While many would consider this outcome very painful, Michael sees it as a source of pride, a valuable experience, and ultimately, inspiration to build greater things like his most recent project, PeekYou—a people search engine whereby users can find people through their first name, surname, online aliases, e-mail address, or physical location. Click here to read more about PeekYou: Call Off the Search; Michael Hussey Can Find Who You’re Looking For

Michael sits in with IntimateMath to let us in on his trying experiences with the companies he’s founded and how he keeps moving forward to build websites which “make enough people’s lives a little bit better or simply more fun.”

A Short Clip of My Conversation with Michael Hussey
Trouble Viewing? Visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ERcJKJHD6E

PROFILE

STATS
Companies Founded:
1. RateMy™ Network / infiniteMedium, 2000-2002
Holding company for: RateMyFace, RateMyProfessors, RateMyTeachers, and other rating sites
Total Funding: $100,000
Highest Numbers of Employees: 5

2. StudyBreakers, 2005
Studybreakers (earlier known as Classface) was a free service for high school students to communicate with each other through an interactive network of online photo albums, weblogs, user profiles, web forums, and groups. It was acquired by Bolt.com, which eventually went out of

Michael Hussey with McGruff The Crime Dog

business and took the site down with it.

Total Funding: Bootstrapped
Highest Numbers of Employees: 5

3. PeekYou, 2006 – Current
Title: Founder & CEO
Total Funding: $1.4M
Highest Numbers of Employees: 12

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Hometown: Alfred, Maine
Current Residence: New York City, New York
Education: University of Maine, BA, Financial Economics, May 2000
Age: 31
Hobbies/Interests: Reading, skiing, tennis, basketball, digital photography, GigaPan robots, watching the Celtics, watching football, watching movies with my wife, and traveling
Most Notable Quality: Foresight
First Taste of Success: SoccerSpot.com (as a 19-year-old kid with a press pass to Foxboro Stadium, sitting next to reporters from ESPN and other big networks)
Proudest Moment: My wedding day
Worst Habit: A penchant for fast food
I’m Happiest …: Breathing life into what was a mere concept just yesterday
Biggest fear: Not trying hard enough, not doing enough to get what I want, and not having enough time in a day to do everything I’d like to do.
Favorite Quote: “All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.”—Edward Gibbon
Role Model: Peter Thiel

Michael Hussey’s: PeekYou | HomePage | Twitter | Linkedin | Facebook | 2006 CNN Interview

THE INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Kim Ngo: Hi Michael. Thanks for chatting with IntimateMath. Tell us what drives you.

The Young Michael Hussey

Michael Hussey: I love building concepts and organizing data. These are things I’ve been doing nearly my whole life. I remember sitting in front of a computer since I was three years old.

Kim Ngo: Is that what inspired you to code?

Michael Hussey: No, it inspired me to seek out other people I could work with to develop (and code) concepts I envision.

Kim Ngo: You don’t code?

Michael Hussey: I considered majoring in computer science and I even did well in my programming classes, but I realized that my time was better spent working with more passionate and talented developers. I consider myself more like an architect of ideas who is able to speak well and clearly to the various parties involved in developing a web business like techies, developers, or would-be end users.

Kim Ngo: Did you have any idea that RateMyFace would become so popular?

Michael Hussey: I knew it was going to be big. I just didn’t know how much work it would be. In the first week, we had 100,000 visitors. Ron, my business partner who I met at the University of Maine, and I spread the word about the site through AOL chat rooms – it didn’t take much to stoke the fire. RateMyFace was growing so quickly, but the program we wrote required five minutes of manual labor per photo uploaded just to create an account. At the time, I had a day job and an internship. I felt that I couldn’t manage all the work for RateMyFace on top of my other commitments to school and work, so I decided to temporarily shut down RateMyFace to focus on finishing school.

The next summer I re-launched the site, but by then, HotOrNot was also online. They had a very simple site, and it worked well. HotOrNot was basically a copycat of RateMyFace where users were able to rate other people’s pictures.

Kim Ngo: Then what happened?

Michael Hussey: Soon after RateMyFace was relaunched, the New York Times picked up on this face rating fad and interviewed both me and someone from HotOrNot. At the last minute, however, the editors struck out our site’s URL from the article because we were an age 13+ site while HotOrNot was 18+. The Times was nervous about our lax age restrictions since face rating was such a new and controversial thing. So I did get quoted in their article, name and all that, but RateMyFace’s URL wasn’t mentioned. From that point on HotOrNot went on to get all the credit.

