8 ms·

Kanye West, Startup Idol

32 points by guynamedloren 13y ago

acron0 13y ago
I feel like he has the right idea but the concept of "risk", I feel, is pretty worthless when you've probably got a few hundred million in the bank. In fact, it upsets me in general when filthy rich people talk about risk, because I have a mortgage and a family so for me, "risk" means maybe not being able to put a roof over my son's head.
- nikcub 13y ago
  He wasn't born a celebrity millionaire. He dropped out of college (scholarship, and his mother was a professor there who didn't approve) to pursuit a career in music, took him a decade to break out.
  - Edmond 13y ago
    True. The interesting thing though about most successful rappers is that, while almost all of them come from poverty, they tend to achieve success early in life such that by the time they hit middle age they've been rich longer than they've been poor (Nas notes this in one of his songs)... A guy like Jay-Z talking about hardship increasingly sounds out of touch :)
    - domrdy 13y ago
      http://rapgenius.com/Nas-loco-motive-lyrics#note-880957 http://rapgenius.com/Nas-loco-motive-lyrics#note-880957
  - pmorici 13y ago
    If his mom was a professor at a college that sounds like an indication of at least an upper middle class upbringing. Edit: Wikipedia says, "middle class" and the college he dropped out of was an art school so it isn't like he was giving up a sure thing to take a course that was more risky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > If his mom was a professor at a college that sounds like an indication of at least an upper middle class upbringing. Knowing what college professor's salaries are like, "at least upper middle class" is way optimistic, though "probably solidly middle class" is likely.
    - nikcub 13y ago
      Single mother in Chicago working at a state college? Straight up middle class. I don't buy the premise that you need to be poor to have an appreciation of risk. Risk isn't just financial, there is also career and personal risk. Think of all the well-off kids who didn't follow in their fathers footsteps or what their parents wanted and pursued their own dreams, at the risk of being alienated, disowned etc.
      - ItendToDisagree 13y ago
        He wasn't at risk of being disowned. He also wasn't at risk of going hungry. He may have been at risk of having to work a boring 9-5 for the rest of his life. But that's a risk shared by so much of the public that it seems pretty minimal.
  - acron0 13y ago
    I don't think it matters how you make your money, just that once you've accrued a certain amount of wealth the concept of risk starts to fade...
- guynamedloren 13y ago
  Read the interview. You've got it all wrong. He actually says the risky thing for him to do is to not to anything. It has nothing to do with money. I'm sure he fully understands that he could sit on his bank account for the rest of his life, check out and not do anything. His risk isn't losing his home. It's a different kind of risk. He stresses that the most important thing to him is actually having ideas and sharing them with the world. He says this over and over again, and I can't help but believe him. > The risk for me would be in not taking one — that's the only thing that's really risky for me.
  - ItendToDisagree 13y ago
    So how does that compare to start ups that usually require vast actual risks from their founders? His risk is sort of a philosophical/existential risk. Not what many would consider an 'actual' risk to himself. This really does seem to be a function of the fact that he is rich and a celebrity.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    >>important thing to him is actually having ideas Kanye's very fortunate that "having ideas" are "the only thing that's really risky for me." Personally I don't find a lot of value in his "ideas" nor do I agree that he's risking very much. For all his nonsense about liberation from evil, he seems hellbent on integrating himself with the fashion world.
- ctide 13y ago
  Do you think he was born with a few hundred million in the bank? He eschewed all the standard hip hop trappings and didn't go all 'gangsta' when that's how people made money. When he produced The Blueprint (one of the greatest hip hop albums ever made) it was backed by soul beats which just weren't a thing in ~2000. He's always done his own thing, his latest album is a prime example of that. He's still just putting out shit he wants to listen to, not necessarily putting out what's successful at any given time in the industry. It's easy to look back and say, you're filthy rich now so you aren't actually taking risks, but taking risks is how he got there.
  - benjaminwootton 13y ago
    +1. He could have churned out album after album in his trademark 'soul' style but he places it all on the line with each album just to mix it up and push boundaries. He's a great artist.
  - tarunkotia 13y ago
