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Livingston: Why was HOT or NOT instantly so popular?

Hong: Looking at hot chicks is fun. It's voyeurism. The concept at the time was so new and edgy. No one had ever seen it before or thought about it. It was just so funny—and painful too. Like voting for people who were so ugly that you wond…

Kaufer: Chapter one is starting up the company, getting anyone interested in what we do. Chapter two was hitting that profitability mark so we could break even. Chapter three is growing, and if it so happens, as it did with us, a great liquidity event. Chapter four is, "OK, are you done with the bu…

So it was falling apart very quickly financially; I could tell that. The board meetings got more acrimonious. They actually precipitated the ultimate fight. They said, "Look, we're going to kick you off the board and sue you for injuring our self-esteem. You better talk to a lawyer."

Livingst…

I wanted them to have a real professional résumé. In the end, the project was a failure because the industry trends moved away from that. People don't want programmers to be professionals; they want programmers to be cheap. They want them to be using inefficient tools like C and Java. They just wan…

For programmers, I had a vision—partly because I had been teaching programmers at MIT—that I didn't like the way that programmer careers turned out. Now that I fly airplanes, I realize that the average programmer is really much less happy in his/her job than the average airplane mechanic, which is …