Flickr

“Cal Henderson, who's the CTO of Slack, and who also, we worked together on Flickr, so have worked together now for 23 years, have been talking about what we want to do next if there is something.”

“Yahoo bought what was it? It was Flickr and Delicious. Did Yahoo buy them both? Yeah, exactly. And they were like twenty-five million dollar tickets each.”

“He said that about half the day was probably the same as it was for many of the people in the audience, scrambling to keep their technology platform one step ahead of the rapid growth of their business. They worked on scaling their databases, web servers, soft…”

“They introduced conventions like tagging and following that are now deeply woven into the fabric of our online relationships.”

“And if you look at when we started Flickr, we started it in 2003. More than 50% of all cameras were shipping with digital phones.”

“You know, in the very beginning of Flickr, each of us, you know, we're a team of five or six people, we're posting an average of 50 times a day in communication with our user base.”

“If you do that, and you do it well, it will carry through. And then 500 people will be behaving the same way, and then 5000 people will be behaving that same way, and then eventually 500,000 people will be behaving that same way.”

“You know, the Muslim community did not like the bare midriff photographs that were all over Flickr, and we had to make a decision, and we came down on the side of the bare midriff. We were like, the bare midriff is okay here, and that is a decision that we are…”

“One of the things that Heather Champ, who is a community manager, the first community manager on Flickr, one thing that she says repeatedly is that what you tolerate is what you are. So if you tolerate white supremacists on your platform, you are a platform fo…”

“Flickr was very famously a team of 20 people, and we never wanted to get larger than 20, which meant that once people started leaving, we didn't have a lot of resilience, and very quickly that organization got unhealthy.”

“Remember Flickr started this where there was no E in it.”

“It wasn't coming from a grand vision of what photos could be. All that stuff came later. There was no insight. It was just like, can we not go out of business?”

“It's not games that are so interesting to me, it's play as an excuse to interact with people socially.”

“We launched in February 2004 and by March 2005, the acquisition by Yahoo had closed. Basically a year in market, and maybe 10 and a half months before we were in the middle of negotiations.”

“Well, I used some open source software called Gallery, and it was a PHP script that would allow pre-Flickr, pre-Facebook, pre-anything to post photos and have galleries online.”

“The very first one I did on my own was a company called PhotoBucket, which we ultimately sold for three hundred thirty million dollars, which sounded like all the money in the world at the time. You know, Flickr had sold for like 25 to thirty five million doll…”

“Started another company called Ludicorp to build a web-based, massively multiplayer game called Game NeverEnding. That didn't work, but we made Flickr instead.”

“Most of that original Flickr team got back together to start another company called TinySpec to build a web-based massively multiplayer game that didn't work, and then we ended up with Slack.”

“Flickr was already acquired maybe, like, eight months or something like that before YouTube was even founded.”

“And that thing ended up being Flickr, and I think when we started it, the intention was, we'll build this, and someone will buy it for, like, a million dollars, and then we can use that million dollars to finish the game.”

“On the train to London every day, two hours in, two hours out, he wrote almost all of the guts of Flickr the way to upload the photos and to process them, to store them, display them.”

“The original payment he got was me buying stuff off his Amazon wishlist.”

“So we had this vote. I lost you know, or Flickr lost in game one, so that I had to call Eric on the side and, like, you know, do some, what I imagine happens in the Senate, some kind of, like, horse trading to convince him to change his vote. And that worked, …”

“Google had bought Blogger which was one of the early blogging programs, and they didn't have a way to host photos, so they put, you know, in their help materials online When people said, how do I upload photos? They said, use Flickr.”

“It was around twenty million bucks.”

“I mean, like, a hundred percent of the time, they would give the opposite advice today.”

“Well, at the time we were required, it was nine people. So Nine people being acquired by what at the time I think was like an 11 or 12,000 person company.”

“Now when we wanted to get more servers, we had to go to the hardware review committee, and you had to make an appointment, and you couldn't get an appointment for like five weeks.”

“It's pretty challenging to work with your spouse, especially in the early days of a startup, so this is going back many years now, when we first started working on Flickr, like, out of money, and it's not just the business is out of money, it's like, we're out…”