Caterina Fake: Changing the Face of the Internet, One Website At A Time

Caterina Fake wasted no time in beginning her career as an entrepreneur. In an interview with Benzinga's Alex Schiff on Zing Talk, she said, "At three or four years old, my mother told me I had to create a business for myself, so that you can earn a living somehow. So I started selling my drawings to her and my grandparents. I had a very small, but a very dedicated market. They all say $0.25 in the corner." Talk about a head start! Aspiring entrepreneurs need not worry that they have joined the game too late. Ms. Fake, co-founder of the wildly popular Flickr and the up-and-coming Hunch.com, traveled a long and winding road to get to where she is today. In fact, the just-turned-40-year-old recipient of prestigious honors such as inclusion in BusinessWeek's Best Leaders of 2005, and Fast Company's Fast 50 is a self-professed "late-comer to the business world." After graduating with a degree in English from Vassar, a liberal arts college located in New York state, Caterina spent years hopping from one profession to another, "I did a job as a production assistant on Seinfeld, I worked at a Dive Shop in Arkansas, I was briefly an investment banker and I worked as a painter's assistant." Not the typical track to a career in creating Web 2.0 phenomena. It wasn't until her late twenties that Caterina found and latched on to her passion: the Internet. "It was the thing I loved to do," she gushes, "the love was immediate." A model of Internet success and Fake's brainchild, Flickr.com, had a similarly shaky start. In the summer of 2002, Caterina co-founded the company Ludicorp, which initially focused on creating an online game. The project, however, went bankrupt. In addition to a lack of financial resources, Ludicorp launched Flickr in what Fake describes as the "nuclear winter of 2001-2004," a time when, "consumer internet was very out of fashion, unlike today where there are startups everywhere." The gamble paid off. To date, Flickr hosts over five billion images, and has been credited with being an early example of the current social media craze. Like Flickr before it, Hunch.com, Caterina's newest contribution to the Internet world, came to be in a moment of crisis. Fake co-founded the company in 2009, during one of the most difficult economic climates since the Great Depression. Hunch.com is, like its co-creator, "ambitious." The site, according to Ms. Fake, attempts to "map every person on the Internet to every item on the Internet and their affinity for this item. It will figure out what people will like and what they will not like, give them search results, recommendations, etc." Despite the challenging economic times, Hunch.com has thrived — the site boasts 60 millions questions that have been answered by visitors thus far. Caterina Fake has made her career by taking traditional business logic, and turning it on its head. She has created two ingenious and innovative sites, the first of which helped to change the face of the Internet, and the second of which promises to do so in the near future. Not only are her two websites massive hits, she started both of them in a time of low consumer confidence. "Working in a climate when people are frightened or less confident is a good time to start a company," she claims, "everybody is running for cover, there are incredible opportunities out there for people who are not." And while Caterina isn't planning on slowing down anytime soon, she's excited about what the next generation of innovators will bring to the table, "I am a die-hard believer that two kids in a garage are creating 'The Thing' that will destroy Google, or Facebook, or Ebay." Until then, we will make do with the help of the creations of entrepreneurs like Caterina Fake. You can listen to the full interview on Zing Talk.