. Through training for sports, I learned that if I worked harder than everyone else and kept a positive attitude, I became an all-star; so I applied that lesson to school, business and life.

Kim Ngo: What keeps you up at night?

Rick Marini: Last night I didn’t fall asleep until after 2:00 am because we had just moved into the new office and I was pumped up. The things that keep me up lately are often more positive than negative. Most of the challenges within a business can be conquered. If I can’t control something then I don’t spend too much time on it. I focus on what I can control and try to get that right. But I get really fired up about positive things. The adrenaline gets pumping and it feels awesome.

Christina K Lopes and Rick Marini at Carmel Mission Ranch (Clint Eastwood's place)

Kim Ngo: So it’s like a drug. It’s like falling in love!

Rick Marini: That’s why being an entrepreneur is so fun. When good things happen, it’s like a feeling of love. That’s why entrepreneurs keep coming back, even when they fail, they come back to feel the high.

Kim Ngo: Who is your favorite female celebrity? Who is the hottest celebrity out there right now?

Rick Marini: I’m a fan of Megan Fox right now. My all time favorite is Angelina Jolie because she is the full package. She is beautiful but is doing a lot of things to change the world in a positive way, and I have a lot of respect for that.