Caterina Fake

Caterina Fake is an American entrepreneur and businesswoman. She co-founded the websites Flickr in 2004 and Hunch in 2007. Fake has been a trustee for nonprofit organizations and was the chairwoman of Etsy. For her role in creating Flickr, Fake was listed in Time magazine's Time 100, and she has been recognized within Silicon Valley for her work as an angel investor. Early life and education Fake was raised in northern New Jersey by her American father and her Filipina mother. As a child, she was not allowed to watch television, and her hobbies included reading poetry and playing classical music. She graduated from the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall in 1986 and Vassar College in 1991 with a degree in English, after transferring from Smith College in 1989. Vassar College had an intranet that the students could connect to from their dorm rooms, which Fake credits as being largely responsible for her eventually finding web design. After working various jobs, including as a painter's assistant, an investment banker, and at a dive shop (which Fake called her "post-college what-do-I-want-to-do period"), she was delayed in San Francisco while visiting her sister. Fake taught herself about the Internet and began creating websites and CD-ROMs. Career In 1997, she took a job managing the community forums of Netscape. This experience, along with others in blogging and online communities, led her to co-found Ludicorp in Vancouver with Stewart Butterfield and Jason Classon in summer 2002. The company developed a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending. The game did not launch, but Fake and Butterfield started a new product called Flickr in 2004 that became one of the world's most popular photosharing websites. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 for around US$30 million. It became part of the "Web 2.0" sites, integrating features such as social networking, community open APIs, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced the most popular content. After the acquisition, Fake took a job at Yahoo, where she ran the Technology Development group, known for its Hack Yahoo program and for Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products. She resigned from Yahoo on June 13, 2008.