Today, everyone has heard of HotOrNot. That’s what happened. I was sort of upset at first, but I wasn’t entirely disappointed because I had already started working on the RateMy™ Network of sites: RateMyTeachers, RateMyPets, RateMyWheels, etc.—we owned 700 domains back then. I knew I could use the success of RateMyFace to promote those more important sites. This was always the intention anyway.

PeekYou

Kim Ngo: Tell us about your new venture, PeekYou.com.

Michael Hussey: I wanted to build something enduring and eternal that will be useful forever. PeekYou is an attempt to reorganize the web around individuals. The building blocks of the web are web links. Google is able to index links, the sites that are linked to each other, and the text on those pages. I wanted to add the human component to these web links.

Kim Ngo: Is PeekYou a virtual web-book, like a phone book but with links?

Michael Hussey: It’s an index or database. It’s like, “Here’s Kim’s bucket with all her public links to pictures, homepages, social networks, blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.” Everyone who is online is going to keep creating links and pages for the rest of their lives. It is my goal to keep filling your “URL bucket” throughout your lifetime and create a single comprehensive repository that belongs to you.

Michael Hussey and PeekYou Team

Kim Ngo: Sounds like you’re creating a web identity for users.

Michael Hussey: Your identity can be derived from the data on your links. You can understand people’s motives by understanding where they participate on the web, what they say on the web, and what they share about themselves. At PeekYou, we ask ourselves, “Can we make sense of the content on that link? Can we make sense of the data on that page?” If so, PeekYou will organize it.

Kim Ngo: And what do you do with this data?

Michael Hussey: There are so many applications for this kind of data. For example, we can use it to bring about more relevant search results from traditional search engines by knowing something about the person performing the search, their background and interests, and, hence, the search results they are likely interested in. People search is a massive market; 25 to 30 percent of Google’s searches are related to specific people in some way, but a lot of people searching on Google is aimed at common people. I believe that people search is still Google’s weakest technology because, for example, there are 100 or more people with my name, and Google doesn’t really know who’s who. Try Googling Michael Hussey. He’s a famous cricket player from Australia, but I’m not that Michael Hussey.

PeekYou Version1.0, 2006

This chaotic experience for searching my name on Google was one of the instigators of the PeekYou concept. This example makes clear how important our database of personal identities tied to web links can be.
With time, the output of ordinary people on the web will only grow, and keeping track of that output, organizing it, and assigning every element of it to its respective author is a necessary endeavor. When I started PeekYou, nobody was doing work in people search; nobody was talking about it. The space has substantially heated up over the past year, and we no longer necessarily enjoy the first-mover advantage. We’re looking to really blow things out this year, in 2010.

Kim Ngo: Let’s go back. How did you get started?

Michael Hussey: When I was 19 years old, I helped start a little web magazine called Soccerspot.com with other fans of U.S. Soccer around the country. There I was, just a kid, but I was sitting next to reporters from publications like ESPN and The Boston Globe. The experience came and went, but it definitely sparked my interest and confidence and taught me that I was capable of much more.

I started playing with the idea of creating an online popularity contest or a rating contest on the web. I’ve always been obsessed with rating things on a scale of 1 to 10. Every time I walk out of a movie, I rate it and I ask the people I watched it with to rate it too.

I started thinking about rating other things besides movies. So I thought to myself, we could have a site for rating coffees, cameras, teachers, and just about everything else. But I knew that I needed to start with something big—something kind of controversial that would generate traffic and interest. Along with this idea, I realized that we could build other sites’ traffic from that of the first popular site through cross promotion.

Michael with His Very Supportive Wife

The first site my business partner, Ron, and I built was RateMyFace.com. Though, we shut it down soon after its first launch because its popularity and traffic were going through the roof, as was the work needed to keep it going. I also wanted to finish school. After graduation, we rebuilt the site. At about the same time, a technology law firm was interested in what we were doing and joined us as an investor and managing partner. This was a good thing because it was clear that I couldn’t operate more than 100 of these rating sites on my own. Ron and I knew that we needed individuals who were passionate about the specific sites and interested in performing the day-to-day operations.