    When you have more it is more scary to take a risk as you are risking everything you have. How I relate to it is this way, I have a fairly good paying job (equivalent to Kanye releasing albums what's popular) versus I solve a hard problem and quit my day job to build it (similar to Kanye sticks to what he believes in). Now you do the math who has more to loose? Having said that, I'm going through a stage in my life where I am getting to see the real character of people in terms of their risk appetite. Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur but when it really comes to doing it people chicken out. May be it's my circle but again that's my experience.
  - tetrep 13y ago
    It is mere coincidence, however, that the music he wanted to make was also the music people wanted to hear. It's hardly laudable to do something you enjoy...
    - ItendToDisagree 13y ago
      Also... Media Hype Machine. He's made himself into a symbol. For all most people (who follow his antics) care his next album could be 'Pip farting on a snare drum' to take a line from Air Heads.
- ryderm 13y ago
  Besides what others said about him not always being rich, there is more to risk than money. Doing something crazy on TV or coming out with an album nobody likes could make hundreds of millions of people think differently of him, say he is going downhill, whatever. That is pretty risky as far as I'm concerned.
- bksenior 13y ago
  sigh... You are a bit naive if you believe that money is the be all end all risk here.
- jusben1369 13y ago
  acronO that's the trap that a LOT of people fall into so you're not alone. But don't go to the grave realizing your decisions were based on making a mortgage payment or a 401K payment or a retirement payment or a college savings plan or a something other very "sensible" sounding. Trust me, your boy is going to love and remember his Dad way more if he saw him doing something he was passionate about and lived in a rental than living in a mortgaged house with a bigger room and a Dad with no spark.
morgante 13y ago
Yuck. The idolization of assholes in our industry continues.
- uid 13y ago
  unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison .. i'm actually struggling to think of an idolized figure in tech who isn't an "asshole". edit: put "asshole" in quotes, which gets my point across better
  - pg 13y ago
    Unless you know these people personally, you don't really know what they're like. I know Mark isn't though.
    - guynamedloren 13y ago
      Kanye at the next startup school, so we can rule him out too? :)
    - uid 13y ago
      I know them as much as the comment above me knows Kanye. Being an asshole is a public persona, and each of those people has been called or referred to as an asshole. edit: and there are plenty of anecdotal "Kanye is a nice guy when you meet him" stories as well. Evel Knievel sued Kanye and described him as 'vulgar an offensive', after they met he said "I thought he was a wonderful guy and a gentleman": http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2007-11-27-kanye-knievel_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2007-11-27-ka...
      - Shinkei 13y ago
        Laughing at 'Bill Gates is an asshole.' I've heard this anecdotally about everyone on your list, but not about him. People malign Microsoft and Windows, but please show me anecdotes about Gates the person being an asshole.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
grimtrigger 13y ago
I feel like the author is projecting a lot of their ideas onto Kanye. Either that, or there's much more evidence for the article in the video, but not quoted in the article.
- guynamedloren 13y ago
  The latter - I tried to keep the article short and to the point, mentioning several things without quoting directly. The specific quotes are at the bottom of the post.
normloman 13y ago
Oh god, why are we listening to this douche.
- ItendToDisagree 13y ago
  You mean 'God' not douche right? This is the guy who wrote a song proclaiming he was God (its the title and chorus in fact)?
deckar01 13y ago
TLDR; Kanye West is a gay fish.
- ItendToDisagree 13y ago
  'lyrical motherfuckin wordsmith motherfuckin genius' you mean!
luser 13y ago
TLDR; Kanye West is irrelevant - completely, irrevocably, without any suggestion of irony, irrelevant. You may now resume your non-smug, non-celebrity life.
pdeuchler 13y ago
