Caterina Fake: Smart move
I don’t consider myself an internet pundit, but I do think Caterina Fake’s latest move is a smart one. She co-founded Flickr, saw it bought by Yahoo! and has since left. What to do? She’s joined the board of Hunch to be chief product officer (as reported by Jemima).
Why do I think this is a smart move? Because she doesn’t appear to be over-estimating her skills and experience. Flickr became an incredible success, and that is undoutedly due to Caterina and Stewart’s uncommon vision, leadership and so on. But a quick glance at the market shows that Flickr’s success must also have been due to a very large dose of good luck.
So Caterina has a very great deal of skill and (now) experience, but she doesn’t have magic powers. And so rather than pretending that she can pull off another Flickr by herself, she’s instead moving into a team position in an existing company. She’s not trying to kid herself or anyone else about her abilities, but rather making an honest contribution. That feels like a rare act of self-understanding from a web pioneer.
