YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Schaaf

lines on the record: 65
first: 2018-12-26
most recent: 2018-12-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Imager images. Why do you have to go to Facebook and see images there? Why do you have to go to Twitter and like, and so over time we built out a destination and a community around image sharing and around self-expression through images. And it's now this visual storytelling platform that it's actually, we call it a community powered entertainment destination. Oh, wow. Because aside, because you mentioned that there's a lot of companies doing image search and we are really not that. We are a destination for entertainment through images.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what Imager became. And so we ended up having this huge network of images being spread out all over the internet. And Matt and I started thinking, why can't people go to Imager directly to see?”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Back in 2009, Twitter didn't even have their own Twitter image hosting service. In fact, I think TwitPick existed. And so what images weren't really a native thing of the internet back then, and they didn't really have it quite as integrated as it is today. And so the internet needed a hub of images or a place that you could post your image and then take it elsewhere. You could put it on Twitter, you could put it on Facebook, put it on Reddit.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Digital development. No, no, it's not. But Silicon Valley is. And back, you know, back in Ohio, Silicon Valley, it feels like this mythical fairy tale land that I never thought I would actually be there, but all these great people, these great companies are there. And so I wanted to be one of those great companies.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But anyway, then, yeah, people really started to use it and it really caught on. But it's still just a personal project. I think I was a sophomore at the time. But when I graduated, I was so passionate about Imager and loved Imager so much and what it was doing. And it was already affecting millions of people around the world just as a project. I wanted to go all in on it. To essentially dominate the internet and have Imagery be ubiquitous throughout it. And so I met my business partner, Matt Strater, who became Imager's first COO. And he really Really create a business out of it that can be self sustaining. And Ohio was great. People, it feels like in Ohio, people really want you to succeed.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so And so I built Imager to scratch that itch. Features that I built into that were more around speed, performance, quick drag and drop. As soon as you do that, you get a link back that you can then share. Because that's what I wanted, sort of the internet. To have And I kind of built that for my own use case. But then I launched it. And unlike all of my other personal projects at that time, nobody wanted a bot for World of War. Well, people may have wanted that, but they doesn't help yet. I think it's illegal to actually sell something like that.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I thought that images and not photos, like that images required different functionality than the flickers and the picasas of the world because those products were always based around high quality Photos and photos are memories that you go to a wedding and you take a thousand pictures and you want to capture these moments and then they kind of sit there and you want to have them on hand for more archival purposes. And I didn't want that at all. I wanted to quickly share a meme. That's an option. That's what people were doing or a logo or something with my friend.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But anyway, most of those were things like that were personal projects because it's my problem that I have to go to class and I have a life and I can't just Sit on World of Warcraft and get all these items, so instead I'm going to build my own solution to that. So Imager was actually. Quite similar to that, in that my own personal frustration was I thought it was way too difficult and annoying, really, to quickly share an image with my friend. And everything that existed back then, it was all for photos and photo storage. But I really thought that.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a lot of stuff going on already on the internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so, but I realized, well, most of my personal projects, I would always start them out of personal frustration. So give me one that you didn't take to something else. Oh, most of them. All of them. I didn't take that. Give me another example.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I did not drop out. I absolutely thought about it. But the thing is, my mom's single mother. Trying very hard to put me through college, I really wanted to finish. But I kept in order to learn, I kept on doing personal projects. And one of those personal projects that I launched was Imager. And that's how it started.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, anyway, I absolutely kind of loved that job, but quickly realized that I wasn't quite learning as much just fixing people's computers. And it was all the same. You reformat it and, you know, the viruses are gone. So then I quickly got into software. And by the time I graduated high school, I was doing professional web development for a number of different clients. And so then I went to Ohio University studying computer science. And through my web development, realized that I already kind of learned a lot of computer science on my own. And I realized that it wasn't quite as”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was hourly. Oh man, super cheap, though. I think it was $15 an hour, which was fantastic because in Ohio at the time, like minimum wage was seven or seven fifty. So I was making some money back then. Right, right.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, nice. Yeah, and I just absolutely loved it, fell into it, learned everything I could about it, immediately became the computer guy in my family and all my friends. And then in high school, I actually started my first company, which was, I believe it's called Schaff's Networking and Administrative Solutions. And some acronym. Anyway, what it was essentially like a geek squad competitor where I went around to people's homes and fixed their computers.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone Yeah, I think that's probably a fair characterization. We are in the top 20 websites in the United States in terms of traffic. However, somehow we do, I hear that a lot. We somehow fly under the rad”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as an internet meme, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Alan Schoff, the founder and CEO of Imager, which is spelled I-M-G-U-R. He started the company almost 10 years ago and has turned into a sort of hangout where people share images, memes, and gifts. It's one of my favorite sites that people don't really know about as well. That's a really important and powerful site on the internet, and it's a really interesting company. Alan, welcome Jerico Decode.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT