Founders at Work.pdf

378 Founders at Work
Hong: Jim was burned out from working on his PhD, and I had just graduated
from business school and was unemployed, so I figured what the hell, let’s build
it. It wasn’t that hard to build in the beginning—it was hard to build later
because we had to scale it—but just putting up something that looked like it
worked was easy. It was not something we focused on. We had the idea one
Monday, and it was coded by Wednesday or Thursday in spare time, really, and
then Jim sent it to me on the weekend. There was no hurry; this was not something
we were thinking about.
The weekend before it launched, I was visiting my parents and my dad
walked into the room and saw me playing with the site and he asked what I was
doing. I didn’t want to admit that I was spending time on this thing since I
was unemployed and should have been looking for a job, so I told him it was
something Jim was doing. My dad was the first person that ever saw HOT or
NOT besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-yearold
retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s
saying, “She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.” We knew then that the idea had
some legs, but we didn’t know how much.
So we launched it on Monday with our own pictures, and at around 2 p.m. I
emailed it to 40 friends and wrote, “Here’s a website that Jim and I made—be
nice.” And I put a link to my picture on the site so they could rate me. I think
we got 40,000 hits that day.
Livingston: Forty thousand hits on your first day when only a handful of people
knew it existed?
Hong: I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this, but after I sent out that first
email, I went rollerblading around a big office park where Tellme was based. I
went up to a random guy and said, “Hey man, have you checked out
hotornot.com yet?” He said, “No, what’s that?” I said, “Dude, just go check it
out!” Then I went home and watched our logs for Tellme and saw a hit come in
10 minutes later, and then more hits kept coming from different people within
Tellme.
Three days later I went back to that parking lot and found someone else and
asked, “Have you seen some site where you rate people from 1 to 10?” And he
said, “Yeah, dude, HOT or NOT!” So that was cool; it totally spread on its own.
Livingston: You had people coming to your site from the very beginning. At
what point did you decide that it could be a business? What were the next
steps?
Hong: That question implies planning. We were more concerned with fear and
survival at the time. I was interviewed by Salon.com the day we launched the
site, and that started a string of near disasters.
Livingston: You were “not ready for prime time”?
Hong: Not at all. The site was on the XMethods server and we really needed to
get it off because the traffic was shutting it down. The bandwidth was crazy; we
were hosting the pictures at the time. After you voted, it took 30 seconds to get
the next page—and at the end of the first day I calculated that this thing was