An Engineer

Carbonite acquired Phanfare in 2011 and at the time, I could not talk too much about the acquisition. But some time has passed now and the details are not nearly as sensitive. In this post, I don’t want to focus so much on what has happened since the acquisition (not much) but instead, what led me to start the company with my friend Mark Heinrich.

My love for photography started at Stuyvesant High School in the early 1980s. Back then, a friend who had a Canon AE1 taught me the basics of SLR photography. I bought a Pentax K1000 and eventually a Nikon FG. I still remember trading my K1000 for the FG, taking the modest credit that Willoughby’s offered me. I wish I had kept that first camera.

I became photo editor of the Stuyvesant Spectator newspaper during my senior year, 1985. By that point I had a darkroom in our laundry room at my childhood home on Staten Island. I developed all the Tri-X pan for the staff photographers, creating proof sheets. I had modest equipment and a lot of patience.

I never considered photography to be art. Maybe some photos are art, but most simply document life, communicate a moment. For me, photography satisfied my desire to leave something behind, to be more than dust in the wind. I also loved the technical aspects of photography and the gear. The Japanese cameras are beautifully made, finely engineered instruments. They are almost like jewelry.

I took a lot of photos – as many as I could afford to develop. I always had basic equipment. In college at Dartmouth I had only a 50mm lens and one terrible Vivitar zoom that was so poor I could never get myself to mount it.  I joined a company at college, Picture This, that took photos at sorority and fraternity formals. I learned how to shoot portraits and groups, use a flash properly and avoid red eye. I learned that at sorority formals, photos without men sell better than those with the men. The men were transitory.

When digital photography started to first take off in grad school at Stanford, I played with a Apple QuickTake 100 we had in our research group. In the late 90s I watched the founding of Ofoto and Shutterfly with great interest. These were ultimately transitional digital photo services – they focused on creating physical prints and objects from digital images, something with little long term appeal.

Many of us in grad school had simple web sites that we maintained on our workstations with our personal digital photos. These websites were the equivalent of the personal photo album of our childhood, the album that was in the living room cabinet. Most of the images that we published to these sites we got from CDs that Kodak gave us when they developed our film. digital cameras were poor quality in the mid 90s and expensive, way outside the budget of a graduate student. Our websites were often static HTML pages generated by Perl scripts. They were protected from prying eyes via an .htaccess file that popped up a password prompt.

After Stanford, in 1999, I founded my first company with my friend Mark Heinrich: Flashbase. I will talk about Flashbase another time, but it had little to do with photography. DoubleClick acquired Flashbase in 2000 and Mark and I finally had some financial security for the first time in our lives. We started buying a lot more digital cameras. I owned one of the first Nikon CoolPix cameras and the Canon D30, D60, and so on. Our digital images were piling up and we were not sure what to do with them.

Keep in mind, this was before facebook, before YouTube. By 2004, Mark and I were interested in doing something in digital photography. We both loved it, and we both had no idea where we should be keeping the long tail of our digital photos. We were certain that keeping them on our local hard drive was the wrong answer, that your hard drive was where photos go to die. Unseen by anybody, the disk would eventually fail. We hypothesized that folks would pay for a high quality archive of their digital photos. And we thought that the internet should be your master copy of your digital photos, not your computer.

The idea of the cloud being the master copy of your digital photos was not popular yet in 2004. Networks were not fast enough and disk was way too expensive. Steve Jobs was pushing the idea of your Mac being your digital hub, centered around iTunes. To make the whole thing workable, we designed a fat network client that would run on your PC and sync your photos to internet, moving small versions fast and fullsize versions in the background. The idea was that you could work with your photos on the local app while the app moved the photos to and from the net in the background.

We were fixated, perhaps wrongly, on preserving fullsize originals. And at that time, there was simply no way to store fullsize originals and have the service be ad-supported and free. Plus, we did not want ads on our personal photo albums. And so we decided that Phanfare needed to be a subscription service.

I will tell the Phanfare story in another post, but in retrospect, we were not wrong about where photography was going but we were way too early. It would take another ten years before Apple would release their Photos app that synchronizes your iPhone roll with the cloud and shows it across your devices. Google Photos is the same idea (but better). These ideas are right in my opinion. You should be able to shoot and the photos should magically get mirrored to all your devices and stored reliably in the cloud. There should be no upload step.

What we were wrong about is that websites of photos at unique URLs would be the way people share photos. People share photos through social media when they want to share with more than a few people and by direct message (email, SMS, google hangouts, etc) when they want to share with a single person.

I learned a lot from the Phanfare experience and I will share some of those things in coming posts.