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Caterina Fake

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2019-02-14
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2019-02-14
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  1. “And I would be offline as much as I could during the times in between. Now, a lot of us have work that we need to do and things that we need to do online. But to be super disciplined about the time that you spend online, I think is really important. And I've always done this, and I have a kind of a notebook that I keep. Next to my computer, and it says WNO on the cover, which says what stands for win next online. And you just write a list and it says, I need to email my accountant. I need to look up what the name of Bob Dylan's second album was. I need to go fix this misinformation on this Wikipedia page. Whatever the thing is that You have these urges during the course of the day to go online. And then the next thing you know, three hours have passed and you're watching. Unboxing videos on YouTube, right?”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “When I am at my most flourishing and productive self, I'm actually online a lot less. And there's now all of these tools, screen time on Apple, on the Apple phone, and all of these things that I think are great. And during the periods in which I think I'm most flourishing, most productive, what I'm doing is I'm going online. I did this for as long as I can and I fall out of the practice. Occasionally, but I always try to get back I would schedule a time to do my email in the morning. 10 30 to 12 or something like this. And then again in the evening, 4 30 to 6.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Paradox of choice, right? Which actually people want to reduce and people want to constantly reduce the amount of stimulation so that they can focus and so that they can live a more deep and fulfilled life. And I really think that in our society today, you need to pick your podcast and hopefully my podcast and eliminate all the others. If you see what I'm saying, you have to focus in and narrow down and eliminate a lot of the noise in your life as much as possible. It's a very difficult thing to do. And so I see the time management part of our lives as being just the crucial thing to defend our space, our happiness, and our individual lives.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “And one of the investments that we've made is this company called Public Goods, which basically gives you one shampoo, one conditioner, one dish soap, and sends it to your house. And so you're not confronted with all of this.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Your head and preserving the ability of yourself to think and wonder and ideate is so precious and should be defended ferociously at all costs. And I've always felt that way. I've always had this very, I call it like cognitive defense, really powerful cognitive defense. And it's interesting because this also shows up in some of the investments that we made. For example, One of my theories about cultural movements right now is that there's this very strong desire to simplify your life. We're being constantly bombarded with information, with marketing, with new products, and you walk into a grocery store and you're confronted with 108 different kinds of toothpaste. And like a thousand articles that you could be reading at any given moment of the day.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “All of that, the kind of the right brain and not the left brain. And I've studied all of these people. I come across these articles. There was an article that was recently sent to me that was about this, I actually forget his name, but he was an AI guru. I think he's from Cambridge. And the thing that I did not manage to read the whole article because I got stuck on the very first half where it described how this Cambridge AI genius woke up and he didn't communicate with anybody until noon and that he managed to have a relationship with his family and they had developed a language of grunts and smiles so that he didn't have to his thoughts didn't get interrupted. And then when he finally went to work around noon, he had one meeting. And I was like, oh my God. God, this is a master of time management. And preserving that flow state.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I have done it, it really depends. Sometimes I wake up and I've always written books, so I've been working on a book now for the past three months, a new book. I write sometimes poetry. I sometimes just open up my journal and start writing. I can be working on a big problem, the five-year plan for my startup or something like that. Any kind of big picture thinking, any kind of thinking that involves creativity, intuition,”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “And I actually gave an interview with Business Week once about my peculiar schedule in that I wake up in the middle of the night between 2 and 5 in the morning and I do three hours of work. I don't turn on the computer. I write everything on paper. I do my best thinking and writing and ideation during those hours in the middle of the night. And then I go back to sleep and get up and carry on with my day. But without that kind of pocket of time where I'm uninterrupted, I'm offline. I'm free and liberated in a way that you just don't get during the workday. It's a magical time.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I couldn't do it. And I honestly believe that one of the reasons I'm an entrepreneur and that I have always worked for myself is so that I can manage my own time. And I have always thought that the highest quality of living, the highest standard of living really comes from being the master of your own time, deciding where you want to go in the morning, what you want to do, and that that is so important. And knowing that when you have the energy to put into your work, you can do that, whether or not it happens at 8 a.m. or if it happens at 10 p.m.