I'm going to jump up on my soapbox real quick, because I've been screaming this for a while. All Kanye West has ever wanted to do is create. If you watch the full interview with Zane Lowe[0], aka the interview that Jimmy Kimmel made fun of and started a whole firestorm over, you realize (if you haven't before) that Kanye sees bringing beauty to others as the penultimate goal in life (you could argue he values his family a bit more). In a sense I think that's what most people who get into startups, or really just "hacking" in general, want to do. Create. Bring beauty. Improve the world in a small way. Leave it better than how you got it, as my dad used to say. Kanye has also gone through some of the exact trials and tribulations that people trying to start a business go through. If you listen to his song Spaceship[1] from "College Dropout" (his debut album) you can really hear the same kind of ethos as he tries to break into the music business while working at the Gap: >> Taking my hits, writing my hits >> Writing my rhymes, playing my mind >> This fking job can't help him >> So I quit, y'all welcome >> Y'all don't know my struggle >> Y'all can't match my hustle >> You can't catch my hustle >> You can't fathom my love dude >> Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers >> That's a Different World like Cree Summer's I'm cherry picking a quote, and it might lose it's umph because of that, but besides the undeniable poetic like quality of his words (is my fanboy showing yet?) you can see the dedication, and the repetition he puts into his craft. This is directly applicable to those trying to get a startup off the ground; You need hard work and most of all you need to ship, and keep on shipping to perfect your product. In fact, when I was trying to get my first startup going I more or less listened to this song on repeat as motivation, because Kanye understands the self-doubt. He understands the constant pressure to succumb to social standards. He understands that people push back when you try and break out. In fact, Kanye probably knows this more than most of us, as a person of color. Yet even through all of this Ye still succeeds. In fact, (it could be argued) the massive amount of people who don't like Kanye are more a testament to his success than the people who do. But it doesn't just stop at music. For those who weren't aware, Kanye started off as a producer and against a lot of pressure to stay a producer became a rapper as well. One of my favorite Kanye songs isn't really a song, but a narrative of how he overcame this and got signed in "Last Call"[2]. As per the same BBC interview I referenced above, Kanye is trying to break into fashion, architecture, design, a myriad of industries using the same ideas and work ethic. Work hard, and make something "dope", while disregarding the way "things are done around here" (to complete the analogy for those less aware of the rap scene, Kanye was one of the founders of "backpack rap", a kind of suburban, every day, introspective way of rapping, as opposed to the massively popular "gangsta rap" of the day). Beyond all of that one of Kanye's biggest messages throughout his music is that the message of "Stay in your place" is wrong. He is consistently trying to upset the status quo. This is a message that should reverberate among any of us trying to shake up an established industry, or trying to create a market that simply didn't exist before. Kanye sees what is "not cool" in the world and tries to fix that, whether it's jumping up on stage and proclaiming on live tv that Taylor Swift doesn't deserve an award, or using shoe design as a way to break the race barrier in fashion. He's just as much a hacker as any one of us who works with code or hardware. Kanye also sacrifices for his art. He paid millions out of his own pocket (back before he was financially set, I might add) to produce his own music videos for "Jesus Walks", after the studios wouldn't go with the direction as he wanted. I can't pin down the quote right now, but I recall him saying something to the effect of "If that album [Late Registration] wasn't a success I would have been broke". As we all know "Jesus Walks" became a #1 hit, Kanye got his videos on MTV, and the album went triple platinum. He continues to shell out of his own pocket for tours (that consistently succeed far past expectations) and runs his own design company, DONDA. Rumor has it he is financing his stylist's new clothing line. Just because it's not software doesn't mean he's not a VC. This might not be the most lucid post, as I'm typing rather frantically in order to get this out before the story drops off the front page, but tl;dr: Kanye West exemplifies the hacker spirit, and learning from someone who has succeeded so immensely as a creative person can't be the worst thing you can do. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_yTQ0SYVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_yTQ0SYVA [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGM6N0qXeu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGM6N0qXeu4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q602739kBr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q602739kBr4
thecolorblue 13y ago
He has changed recently but he used to be a soulful person who talked openly about his own life. I find that inspiring. from his blog: (the blog is taken down but this image can still be found on the internet) http://api.ning.com/files/2B9YJ2tmCwrwvNVAh7nc-3GXR2XCD8LwdSeCZOb0YFVwi7791Rd4WiGiP0s8*A9J6Ao9pP4zFIAqxLo1YO-k24yp17ZNFvgO/kw1.jpg http://api.ning.com/files/2B9YJ2tmCwrwvNVAh7nc-3GXR2XCD8LwdS...

