Founders at Work.pdf

380 Founders at Work
But the Salon.com article was coming out the next morning. I called the
writer and asked her if she could push the story back, but she said it was a slow
news day and she couldn’t. So the article came out and the server got slammed.
My brother needed the server for XMethods, so we did the quickest thing we
could think of, which was that night at 3:00 a.m., we took the site down,
grabbed an extra PC—a 400 megahertz Celeron, no-memory-in-it machine
that I got for free when I opened an eTrade account—and drove to Berkeley
where Jim had a shared office.
I remember taking the top off a case for pushpins and mounting it on top of
the power switch of the machine so no one could turn it off. Then we put it in
the corner under his desk and surrounded it with books, so it just looked like a
bunch of stuff under his desk with a little Ethernet cable coming out.
And as soon as we turned the site back on, the access logs started flying. It
was 5 in the morning!
Livingston: So what next?
Hong: We now had solved the two most immediate problems to keep the site
running, so we were breathing a little easier, but the site was still slow. On day
three, I started looking into managed hosts, and Rackspace came up as the clear
Linux leader. Though we had no money, we were getting a lot of press, so after
a failed attempt to pitch my idea to the Rackspace salesperson, I called the
head of business development and said, “I know you guys want to go public and
it’s great to get your name out. Your whole value proposition is that you can help
companies scale fast by outsourcing. If you can help us, I have all these upcoming
interviews, and we can be a poster child for you.”
He said, “OK, don’t worry, just tell us what you need right now to scale, and
we’ll figure it out later.” So every day that week, I would call them and say that
we needed more machines. We owe Rackspace big.
At the same time, a friend suggested that we sign up for an ad network, and
we were trying to get into 24/7. But we were having a lot of problems with porn
and naked picture submissions to the site. And I knew that no one would advertise
if this was dirty. So we came up with the motto “Fun, clean, and real” and
created a system where people could click a link under an inappropriate picture
and, based on an algorithm, we would kill any picture that got clicked on too
much. So it was community-regulated and that worked pretty well.
I sent an email to the founder of DoubleClick telling him about us and
requesting his help getting into 24/7. He responded saying that unfortunately
the first picture he got when he went to our site was a naked woman. He said
that right now we were innocent until proven guilty, but we needed to move to
a guilty until proven innocent model in order to get advertising.
So we decided to build a moderation system. I originally had my parents
moderating since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it
was going. He said, “Oh, it’s really interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and
a girl and another girl and they were doing . . .” So I told Jim, “Dude, my parents
can’t do this any more. They’re looking at porn all day.” We decided to
open up the community of moderators to the public. You had to apply and write