THE EARLY INTERNET YEARS When I graduated in 1999, it was both the heyday of the internet and the heyday of newspaper mergers and acquisitions. But although I worked for a newspaper, unlike most people I would get my news from the internet, reading off the wires. I found a paradox in my own behaviour and decided this internet thing would be a lot more interesting. I was doing great in my job but decided I would take a risk. I joined a dotcom but seven months later I quit to start my own online analytics company. It was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. The year was 2000 and the stock market had taken a dive. There were two dozen start-ups doing the same thing and I was based in Chicago [in the United States] where financing was hard to come by. I folded my first company within 18 months.
A HONG KONG CHILDHOOD I was born in Korea but moved to Hong Kong with my parents. My dad was working with a Korean company, on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai bridge. We lived there for 31/2 years. I went to Hong Kong International School. Then we moved to the United States, to Sacramento. I haven't been back to Hong Kong since I left, although I think Vancouver [Canada] looks pretty close. I went on to Northwestern University in Chicago. I now live in Seattle.
I was kind of a geek as a kid. Our elementary school had one of the first government-sponsored programming classes. I wasn't very good at it though. I went on to major in journalism.
A SECOND CHANCE After my company folded in 2001, I spent the next five or six years trying to get out of debt. Then, I had to make a choice: I could have gone back to school - I had been accepted into the master's programme at Northwestern University. But I didn't want to get into any more debt. So I declined to pursue my love of the internet. I decided that if I was going to work for a company I would only do so if I had direct access to the CEO. Two people in Hawaii had created the I Can Has Cheezburger weblog in 2007 starting with a photo of a grey cat with a big smile and that funny caption. We acquired the domain name.
Now, people upload their own cat photos and captions to it. We get 1.5 million hits a day. We felt people were coming to the site not just because they loved cats, which they clearly did, but because cats are a canvas for the human emotion. They have very expressive faces. It's easy for us to put human emotions on cats. I raised money through investors to build a company and create more websites in this space. The question was, 'What is this space? What is this market?' The answer is it's really more about humour than about pets. We then launched into funny dog photos with IHasaHotDog.com. I'm a big animal person. I have a 13-year-old dog, who loves eating tuna, strangely.
MORE THAN ANIMALS The success of I Can Has Cheezburger got us thinking about what other playgrounds we could make for people. We wanted to build places where people could come and hang out, places about fun and humour. At a conference a couple of years ago, I said I'd be happy with a dozen sites, but we have about 50 now. Failblog is our largest. It allows people to upload images and videos of them failing in their attempts to do something. It's not about accidents. It's more of a punch line. In Engrish Funny, people upload instances of badly used English. Wedinator.com is humorous wedding pictures and videos. Between all of them, we get 19,000 submissions every day. We are doubling and tripling our numbers every year, reaching vast numbers of people. Someone asked me the other day, 'What does that tell you about humanity?' I'll say this: after having worked on these sites for three years, it does seem like we're making fun of each other. But I believe more than ever that humanity is fundamentally good and that my job, my entire business, relies on the idea that people look at the content, make their own judgments and hopefully contribute to it.
