Engineering News, September 26, 2005

September 26, 2005 Vol. 77, no. 5F

THIS IS THE LIFE: EECS alum Jim Young in his workspace of choice: a massage chair. Young is co-founder of HOTorNOT.com, the appearance-rating website founded at the height of the dotcom boom. (Photo Credit: Rachel Jackson)

HOTorNOT.com gets a 10 for surviving the dotcom bust and building a viable web business

Jim Young (B.S.’94, M.S.’97, Ph.D.’04 EECS) rides into work on his Ducati motorcycle. He tries to get there about noon. His office is located in a slick corporate-style building in downtown Berkeley, but Young’s floor is more like a college pad. The overhead lights are off, and here and there Christmas lights glow. There’s no organized office: a cubicle here, a desktop propped on boxes there, a makeshift table with a laptop. Computer screens glow. There’s a mess of empty bottles, magazines, and a massage chair. The chair is Young’s preferred workspace.

“I really, really love my job,” says Young. “Before I was lazy, but now I’m a bit of a workaholic.”

Young, 32, is co-founder and CEO of HOTorNOT.com. Launched in the autumn of 2000, the website provides a forum for people to post pictures of themselves or their friends online. The site’s visitors rate how good-looking the person is from 1 (not) to 10 (hot). If it sounds a bit like high school (or college for that matter), then that’s precisely why the site became wildly popular. Friends told friends about it like a juicy piece of gossip. In due time, the New York Times, Salon.com, People, Entertainment Weekly, and BusinessWeek covered it.

Not bad for a joke. One evening over rounds of drinks, Young and his friend James Hong (B.S.’95 EECS, MBA ‘94) were discussing a girl. Young said he thought she was a perfect 10. In a booze-induced lightbulb moment, Hong came up with the idea for a website. A few days later, Young (who was subsequently rated a 3.9) used his EECS background to engineer a site, and they sent it around to their friends. “Within an hour, we started getting submissions to the site from people we didn’t know!” says Hong, who was rated a 4.1.

“A week later when the website really started receiving massive traffic, I had to ask my Ph.D. advisor, Dean Newton, if it was okay if I focused on this thing that I had been doing when I was supposed to be doing research,” Young says, chagrined. “He was gracious enough to let me do it and even put me in contact with former students who helped me build out the site and make it more robust.”

HOTorNOT could have flamed out, like many wacky dot-com ideas, but the two friends wouldn’t let it. “It was our baby,” explains Young. “You can’t let your baby die.” The engineering Ph.D. student nursed the site along, spending every extra minute maintaining the technical side of things, while trying to complete his thesis in embedded systems. During that time, he added an online dating component called Meet Me.

Hong, meanwhile, took care of business. When the banner ad money fizzled, the two decided to charge six dollars a month for the online dating service. Single people signed up and hooked up, and marriages resulted. (Both Young and Hong advertise for dates on the site.)

Hong’s idea worked. The friends now employ five web staff (several are Cal engineering grads) and pay themselves a salary. And they’re located in Berkeley for a reason. “I love this place, the campus, the area,” says Young. “I love the creative energy here. There’s a sense of curiosity and freedom unique in the Bay Area. We couldn’t have done what we‘ve done without it.”

Are you Hot or Not? Go to www.hotornot.com.

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