250! Keep em coming! :thumbsup

Edit: Damn.

2 fiddy 2 ambushes:thumbsup

As I mentioned earlier, I wrote the first web personals site in 1994 (called
webpersonals.com). I sold it in 1995 and it was then bought by lavalife for
a nice flip for the first buyer. I'm sure that the code is long history.
The japanese press were the first to write about it - was kind of weird
to have them more in tune than the US.

Webpersonals looked something like this at one point didn't it? :winkwink:

http://web.archive.org/web/200006150...anetvenis.net/

I remember that was my first shot at being a graphic designer....suffice it to say I quickly decided graphics were not for me and stuck to coding :)

Whoa... you got to fear chaos theory (you know, like in Jurassic Park
where one small change induces a cascade of changes and you get a
totally different outcome). With hindsight, of course it's easy to say
things like "Should have kept working on the search engine with Lars
in 1997".

good for you scott, keep going and congratulations :thumbsup .

its a tough road but a rewarding one - i know from experience.

You started with the seventh grade insults after i made a suggestion which was constructive and not bashing you. (and was quoting Eservices2k3 who made a valid point).

if a simple suggestion sets you off and reverts you to posting IQ insults, have at it, my guess is your playing your "board persona".

whats it say under your name? "i'm here for the sport?" ......

i threw your shit back on the same level you threw it at me.

Its the GFY game.

Seriously Scott - this is a good thread so lets agree not to overshadow it with this silliness. :thumbsup

My version was even uglier (if you can believe it) :winkwink: That site
did get kicked around a bit... I think I have a screen capture somewhere...

The earliest one I can find is http://web.archive.org/web/199610221...personals.com/ from 1996.

Doesn't look too far off from the WML I'm coding right now :1orglaugh :(

This is my favorite interview yet. Thank you Sleazy for the venue and thank you Professor for taking time out of your day to share with us. I find your experience profound and inspirational.

Cheers,

Brad

Great read!

I have enjoyed the Ambush Interviews, since I found one. I think Sleazy's does a great job and has alot of contacts backing him up, nothing wrong with other reader's asking different question's, it's the way you go about it.

As in, I'am truely enjoying this Ambush, but I have a few questions to add.

Great questions! Very intreging very interesting guy. I never knew about KoKo and found her site to be very interesting. Maui will be so nice for her.

My first business venture was when I was 8 selling vegetables from our garden to
our neighbors, door-to-door. Aside from learning how to ride a bike with two 5
gallon buckets of tomatoes, I did learn many business principles. For example,
I learned that people didn't want a five-pound zucchini no matter how much I
tried to convince them of the value per pound - business is all about the needs
of the customer.

This IS a fantastic interview! I stayed up late to get caught up on the answers - and entertained with every one. LOVE how the "doors" question gets minds going. Lars is right - that seriously is how it is at Friendfinder headquarters each day!

Wow... umm... yeah...

Great interview and very inspirational, makes me wanna to work even harder :thumbsup

Mark

great read! good luck the Professor.

I guess software guys think of their first computer just like they think
of their first sex partner. I got a Commodore Vic-20 computer when it
had just hit the stores in 1981 - I was instantly hooked. With 3K of memory and no
way to save programs, the computer had much to be desired. None-the-less,
I would turn it on in the morning, spend most of the day writing simple games
and scripts and then delete them all at night when I had to turn the computer off.
About a year later, Commodore came out with the Commodore 64 with 64K of memory
and a then-amazing cassette tape backup system. Now I could build much more
elaborate programs and save them! In gratitude for its purchase by my mom,
one of my first programs was a bible quiz game (yep, I was a church boy).
Speaking of church, if you have right-wing Christain traffic that you want
to convert, send them to BigChurch.com (don't laugh, it one of our better
converting sites... has bible searches, scripture by email, you name it!).

hey andrew.. do you konw what myers-briggs personality type you are?

my guess is INTJ

I hope you're not referring to me as I didn't once criticize anybody in this thread anywhere. I used the word "great" to describe Sleazy's questions and said I wanted to "compliment" them which is what I've done in many Ambush Interviews.

