Caterina Fake

Here’s what you do when your startup’s broke and no one cares.

It was 2002.

Caterina Fake was broke, burned out, and running out of time.

Her startup, Ludicorp, had spent everything building a multiplayer online game no one wanted.

Investors didn’t get it.

Users either.

The team hadn’t been paid in months.

Most founders would’ve shut the doors.

Caterina didn’t.

Instead, she and her co-founder salvaged a tiny photo-sharing tool from the failed game and turned it into something new: Flickr.

What started as a last-ditch experiment became one of the first true social platforms of the Web 2.0 era.

It pioneered tagging, user-generated content, and community-led discovery.

Years before Instagram, before Facebook.

In 2005, Yahoo! bought it for $30M.

But Caterina didn’t stop at Flickr.

She co-founded Hunch, a collective-intelligence platform that personalized decisions before algorithms ruled our lives (acquired by eBay for $80M).

She chaired the board at Etsy.

Sat on the boards of Creative Commons, Sundance, and McSweeney’s.

Invested early in companies like Kickstarter, Cloudera, and Lovevery.

Today, she’s a General Partner at Yes VC, backing startups at the intersection of culture, tech, and impact.

Climate, AI, health, defense.

She’s also the voice behind Should This Exist? and INGENIOUS, two podcasts with over 4 million downloads exploring the social cost of innovation.

“Flickr only existed because our first company failed.”

From near-bankruptcy to the Time 100.

From self-taught coder to angel investor hall of fame.

Caterina Fake didn’t just build websites. She helped build the modern internet.