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And your books are the four hour work week, the four hour body, all of these things having to do with time, managing your time, thinking about time. And when you really look at it, you know, kind of from the 35,000 foot view, time is all we've got. And I have been a time management is possibly the thing that I've done most in my life in terms of generating the kind of life that I have wanted to lead. And that comes from, I mean, it went way back to when I was young and Was actually forbidden by the dean at my school from taking any classes before noon because I'm just one of those people. I work really well at night. I'm a night owl and I could not make it to my classes in the morning. I actually failed a photography class. Because it was at 8 a.m. There's just no way. I just”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I love that you brought this up, Tim, because part of the reason I was super excited to talk to you about this is because I think you and I share an obsession with time.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “As defined by the Valley culture, we're now liberated from a lot of prejudices that they've been working against before. And if there had been an investor in 2004 when I was raising money for Flickr that looked like me, I would have gone straight to her, but there just weren't that many. And so I think things have changed a lot. And non-typical investors, people from outside of Of the valley people that are in different regions, people of color, women. I think there's so much more opportunity right now for those kinds of businesses to flourish and are being given a voice. And when all of those companies were started, it was actually much harder. To find people who understood those business models, those founders, and their orientation.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I think I've always had that. My partners at Founder Collective used to tell me this all the time. I would bring in deals, they say, your deals don't look like anybody else's deals. Your deals look very different. The people that you're backing, the people that you consider as potential entrepreneurs fall far outside of what is typically understood in the valley as a typical investment. And they said this to me kind of over and over again, like, wow, where did you find these folks? And most of the time they found me. And I think part of the reason that we started YesVC and we wanted to start a brand new firm was because we saw that there was a sea change happening in technology and that people that were non-typical, people that didn't fit the typical pattern of an entrepreneur.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “This humanities background, where I had spent a lot of time studying culture and society and people and what was happening around me and human interactions and how the culture was changing gave me a special view into that world that was missing, that somehow other people weren't seeing that was non-typical was outside of the Pattern recognition of Silicon Valley. And a lot of the investments that I have made have fallen outside of the typical pattern recognition that everybody takes advantage of in order to spot success.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Like we were saying earlier, my difference helped me. I'm also a woman in a male-dominated industry. I'm a mom. I have, there's many things about me that are non-typical. And when I was, when I first saw Etsy, it was this beautiful thing. And I actually took it to Reed Hoffman, who had invested in my first company, Flickr, and a bunch of other people in the valley, and they kind of lifted their eyebrows and said, okay, so let me get this straight. This is a bunch of women mostly knitting sweaters and selling it to each other. And I said, exactly. Don't you see the opportunity here? And I think coming from”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “In the world, people would, it was like a caravanserie, people would bring their camels and kind of in medieval times and form a market there. And you could see that that was the genesis of, you talk about the genesis of Airbnb or Flickr or all those other companies. Having a cup of tea and negotiating for your rug. And Etsy had that, right? Etsy had that. And Kickstarter had that. And there were these very kind of person-to-person experiences that were manifested in places like Etsy and Kickstarter and Flickr and a lot of these products at the very outset. And I think that that's another thing that happened at the very beginning of Airbnb. It was very much about people coming together in a very essential and human way. And that was what set those companies on such a strong foundation.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Something that you felt around conversations that were happening online. And this was a possibility that needed to bear fruit. It was very clear. And I think a lot of the things, if you look at, for example, Etsy, Etsy was at the forefront of the DIY handmade movement. It was a kind of a rebellion against big boxed retail and a return to the marketplace, which has always been a very person-to-person community-oriented place. I've traveled in, for example, I traveled in Syria and went to those Sukhes, the big marketplaces in Aleppo, which have now been destroyed tragically. And all of the, that was kind of one of the most ancient marketplaces.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “One of the first, and I actually invested in it when it was still a PowerPoint deck. It was not built yet. And Perry and Yancey, and it was actually brought to me by Sonny Bates, who I think remains on the board now. It was so clear that that. Had to happen. And it was something that you sort of felt in the culture.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Are part of a movement because when you have that kind of movement behind you, there's some kind of cultural change that's happening. There's something that people believe very strongly in. There's a change that society wants. Makes it so much easier to get ahead. People are more inclined to want the product or the service. They're more inclined to talk about it. It's already in a flow that's moving forward.