Co-founder of Flickr photo sharing site is Fil-Am

On her blog, Caterina Fake, 49, co-founder of the Flickr photo hosting and sharing website, described herself using four disordered words: entrepreneur, mother, reader, optimist. Let me add another: Filipino-American. I came across Caterina Fake’s name while doing a web search of ‘Filipino Americans.’ Her name came up and under it her multiple affiliations: co-founder of Flickr; chairman and board member at Etsy; investor in Kickstarter; founder of Hunch.com; founder of Findery; and many more start-ups that have found modest to wild success in their unique, niche markets. Her surname is truly Fake, the anglicized version of her grandfather’s German name, “Feick.” She was born in Pittsburgh and grew up there. Hers is a small family, she said in an email interview with The FilAm: her parents, her sister and herself. Her Filipino mother has roots in Manila and Pampanga. “As a child I visited my relatives in Angeles City and Manila. We also went to Baguio to visit. I have a lot of relatives,” she said. Her mother was a pharmacist and her father worked in insurance though, she said, he loves literature and went to graduate school to study English. So does Caterina, who graduated with honors in English Literature from Vassar College in 1991. “My mother was born in Manila, but moved to the U.S. as a child. She met my father when they were both living in Baltimore and they were on a date with other people.” Growing up, she “would occasionally” encounter racism. “(It) was mostly ignorance. And while I’d like to say I’d patiently introduce bigots to a larger world view, I mostly just ignored them.” She co-founded Flickr with then-husband Stewart Butterfield, a computer software programmer from Vancouver, and together they launched the website in 2004. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo for a reported $35 million the following year, with Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang calling Caterina and Stewart “very good at figuring out how to create communities.” According to Notablebiographies.com, Fake, who is four years older, met Butterfield in 2000 at a San Francisco party. They were married until 2007 and have a daughter named Sonnet. Both resigned from Yahoo in 2008. - The FilAm