I think people who come from outside an industry have a superpower. You are able to see things in a different way compared to people who have spent all of their time within an industry. Before the internet happened, I was planning on getting a PHD in renaissance literature. The internet was an alternate path for me.
I encourage people to emphasize the parts of themselves that are different from the mainstream expectation of who you are supposed to be. Coming from a different direction is almost always an advantage.
We didn’t set out to start Flickr. We were in the process of building something different. A game. This was right after the dot com bust. We couldn’t get funding for our game. Flickr was a Hail Mary that turned into a successful business. Things were different back then. We looked at Flickr as an online community [as opposed to Social Media].
There are some entrepreneurs that are so bull headed and stubborn. They won’t quit. Companies go out of business when the founders quit. When they stop. When they can’t take it anymore.
Is it true your team would manually greet everyone who came to Flickr in order to build the community? In the first 3 months of Flickr each team member would post in the forums 50 times a day. They were commenting on people’s photographs. We were very strong participants in the community as it was being built. I am a big believer in this.
I wrote an article for Wired talking about how founders are “The Abraham”. In the Bible Abraham begat a person, and that person begat someone else, and so on. I believe the entrepreneur is The Abraham of the company. They dictate what the behavioral practices of the community are.
All of those things are how communities are built. Contributing to the conversation all the time is a really important part of building an online community. Things went off the rails when online communities were renamed and repackaged as social media. Then it became a media platform in which attention could be sold. That’s very different than building a community from the ground up.
Being different is an advantage: There are many things about me that are not typical. Coming from a humanities background gave me a special [different] view that other people weren’t seeing.
One of the reasons I’m an entrepreneur is so I can manage my own time. I think the highest quality of living comes from being the master of your own time.
One of my theories on cultural movements right now is there is a very strong desire to simplify your life. We want protection against being constantly bombarded with information and choices.
When I am my most productive self, I’m online a lot less.
A quote Caterina loves: “If I had my life to live over again, I would have made it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week, for perhaps the part of my brain now atrophied would then have been kept alive through life. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.” - Charles Darwin
Quote from Caterina’s essay on behavior you see on social media: Social peacocking is life on the internet without the shadow. It is an incomplete representation of a life, a half of a person, a fraction of the wholeness of a human being.
Book recommendations: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, The Odyssey by Homer, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Hannah Versus the Tree, The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald.
Books that Caterina has given as gifts the most: Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, Drawings and Observations, The Principles of Uncertainty.