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Those businesses, many of them succeeded, many of them failed, and tried to figure out what it was about the companies that succeeded that helped them to succeed. And he looked at the team, execution, the financing, the market they were addressing, the timing, all of the things that potentially contribute to a startup success. And what he discovered was that more than anything, timing was the thing that made those companies successful. I think that if This had happened 10 years before or 10 years after, even five years before or five years after, it wouldn't have had the same momentum as it does now. And I look at this as an investor now with SVC, my investment firm. And we're always looking for companies that have timed it just right, that have found a parade and gotten in front of it, that have”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “We had invented this at exactly the right time. And what had happened was all of these things were converging at the same time. Friends dur had come out and had gotten people accustomed to the idea of having a profile of themselves online. More than half of the households in America had broadband for the first time. More than half of the phones were being shipped with a camera on them. It was just an unstoppable juggernaut because of the time in which it was invented, right? And part of that was being smart and addressing that market, but a lot of it was also, I think we were extremely lucky and well positioned to be taken advantage of all of these flows of information. And Bill Gross, who started Idealab and has been the progenitor of, I don't know, 500 companies, many, many companies, he looked at the successive what, you know,”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say, I mean, it's funny because when you look back at something that has been successful, I think there's a tendency among entrepreneurs to attribute it to some action that they took. And one of the things you mentioned earlier, which I think is actually very important, is that we were extraordinarily lucky.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “And also sold. And that's a very different way of building something than building a community from the ground up, which is, I think, what we were trying to do. And so I think the community even now, you know, it's been acquired by Smug Mug. It's got a new life ahead of it. That's really the foundation of why it was such a strong community and how even after the Yahoo acquisition and many years later continued to be a very strong community and a model of community online.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “If you read the Bible, there's Abraham begat so-and-so begat so-and-so begat so-and-so. And it goes on for pages and pages. And I really do believe that the entrepreneur is the Abraham of the company. And so therefore is dictating what the practices are of the community, how everybody behaves, how people respond to other people's photos, all of those things, I think are basically how communities are built. And staying involved and being involved and having that conversation and being live in that conversation all the time is a really important part of building an online community. And all of this went off the rails a bit when online community was renamed and repackaged as social media because then it became a media platform in which people's attention could be sold. And as we later discovered people's data could be harvested.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Yeah, I mean, I think that's to some degree true. We had, I remember I looked back in the first three months of Flickr, the team each had posted something like 50 posts a day in the forums on people's photographs and had really been very strong participants in the community”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “And we were, I mean, it was a super scrappy operation. This is days before AWS, and we just didn't have a lot of cash. And literally the. The servers were in a co location center, and we literally had the phone number of the woman who worked down on customs who would call us up and say, hey, your new server has arrived from Austin, Texas, Dell has sent you the new server. We would rush down there, plug in our new server at the co-location center, and load up the software and keep going. It was just, it was a super sketchy. Foundation on which all of this stuff was built.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “It came out of nowhere, really. I mean, we didn't have enough money. We had like maybe a month or two left to pay our front-end engineer. And that was it. And so this came out of nowhere. And that was what enabled Flickr to get off the ground.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “And not getting paid. And the only guy that was getting paid was the guy who had three kids on our team. And we were You talk about fumes. We were really driving on fumes And then a miracle happened. What happened was we had submitted an application to the Canadian government. Flickr was started in Vancouver, Canada. We had been rejected actually for this funding for our startup game never ending. And we had apparently checked a little box that said resubmit next year because what happened was we were truly going out of business. I think we had taken money from our friends and family and all of that money had been spent. I remember this. It was December 23rd. It was two days before Christmas. A letter arrived saying congratulations. We're giving you this grant, this startup grant.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “And when it was an amazing thing to see, actually, because Ev had completely run out of cash, you know, this is the story of startups everywhere. It's a race against the bank account, really. And had nothing left when he was starting Blogger, but he just kept on going. It was a miracle. It was amazing to watch. He was eventually, his company was eventually acquired. Blogger was eventually acquired by Google. Google went public. He then had more cash, was able to start the obvious corp, which then incubated Twitter. And having seen that, right, firsthand, close up, that kind of willful determination, I see that again and again. And when you see things like the pivot that we went through, I mean, we were living on, you know, cup noodles.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “You know, it's funny because there's a conversation I once had with another investor who said that there's some entrepreneurs that are just so bullheaded and stubborn and they won't quit that companies really go out of business when the founder just quits when they stop when they're like, I can't take it anymore. And when I was When I was kind of in the valley, I saw several examples of this. I was dating Ev Williams, the Twitter founder at the time.