At 6:44:36 PST on August 1, 2006, we opened our doors to the world. It was a restless night for all of us as we have eagerly anticipated this momentous occasion for months now. Amazingly, we actually launched according to plan! Go figure. 
But when you have a team as smart and dedicated as I get to work with, nothing manages to surprise me anymore. I’m so proud of these guys for pulling together and making this dream a reality.
Just nine months ago I was sitting in a hole-in-the-wall foodcourt downtown eating Vietnamese noodles with Papa lamenting corporate life. We were just so tired of dealing with the politics and bureaucracy. We decided then and there that we wanted to do more. Tinkering with different ideas, we found one we liked focused on travel and we worked and worked to flesh it out while working our day jobs. After some hurdles and losing our engineer, we decided to scrap the idea and start over again. Those were the days when it was easy to give up and call it a day. We could say, “Hey, we gave it a shot”. But that wasn’t good enough for either of us. So we went back to the drawing board. I loved working with Papa back at Yahoo! when we were in the Yahoo! Finance group and it was fun coming up with product ideas with him again.
In the meantime, I was working on a personal project on the side to keep up with my web skills since I was getting rusty doing marketing. I’ve been an avid photographer for a few years now and a big fan of my Canon EOS digital SLR camera. A lot of people had been asking me about my camera and about tips and advice for buying one and shooting with it. So I decided to build a website for fans of Canon digital SLRs called EOSrebels.com to help them out. I also did it to learn more about Google Adsense and affiliate referral programs which I worked on at eBay. I learned that even with a small niche content site, you can get tons of passionate users who are like-minded. All I did was pull together my favorite links and write some content and add a forum. Slowly but surely it got traction and attracted a loyal user base. Plus I was making some cash on the side.
Papa and I got to talking about the site and he was inspired created an Office fansite for the NBC comedy called dunderball.com. Together we learned more about online communities and fansites. We were onto something. He was about to have his second child and was complaining about how there was no good way to find the best links out for new parents. We both felt like it was silly that people had to do redundant research and they weren’t able to effectively share the content they found with others. It was such a pain going through Google searches only to keep finding lame sites and search optimized spammers. We thought to ourselves, wouldn’t it be awesome if we could make thousands of these niche fansites? Fansites and forums out there are so fragmented and quality is so inconsistent. We wanted to bring the whole experience together and put our own spin on it.
After much pain in trying to find a technical person to round out our team, we were about ready to throw in the towel again. We were sitting at the very same foodcourt months later lamenting once more. Right then I got a call from an old family friend, Cliff, who had just gotten back from a trip to Thailand. I had mentioned our idea to him before his trip and after thinking about it on his trip, he called to tell us he was interested. Next time I’m down and out, you know where to find me eating Vietnamese.
We picked up Michael along the way in yet another great story which he shared about earlier. And the rest is history. Now we’re hoping to make history with the launch of Fanpop. I still can’t believe what we were able to create in such a short time. Everytime I hear from users how much they love the site I get choked up. We hope you have fun just as much fun with the site, because we sure had fun making it for you.