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Jim Young's wacky website is hot stuff
by Rachel Shafer
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The red lounge chair in his Berkeley office is Jim Young’s favorite workspace. Within a week of launching HOTorNOT.com in 2000, he was so busy he had to ask his thesis advisor, Dean Richard Newton, for permission to set aside his research so Young could focus on his new business.
RACHEL SHAFER PHOTO
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Jim Young (B.S.’94, M.S.’97, Ph.D.’04 EECS) rides to work every day on his Ducati motorcycle. He tries to get there about noon. His office, located in a corporate building in downtown Berkeley, looks more like a college pad. The overhead lights are off, but Christmas tree lights and computer screens glow. There’s a cubicle here, a desktop propped on boxes there and a mess of empty bottles and magazines lying about.
“I really, really love my job,” he says. “Before, I was lazy. But now I’m a bit of a workaholic.”
Young, 33, is cofounder and CEO of HOTorNOT.com, a Web forum where people post their photos, and visitors rate them from 1 (not) to 10 (hot). If it sounds a bit like high school (or maybe college), that’s precisely why it’s wildly popular. Launched in autumn 2000, the site is now home to 21.5 million photos seeking a rating, with more than 11 billion votes counted.
It all started one evening, when Young and his friend James Hong (B.S.’95 EECS) were discussing a woman they knew. Young said he thought she was a perfect 10. In a light bulb moment, Hong came up with the idea for the website. A few days later, Young (who was rated a 3.9) did the engineering, and they sent the URL to their friends.
“Within an hour, we were getting submissions from people we didn’t know!” says Hong (rated a 4.1). Friends told friends and, suddenly, it was mentioned in the New York Times, Salon.com, People, Entertainment Weekly and Business Week. Like many wacky dot.com ideas, HOTorNOT could have faded out as quickly as it ignited, but the two friends wouldn’t let it.
“It was our baby,” Young explains. He nursed the site along, spending every extra minute maintaining the technical side while trying to complete his thesis in embedded systems. He added an online dating component called Meet Me and, when banner ad funds fizzled, decided to charge a fee for it. (Hong and Young both use the dating service themselves.) Single people signed up, hooked up, and even got married. HOTorNOT now employs five staff, including several engineering alumni, and the cofounders pay themselves a salary. By giving visitors the chance to rate any photo as “inappropriate,” they try to keep the site tasteful and fun.
“We love this place,” Young says. “There’s a sense of curiosity and freedom about the Bay Area. We couldn’t have done what we‘ve done without it.”
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