32 points by guynamedloren 13y ago

I feel like he has the right idea but the concept of "risk", I feel, is pretty worthless when you've probably got a few hundred million in the bank. In fact, it upsets me in general when filthy rich people talk about risk, because I have a mortgage and a family so for me, "risk" means maybe not being able to put a roof over my son's head.

nikcub 13y ago
He wasn't born a celebrity millionaire. He dropped out of college (scholarship, and his mother was a professor there who didn't approve) to pursuit a career in music, took him a decade to break out.
- Edmond 13y ago
  True. The interesting thing though about most successful rappers is that, while almost all of them come from poverty, they tend to achieve success early in life such that by the time they hit middle age they've been rich longer than they've been poor (Nas notes this in one of his songs)... A guy like Jay-Z talking about hardship increasingly sounds out of touch :)
  - domrdy 13y ago
    http://rapgenius.com/Nas-loco-motive-lyrics#note-880957 http://rapgenius.com/Nas-loco-motive-lyrics#note-880957
- pmorici 13y ago
  If his mom was a professor at a college that sounds like an indication of at least an upper middle class upbringing. Edit: Wikipedia says, "middle class" and the college he dropped out of was an art school so it isn't like he was giving up a sure thing to take a course that was more risky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > If his mom was a professor at a college that sounds like an indication of at least an upper middle class upbringing. Knowing what college professor's salaries are like, "at least upper middle class" is way optimistic, though "probably solidly middle class" is likely.
  - nikcub 13y ago
    Single mother in Chicago working at a state college? Straight up middle class. I don't buy the premise that you need to be poor to have an appreciation of risk. Risk isn't just financial, there is also career and personal risk. Think of all the well-off kids who didn't follow in their fathers footsteps or what their parents wanted and pursued their own dreams, at the risk of being alienated, disowned etc.
    - ItendToDisagree 13y ago
      He wasn't at risk of being disowned. He also wasn't at risk of going hungry. He may have been at risk of having to work a boring 9-5 for the rest of his life. But that's a risk shared by so much of the public that it seems pretty minimal.
- acron0 13y ago
  I don't think it matters how you make your money, just that once you've accrued a certain amount of wealth the concept of risk starts to fade...
guynamedloren 13y ago
Read the interview. You've got it all wrong. He actually says the risky thing for him to do is to not to anything. It has nothing to do with money. I'm sure he fully understands that he could sit on his bank account for the rest of his life, check out and not do anything. His risk isn't losing his home. It's a different kind of risk. He stresses that the most important thing to him is actually having ideas and sharing them with the world. He says this over and over again, and I can't help but believe him. > The risk for me would be in not taking one — that's the only thing that's really risky for me.
- ItendToDisagree 13y ago
  So how does that compare to start ups that usually require vast actual risks from their founders? His risk is sort of a philosophical/existential risk. Not what many would consider an 'actual' risk to himself. This really does seem to be a function of the fact that he is rich and a celebrity.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  >>important thing to him is actually having ideas Kanye's very fortunate that "having ideas" are "the only thing that's really risky for me." Personally I don't find a lot of value in his "ideas" nor do I agree that he's risking very much. For all his nonsense about liberation from evil, he seems hellbent on integrating himself with the fashion world.
ctide 13y ago
Do you think he was born with a few hundred million in the bank? He eschewed all the standard hip hop trappings and didn't go all 'gangsta' when that's how people made money. When he produced The Blueprint (one of the greatest hip hop albums ever made) it was backed by soul beats which just weren't a thing in ~2000. He's always done his own thing, his latest album is a prime example of that. He's still just putting out shit he wants to listen to, not necessarily putting out what's successful at any given time in the industry. It's easy to look back and say, you're filthy rich now so you aren't actually taking risks, but taking risks is how he got there.
- benjaminwootton 13y ago
  +1. He could have churned out album after album in his trademark 'soul' style but he places it all on the line with each album just to mix it up and push boundaries. He's a great artist.
- tarunkotia 13y ago
  When you have more it is more scary to take a risk as you are risking everything you have. How I relate to it is this way, I have a fairly good paying job (equivalent to Kanye releasing albums what's popular) versus I solve a hard problem and quit my day job to build it (similar to Kanye sticks to what he believes in). Now you do the math who has more to loose? Having said that, I'm going through a stage in my life where I am getting to see the real character of people in terms of their risk appetite. Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur but when it really comes to doing it people chicken out. May be it's my circle but again that's my experience.
- tetrep 13y ago
  It is mere coincidence, however, that the music he wanted to make was also the music people wanted to hear. It's hardly laudable to do something you enjoy...
  - ItendToDisagree 13y ago
    Also... Media Hype Machine. He's made himself into a symbol. For all most people (who follow his antics) care his next album could be 'Pip farting on a snare drum' to take a line from Air Heads.
ryderm 13y ago
Besides what others said about him not always being rich, there is more to risk than money. Doing something crazy on TV or coming out with an album nobody likes could make hundreds of millions of people think differently of him, say he is going downhill, whatever. That is pretty risky as far as I'm concerned.
bksenior 13y ago
sigh... You are a bit naive if you believe that money is the be all end all risk here.
jusben1369 13y ago
acronO that's the trap that a LOT of people fall into so you're not alone. But don't go to the grave realizing your decisions were based on making a mortgage payment or a 401K payment or a retirement payment or a college savings plan or a something other very "sensible" sounding. Trust me, your boy is going to love and remember his Dad way more if he saw him doing something he was passionate about and lived in a rental than living in a mortgaged house with a bigger room and a Dad with no spark.

