Powerful Women: Caterina Fake

Generation-Y is the most tech savvy group to date. We would be nothing without the Internet and all of the conveniences that come with it. Because of this, we must recognize the forefront leaders in this business.

One being, Caterina Fake. If you don’t know, Caterina is best known for co-founding websites Flickr and Hunch. You may have heard of them…

Caterina was born in Pittsburgh, where she lived until she went to school at Smith College. In 1991, Caterina graduated from Vassar College.

Caterina got her start in the tech industry at Salon.com, holding a position as Art Director. She then moved onto managing the community forms of Netscape (remember Netscape?!).

During the summer of 2002, Caterina aided in co-founding a tech company called Ludicorp with partner Stewart Butterfield. Ludicorp was responsible for developing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game called Game Neverending. The game never ended up launching, but the website Flickr came to be as a result.

Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! In 2005 and is now one of the world’s most popular photo sharing websites. Flickr is now integrated into social networking sites and community open API’s.

After the acquisition by Yahoo!, Caterina took a job with the company where she ran the Tech Development group. She resigned in 2008 to co-found the website Hunch with Chris Dixon. Hunch builds a “taste graph” of the Internet, mapping every user on the Internet to every entity and their affinity for that entity.

Hunch launched in 2009 and was acquired by eBay for $80 million in November 2011.

Caterina now holds seats on the board of directors of Creative Commons and is the Chairman of the Bard of Etsy.

Ally | Elite.

Photo Credit: Getty Images