Caterina Fake

Cofounder of Flickr

• Born: June 13, 1969
• Place of Birth: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Primary Company/Organization: Flickr

Introduction

Caterina Fake developed online communities where people could share art, photography, and writing and chat about common interests. Her Internet start-ups Flickr and Hunch gained the attention of Yahoo! and eBay, earning her millions. Fake is seen as a role model for women interested in Internet entrepreneurship. Her abilities to think outside the box, focus on a goal, and collaborate with others on creative projects have played key roles in her success.

Early Life

Caterina Fake was born to an American father and a Filipina mother on June 13, 1969, in a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Fake's father, Peter, a retired insurance executive with a master's degree in English literature, shared his love of learning and sense of wonder with his daughter. Some of Fake's earliest memories involve playing word games, collecting seashells and butterflies, and learning about astronomy with her father.

Fake's leadership potential was evident as early as kindergarten, when one day she decided to go to school without shoes and successfully persuaded her classmates to throw their own shoes out the window. She was a highly intelligent, studious girl who spent many afternoons checking out books from the public library. Curious and driven, Fake did best in classes where she could design her own program for learning. During her high school years, she skipped many classes but did all of the assigned reading, often outsmarting her teachers by asking them unanswerable questions.

Following in her father's footsteps, Fake decided to study English literature, graduating from Vassar College in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in English. She appreciated the professors who challenged her to think and work hard. During her college years, she also worked at the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York, where she created art and handmade books.

Life's Work

Fake's original career plans involved art and writing, but she was drawn to the Internet for its potential to connect similarly minded people with common interests from around the world. The experience of creating and sharing art and literature in an alternative space inspired Fake to develop analogous online environments. She taught herself programming code in hypertext markup language (HTML) over the course of several months at her sister's house.

In the 1990s, Fake started her online career as a lead designer at the web-development agency Organic Online. There, she worked on the first websites and online ventures for Fortune 500 companies such as McDonald's, Kimberly-Clark, Colgate-Palmolive, Levi's, and Nike. After that, Fake became art director of the new Internet site Salon.com, which was heavily involved in the development of online community, social software, and personal publishing. In 1997, she took a job managing the community forums of Netscape. She also worked as creative director of Yellowball, an online space that enabled people to collaborate in the creation of stories and animations.

Fake's career as an Internet entrepreneur took off when she met Canadian web developer Stewart Butterfield online in 2001. Fake lived in San Francisco at the time, and Butterfield lived in Canada; they fell in love and began a long-distance relationship. During their courting phase, Butterfield suggested to Fake that they start a company together. In 2002, the two founded Ludicorp (from ludis, the Latin word for “play”). The goal of Ludicorp was to build a better platform for real-time online interaction. Their corporate philosophy, based on a passage from Charles Spinosa's Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity (1997), involved working for the enjoyment of the game and producing identities that people would care about.

Initially, Ludicorp developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) called Game Neverending, which included instant messaging. In 2004, they added a new feature: a chat environment with photo sharing. Fake and Butterfield discovered that the beta testers actually enjoyed sharing photos and chatting about them on the site more than they did the game itself. Based on user reactions and the fact that Ludicorp was running out of money, Fake and Butterfield designed a new site called Flickr, which became one of the world's most popular photo-sharing websites. In 2005, Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! and became part of the core of so-called Web 2.0 sites, integrating features such as social networking, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced the most popular content.

After the Flickr acquisition, Fake took a job overseeing the technology development group at Yahoo! The group was known for its Hack Yahoo! program, a stimulus to foster innovation and creativity. Under Fake's leadership, the group also created Brickhouse, a rapid-development environment for new products. Fake resigned from Yahoo! on June 13, 2008. While business partner Butterfield penned a long, bizarre resignation letter to Yahoo, Fake's reasons for her resignation remain unknown.

In August 2008, Fake joined the board of directors of Creative Commons; she served in that capacity until 2014. As a creator of media-sharing sites, Fake had embraced Creative Commons' open-content licensing to encourage users to make their work available through Flickr and other sites. In keeping with her creative philosophy, Fake believes that Creative Commons licensing encourages creativity by freeing ideas from legal constraints.

In 2009, Fake cofounded the website Hunch with entrepreneur Chris Dixon. Hunch builds the “taste graph” of the Internet, intended to connect every user on the Internet to every entity based on his or her affinity for that entity. Hunch launched in June 2009 and was acquired in November 2011 by eBay for an estimated $80 million. In the same year, Fake started a new site called 2bkco. 2bkco created Pinwheel (later renamed Findery), a social site where people could leave notes, annotations, tips, and photos for other users at designated locations. Fake envisioned Findery as a community rather than a business. While Findery received tens of thousands of e-mail requests to join, the company added user registrations in a slow, staggered manner to establish a dedicated and engaged user community. According to Fake, social sites should grow because users find them valuable and then recommend them to friends. Findery later shut down.

Fake invests in ventures that appeal to her personally. She was an early investor in Etsy, a social and commercial site for artists and craftspeople, and chaired Etsy's board. She also served on the boards of the Sundance Institute and the Berkeley School of Information. Fake was also a founder partner in Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital fund organized by entrepreneurs that advises many start-ups and new businesses. In 2018, she and entrepreneur Jyri Engeström cofounded Yes VC, another seed-stage venture capital firm.

In 2019, Fake created the podcast Should This Exist. She and Engeström also run a seasonal café called Kahvila Siili in Helsinki, Finland.

Fake believes that if people choose a problem to solve, pick a good market, and are ambitious and hardworking, they will not fail. She chooses to back young entrepreneurs because she is conscious of the many people who helped her on her way up and wants to return the favor. For this reason, Fake has also made time to advise her alma mater, Vassar College, on social media and digitization projects. In addition, she has participated in women-in-technology organizations such as the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs, maintained a group blog with other women in technology, and worked on getting women more speaking engagements at industry conferences.

Personal Life

Fake married Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield in 2002. They had one daughter, Sonnet, in 2007, and divorced about six months later. Fake homeschools her daughter and has argued eloquently in support of the homeschooling movement and how it improves the socialization of children. She is an avid reader who enjoys discussing literature, making and sharing art, and traveling. Most of all, she enjoys activities that bring people together, such as making crafts, playing board games, and brainstorming, with or without beer.

Fake has been widely recognized for her work as an Internet entrepreneur. In 2005, she was named one of Businessweek's Best Leaders, Forbes' eGang, and Fast Company's Fast 50; the following year, she appeared in Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People and was featured on the cover of Newsweek. In May 2009, she received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design. Fake divides her time between New York City and San Francisco.

Bibliography

Atherton, Amber. "Caterina Fake." In: The Rise of Virtual Communities, pp. 99-105. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6‗9. Apress, 2023.

Fake, Caterina. “Caterina Fake: Cofounder, Flickr.” Interview by Jessica Livingston. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. New York: Springer, 2008. Print.

---. “One on One: Caterina Fake, Flickr and Hunch.” Interview by Nick Bilton. New York Times 6 Oct. 2010. Web. 4 May 2012.

Katayama, Lisa. “Meet Our Board Members: Caterina Fake.” 8 Dec. 2010. Creative Commons. Web. 4 May 2012.

Rao, Leena. “More Details on Caterina Fake's New Startup, Pinwheel: A Mobile Flickr for Places (Ish).” 16 Feb. 2012. TechCrunch. Web. 4 May 2012.

Spragins, Ellyn, ed. “Caterina Fake: Founder of Flickr.” If I'd Known Then: Women in Their 20s and 30s Write Letters to Their Younger Selves. Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2008. Print.