I figured that anyone interested in ratings and in creating a community around a product would pay me for the rights to, say, RateMyCoffee and RateMyCellphone. I developed a plan to run the “RateMy” sites as a franchise business whereby third parties would pay us for the right to operate their own site in the network. We were set to work on software that would get any new rating site up and running within minutes. The software was to include a single login across the network and linked community features. In the meantime, we launched “test” franchises such as RateMyWheels, RateMyRecipe, and of course, RateMyTeachers/Professors. All these sites were launched between the spring and summer of 2001, and about $100,000 dollars went into them, provided by our new investors from the technology law firm. The law firm brought on a managing partner or CEO-type to help us build the business.

As things were progressing, I realized that the CEO was spending a lot of our money, but I wasn’t aware of the actual state of the finances until September 13th, 2001. It was a strange week. Obviously, no one came in on Wednesday, September 12th, but on Thursday, the D.C. police left us phone messages asking to speak with the CEO. It turns out he had been bouncing checks all across town and embezzling our company funds.

Besides the matter with the CEO, the contracts for the rating sites were set up to protect the test franchisees so that if anything happened to the holding company, they would have first rights on the rating sites they were operating. I owned a third of the company by then, but when the holding company fell apart as a result of the CEO’s actions, I lost my rights to all of my RateMy sites.

Michael Hussey in 2006, Working Out the Early Details of PeekYou

Kim Ngo: Did you lose rights to every single one of the rate sites?

Michael Hussey: Yes—everything.

When the “mothership” of the network fell apart due to our CEO’s fraudulent actions and final settlements were reached, the site operators took 100% ownership of the existing sites. So, for example, the operator of RateMyProfessors took full control of the site and did a good job running its day-to-day operations. As for RateMyTeachers, its operators were kind of clueless. About a year later, they had the good sense to invite me back on as a partner. I made it my mission to turn the site into a success over the following years. Over the next few years, we rebuilt RateMyTeachers from the ground up with a different design and enhanced functionality, and the site started making real money. By that time, I wanted to move on, and RateMyTeachers was able to continue growing essentially with one full-time employee and a team of very smart administrators from across the world. The site was essentially running itself.

Kim Ngo: Can you tell me about the sale of RateMyProfessors to MTV?

Michael Hussey: When RateMyProfessors was acquired, John, a guy with whom we started the site, had taken up 100% ownership and had become its sole operator. John sold it for a good amount of money, though I’m not sure exactly how much. He sold it to a really sharp guy named Pat who owned an online textbook company in Baltimore. Pat held on to RateMyProfessors for a year and then swung it to MTV for many millions of dollars—a most impressive feat.

Kim Ngo: Was that painful for you?

Michael Hussey: Not really. I felt pretty good about it even though I wasn’t participating in the upside. I was happy for John and Pat.

Kim Ngo: Did you learn anything from that experience?

Michael Hussey: Yeah, it gave me a lot of confidence. If I could create something that eventually sold for that much, I could do much greater things into the future. In fact, I knew I was already on that road with the PeekYou database.

The Birth of Your Online Identity

Kim Ngo: If you can leave one piece of advice to future founders, what would that be?

Michael Hussey: Get a mentor. Succeeding at a startup venture demands young entrepreneurs to be competent in many aspects of the business, not only in being creative and technically savvy but also being good at organizing and negotiating. The good advice of a mentor —or even better, their good example — can be invaluable at guiding a young entrepreneur in making sound decisions in the early days of his or her startup.

More generally, it is important to surround yourself with experienced people who want you to succeed, and to learn from them.

A good habit is to write down everything. If you come up with any worthwhile new ideas, get it down on paper. Writing it down is the first step to taking action on the concept. Getting it on paper helps me a lot in clarifying my own thoughts as they occur to me and it helps me make sure I don’t forget anything valuable in the heat of the moment.

And perhaps most important, have fun with whatever your endeavor is and make sure everyone you work with is having fun too.

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.

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 before setting off to start his own lustrous consulting firm, Olsen Solutions LLC, where he consulted numerous internet startups like Box.net, YouSendIt, and Moodlogic. In 2007, Dan took a bold leap by creating his own startup, which he operates out of the house he lives in. The passion and dedication shared by Dan and his team led to YourVersion’s thrilling launch at the recent TechCrunch50 conference. Dan gets personal about the humble beginnings of a startup and the passion that keeps pushing him forward.

Here I speak to Dan about:
- How YourVersion got started
- His toughest experience in building YourVersion
- How he manages things that are out of his control
- What he thinks YourVersion did differently to win the People’s Choice Award
- Why it’s so important to have a “Launch Culture”
- And his advice to future founders

Below are short clips from our meeting.

To Read Full Interview, visit: Read Dan Olsen

Thanks and Enjoy!