Also, one question was a repeat and it was in error, it was my very last question and it was too late to edit after posted. The question was "who do you look up to?"

Sleazy and the person being interviewed have invited others to ask questions in these interviews in the past. I take up that opportunity when I'm curious about somebody because it's not every day you get to talk to them. It adds value to the interview by creating even further interest. I think my questions were interesting and many other people feel the same way. It also takes pressure off Sleazy as he might feel over the top asking too many questions and he might ask different questions than an outsider would because he knows these people personally while we do not.

If you think I criticized anybody I think you have me mistaken with another poster.

Fantastic stuff.

Just with quick math on AFF, you are over half the size of Advanced Micro Devices (1.2b in sales). You can qualify for the Forbes 400 list or are very close.

Great interview, awesome read!

Most Excellent Interview, always was curious about "the man behind the machine" so to speak... :pimp

Andrew was up all night coding I think till about 4 am so he will be back at it in a few hours :)

My undergrad was in Terre Haute, Indiana - known fondly then as the armpit of Indiana
with one of the lowest housing costs in the country. After my freshman year, I
found a 4-bedroom, 2700 sq ft turn-of-the-century Victorian house for sale for
$21K. I was able to convince a bank to appraise it for considerably more than the
asking price as well as giving a loan to cover the cost. For the next three years,
I rented rooms of the house to 26 different people which help me cover my expenses.
I ended up selling the house a week before graduation for a reasonable profit - due
in part to three years of painting and upgrading the house. I recently went
back there and found that it hadn't been maintained - I'm sure it can be
bought for about the same now... 15 years later.

I think you're right... although I believe Andrew is on the border of almost every type, so depending on his mood for the day, he could jump to an ESFP.

Finally ... the question I've been waiting for!

Hrm ... that was not the story I was expecting, but good nonetheless. Allison from TopBucks and I shared a 600 sq. ft. casita in college, not as nice. Tucson is equally as armpitty I'm sure!! : )

Yes, INTJ/ENTJ. For people who haven't heard about myers-briggs, it's
a really amazing tool for understanding people and their needs. In just
a couple questions, you can figure out what turns someone on, what
things can make them happy, what triggers them getting upset, what
jobs are they best suited for, etc. It's also a good way to understand
yourself better - highly recommend checking out some sites that have
it or similar (including some of ours).

Hmmm... in Minnesotan winters, such hair is a life preserver
http://photos.conru.com/conru/albums/41/741.16837.jpg

Great read so far

HIPPIE FREAK


thats some funny shit right there

hah didn't i see you in "Deliverance"

LOL!!! It's like his face photochoped onto a giant fur ball!!

The day we had a maintenance guy come to do some routine checks in our building...
The poor guy walked into our office to see a dozen people...all with varying degrees of porn on our monitors.

We were all just working...but I can only imagine what he was thinking. :1orglaugh

the leaders of the adult internet industry: lars circa 1983
http://images16.fotki.com/v280/photo...983lars-vi.jpg

wow, that was my first job too. My mom has a huge garden, and she always sent my brother and I around with the cart to sell them off to the neighbors. I think some of them just bought stuff to make us add things up. :) I went to college with $800 in my bank account thanks to those veggies!

hahahaha nice hat! I'm glad none of you have pictures of me. :P

Oh shit! I wonder if he had the checkered shoes to match!? hahahaa

Great pic! Makes me think of the movie Breakin'.

*Que George Kranz: Din Daa Daa*

Is that fred flinestone's son?

he still has checkered shows today :1orglaugh

this has been the best ambush interview I have read! I'm really enojying the extra questions being added on, definately some great ones ..

I have a few myself.

I keep hearing your up all night programming ..

With AFF's and the rest of the FF networks infrastructure you must have incredible hardware and software setup. I'm sure you are pioneering many great software technologies and running off very expensive servers.

