Caterina Fake
Co-Founder, Flickr. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
1shows
2appearances
14statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Caterina Fake said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Fake: Social platforms are defined entirely by the behavior they tolerate
“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…”
Fake: Early Flickr explicitly permitted bare midriffs despite alienating Muslim users
“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…”
Fake: Investors overlooked Etsy's female-dominated, countercultural marketplace in early rounds
“One of the things that was missed was that it was a principally female marketplace, right? And at the time it was 2005, 2006. There were a few examples of that, but Etsy was also a market that appealed to a certain kind of semi-countercultural group.”
Caterina Fake: Diversity initiatives grafted on years after founding usually fail
“Deliberately choosing and building a team at the very outset will carry through the organization from the get-go. I mean, you can, you know, a lot of companies try to graft on these Diversity initiatives, 12 years after the founding of the company, and those t…”
Fake: Idealab research proves timing is the top factor in startup success
“Bill Gross at Idea Lab did this research where he looked at all of the different companies, 203 hundred companies that he had invested in over his career, and tried to figure out what it was that made them successful. Was it execution? Was it the market? Was i…”
Fake: The term 'social media' was coined purely to sell ad inventory
“The reason that they called it social media is because you can sell media. You can sell column inches. You can sell broadcast hours. You can advertise against it, but it was not social media. That is not what it was. It was an online community, and that meant …”
Fake: By Flickr's 2003 launch, most cameras were already inside mobile phones
“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.”
Fake: Founder-modeled community behavior naturally scales from 500 to 500,000 users
“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.”
Fake: Most companies avoid direct communication and treat users as support problems
“It's very rare these days for there to be direct communication between companies and their user base. In fact, they're seen as a customer service problem, eating up customer service hours, and actually most companies actually try to prevent you from getting in…”
Fake: Etsy succeeded as a consumer rebellion against big-box retail
“Not only is it that, but it's a movement. It's this sort of rebellion against big box retail and people want their soap to come from a grandmother in Peoria.”
Fake: Blue Bottle possessed authentic culture rather than contrived marketing
“You could see that there was this incredibly strong culture and a very strong seed had been planted. It had that, that very human element. It had that mystique. It had a creation myth. It had this eccentric location in this alley. And there was something about…”
Fake: Early Flickr's tiny team manually posted 50 times daily per person
“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.”
Fake: Early Etsy Customers Were Also Sellers Buying From One Another
“In the very beginning, a lot of the customers of Etsy were actually also the sellers. So they were buying from each other and they were kind of, it was this positive feedback loop.”
The other half of the tape: Caterina Fake's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Caterina Fake, by other people (1)
Hoffman: Passing on Etsy's angel round cost a 20x to 50x return
“And so part of the mistake was, you know, when she presented to me, it was before it was venture invested, right? I could have put in money essentially as an angel. And, you know, I don't know what Etsy's valuation is today, two billion dollars, something like…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Caterina's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Co-Founder, Flickr | 2 | 14 | 100% 3/3 | full record on Masters of Scale → |