How We Did It: Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, Co-founders, Flickr

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Butterfield: Our friend Ben came up with the name Flickr.

Fake: Ben was saying, "Oh, but it's like, you know, like, kind of like if you see the flickering of the metaverse…" And we're like, "flicker!" We tried to get "flicker" with an e, but the guy who had the Web domain wasn't willing to give it up.

Butterfield: In February 2004, we launched Flickr.

Fake: George Oates [a Flickr employee] and I would spend 24 hours, seven days a week, greeting every single person who came to the site. We introduced them to people, we chatted with them. This is a social product. People are putting things they love--photographs of their whole lives--into it. All of these people are your potential evangelists. You need to show those people love.

We did all kinds of dumb, stupid things. But our unofficial slogan was, "F--- up fast." Make mistakes rapidly, learn from them, and move past them.

Butterfield: By June, July, Flickr was growing and starting to look really interesting. And that's when we first came down to meet with Yahoo. We had a meeting in the morning with Yahoo and in the afternoon with Google.

Fake: It was actually a terrible meeting with Yahoo. We did a terrible demo, we found a major bug right in the middle of it. We didn't feel the magic. And then they called us back six months later and were like, "We wanna talk again." That time we felt the magic.

Yahoo shared the vision, agreed on the direction and how we were going to run the business, and that was the main thing. I've learned a lot here--the kind of experience that you can get here is not something you get outside a big company.

Butterfield: We used to call our guy at Dell and put stuff on our credit card and get the servers three days later and then go install them. Here, there's a hardware review committee and a procurement process, and it takes weeks and weeks.

Fake: There are all these factors that went into the decision to sell. One of the first investors was Stewart's friend. He was extremely ill, and he stood to make a lot of money if we sold the company.

Butterfield: You never know when an Asian currency crisis is going to happen or 9/11 again or the market tanks or whatever. So we definitely believed that Flickr had a lot of potential life, but at the same time, it was a great result for all the people who had agreed to invest and who trusted us. We shouldn't have sold when we did, but you don't know that until after the fact. And it's not like we have some tragic life story. We're on the cover of Time magazine and the cover of Newsweek. Reid Hoffman [an early investor in Flickr] said, "You can always do it again. And the amount of money that you'll make on this will change your life in a way that…"

Fake: "…you'll be able to be entrepreneurs the rest of your lives."

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