morgante 13y ago

Yuck. The idolization of assholes in our industry continues.

uid 13y ago
unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison .. i'm actually struggling to think of an idolized figure in tech who isn't an "asshole". edit: put "asshole" in quotes, which gets my point across better
- pg 13y ago
  Unless you know these people personally, you don't really know what they're like. I know Mark isn't though.
  - guynamedloren 13y ago
    Kanye at the next startup school, so we can rule him out too? :)
  - uid 13y ago
    I know them as much as the comment above me knows Kanye. Being an asshole is a public persona, and each of those people has been called or referred to as an asshole. edit: and there are plenty of anecdotal "Kanye is a nice guy when you meet him" stories as well. Evel Knievel sued Kanye and described him as 'vulgar an offensive', after they met he said "I thought he was a wonderful guy and a gentleman": http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2007-11-27-kanye-knievel_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2007-11-27-ka...
    - Shinkei 13y ago
      Laughing at 'Bill Gates is an asshole.' I've heard this anecdotally about everyone on your list, but not about him. People malign Microsoft and Windows, but please show me anecdotes about Gates the person being an asshole.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

grimtrigger 13y ago

I feel like the author is projecting a lot of their ideas onto Kanye. Either that, or there's much more evidence for the article in the video, but not quoted in the article.

guynamedloren 13y ago
The latter - I tried to keep the article short and to the point, mentioning several things without quoting directly. The specific quotes are at the bottom of the post.

normloman 13y ago

Oh god, why are we listening to this douche.

ItendToDisagree 13y ago
You mean 'God' not douche right? This is the guy who wrote a song proclaiming he was God (its the title and chorus in fact)?

deckar01 13y ago

TLDR; Kanye West is a gay fish.

ItendToDisagree 13y ago
'lyrical motherfuckin wordsmith motherfuckin genius' you mean!

luser 13y ago

TLDR; Kanye West is irrelevant - completely, irrevocably, without any suggestion of irony, irrelevant. You may now resume your non-smug, non-celebrity life.

