Caterina Fake
A lot of things have changed since the days of Flickr. Facebook has concentrated the sociality of the Internet within its blue borders, like a Walmart siphoning off the mom-and-pop shops that formerly comprised the Internet's gathering places. Communication, in the age of mobile dominance, has become, of necessity, shorter and snack-sized.Collection: Communication
The computers people have are no longer on their desks but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world.Collection: Technology
Every place has a story - or a thousand stories. Findery brings places to life, be they where you stand or where you hope to go.Collection: Hope
Our successes have been so great and so rapid that, within 20 years, we've gotten a third of the world's population online, shrunk our computers to the size of our hands, and connected each to each.Collection: Computers
Dream, struggle, create, prevail. Be daring. Be brave. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be strong. Be brilliant. Be beautiful.
Sometimes you climb the mountain, and you fall and fail. Maybe there is a different path that will take you up. Sometimes a different mountain.
Being pregnant has all kinds of advantages. People keep telling you how beautiful you look. They do it over and over. Very sweet of them, but it is just not true. I've seen myself before, and I've definitely looked better.
Good parents, who are able to maintain the affection and respect of their children and whose offspring admire them and value their good opinion, can be reasonably certain that their values and ways of socialized behaving will be adopted by the next generation.
I learned most of what I knew about online communities on The Well, and it was a good place to learn. The group of people in Sausalito and Bolinas who'd gotten the Whole Earth Catalog off the ground - a bunch of boomer hippies, intellectuals and nerds - established the 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link', and showed us what online communities were.
It's fairly easy to know when you've succeeded because you're kind of hanging on for dear life. It's such an unstoppable juggernaut; you're trying to stay with your head above water because things are moving so fast.
In my house, there is an old Chinese cabinet full of little figurines on two shelves. They are for my daughter, to tell stories. We have told hours and hours or stories using these figures. There are all kinds of people, children and adults, and all kinds of animals - elephants, tigers, snakes.
One of the many wonderful things about homeschooling is that I am constantly learning alongside my daughter.
I worked at a Web development shop and other start-ups and eventually started a project called Ludicorp, which built an online game. We soon ran out of money, and Flickr was the last-ditch effort to save the company. It quickly became a very unstoppable juggernaut.
If you built a successful company the first time, it's really important not to fall into the trap of resting on your laurels and doing the same thing the next time. It's stepping into the unknown that enables you to create something fresh, new, and innovative.
My life project is humanizing technology: making technology more real and bringing it back into human interactions.
The children of less effective, less competent parents will be more likely to adopt the customs and values of the peer group.
When we were making Flickr, we called it the 'Eyes of the World.' The idea was that everybody, everywhere, is looking. It was this sense of being able to penetrate worlds that you had never been able to access before - of global, universal travel.
If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are; we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.
If you look at all the companies I've been involved with - Flickr, Etsy, Findery - communities are a significant part of them. Connecting people to each other, user-generated content, building interactions. That's what I've cared about most.
In building a social network, the standards and mores of a community are its lifeblood; one does not lightly 'experiment' with these, and LinkedIn is exactly right to defend them.
If you looked at my resume in the years leading up to Flickr, I worked in a dive shop in landlocked Arkansas; I was a starving artist. I just arrived at the thing I love to do accidentally.
My background isn't in social software; it's in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on the Internet in the 1980s, and the magic moment for me arose from my being a literature geek, especially Dante and Shakespeare.
The things I'm good at are building communities, participatory media, places where people contribute things of their own making.
Etsy helps work be more human - you can stay at home and work alongside your kids - and it makes commerce more personal.
College works on the factory model and is, in many ways, not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student, and out comes a scholar.
I love participatory media, collective knowledge systems, user-generated content and the like, and spent much of my life and career participating in them and making them.
On Etsy, you can't resell new goods you weren't involved in making, whereas on eBay and Amazon, that is more than welcome - everything from dishwashers to XBoxes, curling irons, espresso machines, and metal detectors.
Part of why making Pinwheel is so fun, is so exploding with possibility, is that a note, like a photo, can be a container for all kinds of things. It is the perfect social object. Stories, advice, jokes, diatribes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, love letters, grocery lists, and manifestoes can all be put into a note.
My background is in art. I was a painter and an occasional sculptor, and I really like materials - you know, stuff. Physical objects. The world and the trees and the sunshine and the flowers. And all of that doesn't seem to really exist out in the ether of the Internet.
When I die and my memories die with me, all that will remain will be thousands of yellowing photographs and 35mm negatives in my filing cabinets.
A lot of the reason I wanted to become an entrepreneur and avoid working for others is that you get to create the world you want to live in and the company you want to work for, and I've loved that. It's a part of entrepreneurship that women should really embrace.
I joined the board of Etsy when it was just three founders, and I helped recruit the COO and CTO, Chad Dickerson, who later became the CEO.
I've had two IPOs: with Etsy in 2015 and Cloudera in 2016. There have also been a ton of trade sales in my portfolio.
When you have a failed pitch, you meet many more venture capitalists than you really want to.
Trade sales are the bulk of exits, and there's no shame in that. Sometimes, it's exactly the right thing to do.
Do not seek prizes that aren't worth getting.
Facebook is a powerful company, yes, but so was IBM.
If the business were a play, Act One is, 'Woohoo, bright and bushy-tailed. We're going to make something great!' Act Two is, 'We're six months behind on back-end development.'
I work really hard. My daughter asks me what I do, and it's mostly calls, emails, and meetings. We have our office in Hayes Valley, a nice part of town, because we're all about place being important.
I go to bed early - around 9 P.M. or 10 P.M. - and wake up between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M. and get an extra three hours of work done. Then I have a regular work day. It's very effective.
A co-founder is like being somebody's parent: You want to make sure your offspring thrive.
I stay up on current events. I read 'The New Yorker' and 'The Economist.' I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.
I approached Yahoo as a learning experience. Everything at every stage of the game affects what you do next. At Yahoo, I learned a lot about social search and met a lot of amazing people - some are now entrepreneurs with companies I subsequently invested in.
The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry.
As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.
I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.
College is an environment designed to encourage openness - the ability to think of things in novel ways and entertain unconventional beliefs.
One of the issues we face here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is a sense that the people all around us are as conversant in startup and tech culture as we are. But we need to remember, and remind ourselves repeatedly, that we're a small minority in a larger population.
I had never understood why the farmlands of the U.S. had been settled in such a sparse and isolated way, whereas the farming communities in Europe seemed closer, more convivial, centered around village life.
I wish we didn't have to be nude to be noticed... But given the game as it exists, women make decisions. For instance, the Miss America contest is, in all of its states... the single greatest source of scholarship money for women in the United States.