Caterina Fake

Early life and education

Fake was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to an American father, and a Filipina mother who is a naturalized citizen. As a child, she was not allowed to watch television, and her hobbies included reading poetry and playing classical music.

Fake graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall and attended Smith College. In 1991 she graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. degree in English.

Career

She started her career as a Lead Designer of Organic Online, a top web development agency, where she worked on web sites for Fortune 500 companies such as McDonald's, Kimberly-Clark, Colgate-Palmolive, Levi's and Nike - many of them their first online ventures. She served as a Member of the Research Staff at Interval Research.

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, she co-founded Ludicorp in Vancouver with Stewart Butterfield and Jason Classon. 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 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 and for 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 made recommendations to users based on the tastes and opinions that they entered into the system. It launched in June 2009. Hunch was acquired by eBay for a reported $80 million in November 2011. eBay shut it down in March 2014.

Fake's most recent venture is Findery, which was originally called Pinwheel, and launched in a limited beta in February 2012. It was renamed to Findery in July 2012. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.

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. In 2015, Fake joined the Sundance Institute Board of Trustees.

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. As of 2015, Fake is in a relationship with Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engeström, and the couple have three children between them.

Fake currently lives in San Francisco, California and New York City.