Founders at Work.pdf

James Hong 379
going to cost at least $150,000 in bandwidth per year at the current run rate,
and it was growing fast.
We realized quickly that the momentum would make us broke. I was
already $60,000 in debt from grad school. I had turned down a consulting job
paying around $170,000. I did it to roll the dice, but I was poor. I knew we
couldn’t afford this and thought seriously about shutting it down.
Livingston: So what did you do?
Hong: We were panicking at this point. There was no plan for a business, it was
just, “How the fuck do we keep this thing going?” We weren’t trying to figure
out what kind of boat we needed to build, we were trying to keep from drowning.
But we did know a few things: we had to reduce our costs, we had to make
it make money somehow, and we needed more machines. And because the idea
could be so easily copied, we had to get as much press as possible to lock out
anyone else from getting publicity.
So it was panic. The whole point was just to keep going, keep going, don’t
stop. I got 8 hours of sleep in the first 8 days, and finally they made me sleep
because I was literally shaking.
Livingston: Take me through the turning points of the first 8 days.
Hong: Basically, the feeling was: do whatever you have to do, just scrape on by.
So we first addressed the biggest problem, which was getting rid of the huge
bandwidth driven by the pictures. That was why we almost shut down the site.
It was 12:30 a.m. after the day we launched, and I was sitting in the drive-thru
at In-N-Out when I had an idea.
Three days earlier, my brother and I had launched something on XMethods,
which was a web service–based file system, basically a network drive, and I
showed it to Dave Winer. Though he subsequently copied it, at that time he
said, “Why the hell would I need that? That’s called FTP. I have a Yahoo
GeoCities account that lets me FTP to it.” I owe Dave a lot for his cynicism.
So sitting in line, I remembered what Dave had said, and I thought, “Holy
shit, we don’t need to host the pictures, we’ll let Yahoo do it!
“We’ll just FTP all the pictures we have now up to a Yahoo GeoCities
account, and we’ll change the database records so that it will point to the files
on Yahoo, and then from that point on, we’ll just make instructions telling
people to go to Yahoo GeoCities and then submit URLs of their pictures.”
We lost some users from submitting it this way, obviously, but it solved the
problem. And the way I figured it, I said to Jim, “Dude, how many page views,
especially at the speed of the site, will anyone have each day, maybe 25? All we
need is 25 new pictures a day and we’re done. We don’t have to have a billion
pictures, we just need 25 new pictures a day. So that’s what we did. And this
wasn’t planning, it was survival mode. I can’t tell you enough how much it was
survival. Desperation is a good word to describe it.
So between 12:30 and 3 a.m. on the day we launched, we moved all the pictures
to Yahoo and solved the image problem.