pdeuchler 13y ago

I'm going to jump up on my soapbox real quick, because I've been screaming this for a while. All Kanye West has ever wanted to do is create. If you watch the full interview with Zane Lowe[0], aka the interview that Jimmy Kimmel made fun of and started a whole firestorm over, you realize (if you haven't before) that Kanye sees bringing beauty to others as the penultimate goal in life (you could argue he values his family a bit more). In a sense I think that's what most people who get into startups, or really just "hacking" in general, want to do. Create. Bring beauty. Improve the world in a small way. Leave it better than how you got it, as my dad used to say. Kanye has also gone through some of the exact trials and tribulations that people trying to start a business go through. If you listen to his song Spaceship[1] from "College Dropout" (his debut album) you can really hear the same kind of ethos as he tries to break into the music business while working at the Gap: >> Taking my hits, writing my hits >> Writing my rhymes, playing my mind >> This fking job can't help him >> So I quit, y'all welcome >> Y'all don't know my struggle >> Y'all can't match my hustle >> You can't catch my hustle >> You can't fathom my love dude >> Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers >> That's a Different World like Cree Summer's I'm cherry picking a quote, and it might lose it's umph because of that, but besides the undeniable poetic like quality of his words (is my fanboy showing yet?) you can see the dedication, and the repetition he puts into his craft. This is directly applicable to those trying to get a startup off the ground; You need hard work and most of all you need to ship, and keep on shipping to perfect your product. In fact, when I was trying to get my first startup going I more or less listened to this song on repeat as motivation, because Kanye understands the self-doubt. He understands the constant pressure to succumb to social standards. He understands that people push back when you try and break out. In fact, Kanye probably knows this more than most of us, as a person of color. Yet even through all of this Ye still succeeds. In fact, (it could be argued) the massive amount of people who don't like Kanye are more a testament to his success than the people who do. But it doesn't just stop at music. For those who weren't aware, Kanye started off as a producer and against a lot of pressure to stay a producer became a rapper as well. One of my favorite Kanye songs isn't really a song, but a narrative of how he overcame this and got signed in "Last Call"[2]. As per the same BBC interview I referenced above, Kanye is trying to break into fashion, architecture, design, a myriad of industries using the same ideas and work ethic. Work hard, and make something "dope", while disregarding the way "things are done around here" (to complete the analogy for those less aware of the rap scene, Kanye was one of the founders of "backpack rap", a kind of suburban, every day, introspective way of rapping, as opposed to the massively popular "gangsta rap" of the day). Beyond all of that one of Kanye's biggest messages throughout his music is that the message of "Stay in your place" is wrong. He is consistently trying to upset the status quo. This is a message that should reverberate among any of us trying to shake up an established industry, or trying to create a market that simply didn't exist before. Kanye sees what is "not cool" in the world and tries to fix that, whether it's jumping up on stage and proclaiming on live tv that Taylor Swift doesn't deserve an award, or using shoe design as a way to break the race barrier in fashion. He's just as much a hacker as any one of us who works with code or hardware. Kanye also sacrifices for his art. He paid millions out of his own pocket (back before he was financially set, I might add) to produce his own music videos for "Jesus Walks", after the studios wouldn't go with the direction as he wanted. I can't pin down the quote right now, but I recall him saying something to the effect of "If that album [Late Registration] wasn't a success I would have been broke". As we all know "Jesus Walks" became a #1 hit, Kanye got his videos on MTV, and the album went triple platinum. He continues to shell out of his own pocket for tours (that consistently succeed far past expectations) and runs his own design company, DONDA. Rumor has it he is financing his stylist's new clothing line. Just because it's not software doesn't mean he's not a VC. This might not be the most lucid post, as I'm typing rather frantically in order to get this out before the story drops off the front page, but tl;dr: Kanye West exemplifies the hacker spirit, and learning from someone who has succeeded so immensely as a creative person can't be the worst thing you can do. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_yTQ0SYVA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR_yTQ0SYVA [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGM6N0qXeu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGM6N0qXeu4 [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q602739kBr4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q602739kBr4

thecolorblue 13y ago

He has changed recently but he used to be a soulful person who talked openly about his own life. I find that inspiring. from his blog: (the blog is taken down but this image can still be found on the internet) http://api.ning.com/files/2B9YJ2tmCwrwvNVAh7nc-3GXR2XCD8LwdSeCZOb0YFVwi7791Rd4WiGiP0s8*A9J6Ao9pP4zFIAqxLo1YO-k24yp17ZNFvgO/kw1.jpg http://api.ning.com/files/2B9YJ2tmCwrwvNVAh7nc-3GXR2XCD8LwdS...