Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake differentiates authentic online communities from advertising-driven social media platforms.
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”