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June 28, 2007
When 20/20 Hindsight Makes You Want To Blind Yourself
It's hard to feel sorry for James Hong. As one of the two co-founders of HOTorNOT, the oft-copied photo rating site, he's raked in the dough. For years, HOTorNOT was run leanly, with little investment in development and lots of advertising revenue. Hong himself describes it as a cash cow.
Recently Hong has been re-inventing the aging HOTorNOT, and he has written about it on his blog.
It's a good read in general, but this is the part that made me groan out load. He describes their initial strategy to re-invent the business:
[O]ur original vision was to become an incubator and to enable our employees to work on new ideas, and let them spin those off as separate companies.. basically let our employees graduate into becoming funded entrepreneurs at a time when funding was hard to get. Our first and only attempt at this was back in 2003 when we hoped to work with Steve Chen and Mike Solomon to start Yafro.com, which was going to be a social networking site with media sharing applications built on top. [Emphasis mine. -greg]Sounds reasonable until a couple of years later when you realize you punted on funding a social media-sharing service being pushed by Steve Chen. Yes, that Steve Chen.In the end things did not work out because some members of our board were uncomfortable with the idea of giving the employees of a spinout majority share and control… so Jim and I agreed with Steve and Mike that it was a no go.
I'm sure the tens of millions Hong has raked in from HOTorNOT allays the pain a little, but still . . . damn, that's gotta burn!
Posted June 28, 2007 06:27 AM
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