Caterina Fake Biography

Caterina Fake is an American entrepreneur and businesswoman. She is best known for co-founding the websites Flickr and Hunch.

Early life

Fake was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to an American father, and a Filipina mother who is a naturalized citizen. Fake graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall, attended Smith College, and graduated from Vassar College in 1991.

Career

In the 1990s, Fake was Art Director at Salon.com, and heavily involved in the development of online community, social software and personal publishing.

In 1997, she took a job managing the community forums of Netscape.

In the summer of 2002, Fake co-founded Ludicorp in Vancouver with Stewart Butterfield. 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 that became one of the world's most popular photosharing websites. Flickr was then acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. Flickr became part of a vanguard of so-called 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, a stimulus to innovation and creativity, and Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products. Fake resigned from Yahoo on June 13, 2008.

In 2009, Fake co-founded the website Hunch with entrepreneur Chris Dixon. The site is building the "taste graph" of the Internet, mapping every user on the Internet to every entity, and their affinity for that entity. It launched in June 2009. It was acquired by eBay for a reported $80 million in November 2011. Pinwheel launched in a limited beta in February 2012, and renamed to Findery in July 2012.

Memberships

Fake joined the board of directors of Creative Commons in August 2008, and is Chairman of the Board of Etsy. She is a Founder Partner at Founder Collective, and advises many startups and new businesses.

Awards and honors

Fake has won many awards, including BusinessWeek's Best Leaders of 2005, Forbes 2005 eGang, Fast Company's Fast 50, and Red Herring's 20 Entrepreneurs under 35. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people, appearing on the cover of Newsweek that same year.

In May 2009 she received an Honorary Doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Personal life

Fake was married to Stewart Butterfield, her Flickr co-founder, from 2001 to 2007. They had one daughter together, in 2007. Fake currently lives in San Francisco, California and New York City.