4 ms·

Perhaps I could take this "make things" post seriously if the things made and shouted out (cough Flickr) could go the distance and remain viable. Did Flickr hav

by wyclif 15y ago

Perhaps I could take this "make things" post seriously if the things made and shouted out (cough Flickr) could go the distance and remain viable. Did Flickr have a good run? Sure. But it seems to me there's a problem inherent in cashing out your company and moving on to the next thing. The Internet is littered with the corpses of once-great companies.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 15y ago
Seriously? You're discounting this because she only created Flickr? (And Hunch, and whatever she's working on now?) I was working on my own startup at the same time Flickr was created; the funding climate then was brutal. Flickr was expensive to run, and growing like crazy. This was before things like AWS, so scaling was much harder. Selling to a large company with the ability to scale it easily may have been their only option. So I doubt it was a matter of cashing out.
- kanamekun 15y ago
  I totally agree. Flickr was started 7.5 years ago. Believe it or not, things like storage and bandwidth used to be a lot more expensive. And with costs so high, monetization often required your own dedicated ad sales force. It's amazing to me how quickly people can take the last decade or so for granted. Back when I started my first company, we had to buy a PBX and even install our own mail servers. Uphill, in the snow, both ways!!
- wyclif 15y ago
  No, I'm not dissing the founders. I'm talking about when these companies get bought by larger concerns. Seriously, when was the last time Flickr innovated since they became a Yahoo! property? Disclosure: I've been a Flickr Pro user since 2004, but recently I stopped subscribing.
revorad 15y ago
I see your point but in a way it supports the OP's point. It's more fun to just build new stuff instead of maintaining old stuff. That's why most hackers don't care so much about the business and just want to make things. It's a bit like how some artists feel about their work. I used to write plays in school and college, one of which got really popular. People would keep asking me to perform it again and again because they loved it. But it killed me to do the same thing over and over again. I just wanted to move on and make new plays.

by wyclif 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

wpietri 15y ago

Seriously? You're discounting this because she only created Flickr? (And Hunch, and whatever she's working on now?) I was working on my own startup at the same time Flickr was created; the funding climate then was brutal. Flickr was expensive to run, and growing like crazy. This was before things like AWS, so scaling was much harder. Selling to a large company with the ability to scale it easily may have been their only option. So I doubt it was a matter of cashing out.

kanamekun 15y ago
I totally agree. Flickr was started 7.5 years ago. Believe it or not, things like storage and bandwidth used to be a lot more expensive. And with costs so high, monetization often required your own dedicated ad sales force. It's amazing to me how quickly people can take the last decade or so for granted. Back when I started my first company, we had to buy a PBX and even install our own mail servers. Uphill, in the snow, both ways!!
wyclif 15y ago
No, I'm not dissing the founders. I'm talking about when these companies get bought by larger concerns. Seriously, when was the last time Flickr innovated since they became a Yahoo! property? Disclosure: I've been a Flickr Pro user since 2004, but recently I stopped subscribing.

revorad 15y ago

I see your point but in a way it supports the OP's point. It's more fun to just build new stuff instead of maintaining old stuff. That's why most hackers don't care so much about the business and just want to make things. It's a bit like how some artists feel about their work. I used to write plays in school and college, one of which got really popular. People would keep asking me to perform it again and again because they loved it. But it killed me to do the same thing over and over again. I just wanted to move on and make new plays.