At the age of 20, Michael Hussey launched RateMyFace.com—the first of his well-known rating websites, RateMyTeachers.com (Check out his RateMyTeachers 2006 CNN Interview), RateMyProfessors.com, and other rating sites. After several years of hard work dedicated to his first sites, Michael was forced to leave RateMyProfessors by events out of his control. The exit cost him his entire share of ownership. To add insult to injury, when an online bookstore from Baltimore later purchased RateMyProfessors and then sold it to MTV for millions of dollars, Michael received nothing.

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

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

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.