Caterina Fake began building early web sites in the 1990s at Organic, Inc., creating the first McDonald's website. She co-founded Flickr and sold it to Yahoo in 2005, later serving on Etsy's board and supporting arts organizations. She founded Yes VC in 2018, investing in energy, health, and AI startups. She experienced failures such as the Findery travel-journal app and now plans to train as an emergency medical technician to move away from trivial internet work. She warns that advertising and AI are degrading the user-generated internet, eroding valuable content, and stresses the importance of real-world skills and genuine communities.
I worked at one of the very first web agencies, called Organic, Inc., which spun out of Wired magazine to create websites for advertisers. The first site that they assigned me to work on, completely unexpectedly, was mcdonalds.com. So, I built the first McDonald's website. It was a horrific-looking website, but it was before formatting was even possible.
It was about teenagers having their period for the first time. I remember Brian searched for "teenage girl," and all this pornography came up. And this is 1996 - so the internet has always been 95% garbage and 5% good stuff. But that last sliver of good content is being eroded even further. My experience of the internet, when constrained to apps, has become further polluted by an inability to turn off ads.
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