How involved in the programming exactly are you? How much do you code? How much do you manage other programmmers? Have you ever considered different platforms / webservers / db servers than you are currently running?
Are you able to say how many servers you are running?

What are AFF's most difficult technological challenges today and for the future? What has been the biggest tech problem or challenges you have had in the past, and how difficult was it to resolve?

I understand some of these may be confidential, but I'm excited to read your replies to whatever you feel you can reply to. :)

Thanks very much for the great interview. You are definately the guy in the biz I look up to most :thumbsup :thumbsup

Yah... IMS was the name of the company I talked about earlier. I hired this
one guy in 1994 to try to sell web development services. Picture a 250 sq
ft office with a dozen college people in jeans and one sales guy wearing
a bright purple suit. That guy was Lars! I knew he was going to be legendary.
After a few months, he realized that it wasn't rocket science and took off to
start doing his own companies - we've been friends ever since.

Like most people, I was very shocked when I first met Andrew to discover that he was so down to earth. He's a true class act, a role model of role models.
His personality is apparant through all of his sites and it's a HUGE plus.

Love the interview, it's a pleasure being an affiliate, and thanks for all the paychecks, which is a bit of an understatement:

Thank you Andrew for paying for my house, my cars, my vacations, my retirement fund.... damn I could go on forever. NOTHIN CONVERTS LIKE AFF!

http://www.discretesex.com/friends/mansion/80.JPG

Don't worry about the low post count... You're not alone there. :thumbsup

Thanks a lot TheProfessor! Your answers were a great read.

Oh fuck yeah I did and also had a brand new Duane Peters Santa cruz skate board with rail guards and curb hoppper and skid plate with indie trucks !

I picked her up at a pound a few years ago - aside from being a
sweetheart, she gets me away from the computer at least a few
times a day - A dog doesn't care about your work when they want
to go out to pee.
http://photos.conru.com/conru/albums/73/473.jpg
http://photos.conru.com/conru/albums/83/483.jpg
http://photos.conru.com/conru/albums/54/454.jpg

let me guess..vans?

awwww, great pic. :) You should bring her by more often... ahe adds a little extra excitement to the affiliate department!

Q: With AFF's and the rest of the FF networks infrastructure you must have incredible hardware and software setup. I'm sure you are pioneering many great software technologies and running off very expensive servers.

A: Yah, we've come a long way from having everything on one linux box.
We're now on over 1000 servers with dozens added every month. Hardware
and software requirements grow exponentially with size (e.g., more people
each day doing searches on a growing amount of members). We've worked
hard to increase capacity and redundancy - with more on the way.

When we started in 1996, we thought that we'd be "mostly done" with
software development after a few months because, hey, how tough is
to create a little dating site? 10 years later we have a project list that
is approaching 800 things to do.

Q: How involved in the programming exactly are you? How much do you code? How much do you manage other programmmers?

We have over 70 people in development currently who crank out about
40 new projects/features per week. Over the past few years, we have
increasingly become more process oriented (e.g., spec=> design=>
build=> test=> release=> review). Most developers appreciate the
extra structure. One of the advantages of being a developer (and CEO),
is that I can work on skunk projects - ones that are faster to have one
person do most of the process. I guess programming is a vice for me.
I used to code about 40 hours/week in spare time (e.g., after hours) but
have recently set a tighter personal limit... which I often break. With
the growing team of developers, I'm increasingly empowering senior
staff to run with projects - with perhaps a few suggestions.

Q: Have you ever considered different platforms / webservers / db servers than you are currently running?

A: We often rework our delivery system and tweak performance.

Q: What are AFF's most difficult technological challenges today and for the future? What has been the biggest tech problem or challenges you have had in the past, and how difficult was it to resolve?

A: We have about 10 core development goals ranging from customer
satisfaction to system stability. After 13 years of building websites,
we have seen almost every type of technological challenge - from
hardware failures to complex software algorithms. What I'm most
proud of is our team's ability to adapt and grow.

Whoa dood! Rad!!!

301 professors - excellent interview