jlodwick

Hello HN!

Back in the early 2000s, my business partners and I launched a number of websites. Some were successful (CollegeHumor, Vimeo), others were not.

This URL features a detailed, contemporaneous look at of one of the unsuccessful projects, a 2002 "social directory for college students" called Campus Hook. To my knowledge, this is the first time this document has been shared publicly.

It may be of interest to anyone looking at the history of social networking sites, especially the transition from online dating to more general interpersonal interaction.

It may also be interesting in the context of Facebook's history: although we identified a very similar demographic opportunity as the FB founders, we (obviously) failed to win the big prize.

(I contend that we failed because we were simply too old to care about the core product or users; by the time the site went live in early 2003, we were college seniors eager to move to San Diego and begin our adult lives. We could hardly have cared less about dorm-room dating. However, the lack of school email verification -- attributed to the Winklevii years later -- could also have been a determining factor!)

If anyone has questions, I'll keep an eye on this thread and do my best to answer. AMA!

-Jake Lodwick

I like this comment!

That's amazing! We started Campus Hook in 2002 (I think) but the timing was bad for a few reasons: 1. A few years early in terms of college student adoption of internet 2. A few years later in terms of founders' ages (we were seniors and didn't really care about campus dating anymore)

So happy to hear you met on there, and, apparently, are still married! Perhaps it wasn't a failure after all :)

> mindcrime 23 hours ago | link | parent

True, but I know about the potential of companies, and failing to reach that potential is a form of failure. So you know all about the ultimate potential of every single company out there, formed and as-yet-unformed? Dude, if you're that prescient, forget this entrepreneurial thing and just buy lottery tickets, or go to the horse tracks. All joking aside, I don't completely disagree with "True, but I know about the potential of companies, and failing to reach that potential is a form of failure", but I do disagree that you have any standing to mandate what everyone else should have as goals, or what their "success criteria" are. I suppose if one were looking at it from the point of view of "the success of the company" as opposed to "the success of the founders" I could be more sympathetic to your position,

I was, and this probably wasn't clear.

It was my first article in a while and there are a number of things I want to do differently in the next one, especially when introducing a contrarian point. I appreciate your feedback.

> You don't know me, my life, my past, my future, my dreams, my fears, my hopes, my goals or a goddamned other thing about me.

True, but I know about the potential of companies, and failing to reach that potential is a form of failure.

> Pretty easy position to take once you've already earned your own "fuck you" money.

True, though I certainly wish I'd known this position before I earned mine.

Maybe it wasn't clear from the article, but I was talking about the acquisition of a company, not a product. Hackers, and SV people in general, tend not to distinguish between the two, as many "startup companies" are actually just attempts to commercialize a single product idea. The potential for a company is orders of magnitude greater, because a company can create endless products. If you're talented enough to build things that are useful to people, why not found a single legal entity that creates many things, mitigating per-thing risk and exploiting countless economies of scale?

Yeah. My suggested title was "A Critique of Popular Ambition". In future articles I might ask for more input on the title.

The existing businesses were nurtured and optimized reasonably well. I was lamenting the loss of the creative spirit that generated those two businesses in the first place -- the larger, more valuable core of the company.

> Ten times out of ten, he'd take his buyout over again.

How do you know that?

> With your fat bank account, you can start a new, independent company.

It takes years to build a great company. Running a great company was better than having the potential to start a new one.

We chose not to support Firefox because we didn't want to use Flash or OGG Vorbis. But upon reading your comment I looked into it and apparently there is now limited FF support for H.264, which we will investigate. Thanks.

Fine. But what advantage do you have over similar humans?