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Well, that happened. It's interesting because we were actually in the process of building something different when Flickr came about. Everybody calls it pivoting these days, but it was a pivot and came out of an unsuccessful game. It was also built during the lull after the dot-com boom there was the dot-com bust in 2000, 2001, 2002 is when it was when things were actually looking very bad for technology and technology businesses and startups and the ability to get funding. We were unable to get funding for the game that we were working on. And so Flickr was a kind of a Hail Mary that we were able to turn into a very successful business and then led into the whole Web 2.0 era social media as we know it now, although when we conceived of it, it was not social media, it was an online community.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “This was a very early stage in the internet, and there were no manuals or guides or blog posts or anything like that to help you shape your approach to the industry. And so you had to make it up yourself. It was a very small community of people that were interested in the web at that time. They were all centered down in South Park, which we at that time called multimedia Gulch, which is a kind of a funny terminology. It was very early stages. And so I had to teach myself HTML, I had to figure out how to design for the internet. And it was a very Experimental DIY self education. At the time, getting involved in that at that very early stage, it was such a small community that I just happened to be really lucky that my friend's roommate actually worked at one of the very first web companies and was able to teach me HTML.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “And a lot of that comes from this background in humanities that I have. I really am a big believer in people's creativity flourishing when they come at things from a different direction and see things in a different way. And in many ways, I've always encouraged entrepreneurs and investors and people who are interested in entering technology to come at it from a different field and really emphasize those parts of themselves that are different from the mainstream expectation of who you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to know, where you're supposed to go to school, coming from a different direction is almost always an advantage.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “I really think that people come from outside of the industry have a superpower that people who have lived within the industry their whole lives or have spent all of their time in that. Mindset, it does give you a superpower, it does give you an ability outside of to be able to see things in a different way. And if you look at all of the companies that I've been involved with and the investments that I've made, they are companies that emphasize creativity, communication, connection, collaboration, and community.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Oh, yeah, I mean, my background is in art and literature mostly. And from the age of, I would say probably about 10 or 11, I had decided that I was going to be an artist and a writer. And I had studied, I'd actually gone, I was an art school dropout. I graduated from Vassar with a degree in English literature. And I had applied to grad school at Berkeley before this whole internet thing happened and was planning on getting a PhD in Renaissance literature. That was really my true love. I've always loved poetry. And the internet, which I've always had an interest in and had had a computer and had been hacking around with it since I was young, was another alternate path that I took. So I had actually, you know, I had been very interested and had, there were a bunch of professors that I went and interviewed with at Berkeley. Renaissance literature was”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “And so I just stayed. And my delightful sister, who I love dearly and has always taken care of me throughout my life, her little sister shows up. And six months into my stay there. She suggests to me, hey, Katerina, you might want to think about getting a job. So this being 1994, the most interesting thing that was going on at the time in San Francisco was the internet. And so I got started then as a web designer”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “That's actually not my path, the Stanford NBA. However, what happened was I was living in New York and had spent the summer in Arkansas rock climbing and was big into rock climbing and had Hooked up with a group of people there, and we were on our way to Nepal to do a big climb. And so I showed up at my sister's apartment in San Francisco. She had moved there first. I am from the East Coast originally. And I had my ice pick and my crampons and my backpack full of gear and was planning on doing a big climb in the Himalayas. She being my older sister put me up for a couple weeks in her house and I was visiting her on the way out to Asia. But what happened was my trip was delayed because one of our kind of head climbers had become injured. And then the trip was delayed and delayed. And then finally it was avalanche season and it was no longer possible for us to do the trek through the Himalayas. And so I ended up staying in my sister's spare bedroom. At the time, San Francisco was cheap enough that people had spare bedrooms.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “This has happened to me many times, in fact, and I discovered that it was actually the systems at KLM and Northwest that would throw my ticket out, my last name being fake. And I have missed flights and have spent way too many hours with customer service trying to fix this problem. The other thing, too, here's another thing, too, is that I was unable for the first two years of Facebook to make an account there. Oh, so, and probably all of my relatives. It has been resolved by my not taking those airlines anymore. I'm serious. I actually will see a flight on KLM or Northwest and”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “I'm super excited to be here, Tim It has. I remember actually when you first moved out to San Francisco and you and I had some kind of conversation or email exchange very early on.”

    2019-02-14 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #360: Caterina Fake — The Outsider Who Built Giants · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT