July 31st: James Hong, HOTorNOT

James Hong, co-founder HOTorNOT.com

Our speaker for July will be James Hong, co-founder of the popular photo rating / casual dating website HOTorNOT. James will speak about his experiences as a scrappy entrepreneur, how to bootstrap a startup, and how he built a very profitable, subscription-based web business.

James is a creative, unorthodox, and scrappy Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He came up with the idea for HOTorNOT while drinking (heavily, we suspect) with fellow co-founder Jim Young in October of 2000. In its first week the site topped 2M daily pageviews, and became an immediate cult hit. With *zero* angel or VC funding, HOTorNOT grew quickly to a multi-million dollar subscription business. After operating profitably out of a living room for much of its first eight years, the company was sold in early 2008 to an investment group for a rumored $20M. If there’s a shrewder entrepreneur in the valley than James, we’d like to meet ‘em.

Since the acquisition, James has been on temporary sabbatical from entrepreneurship — in other words he’s at home watching television, where his latest indulgence is MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew. James also enjoys spending time with a few of his angel investments, including Slide and Mochi Media. He is currently waiting for the economy to completely tank before embarking on another venture… or until Boogie Bots is voted off the show. James is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he earned a BS Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the Haas School of Business.

Here’s a quick video interview of James and his thoughts on being scrappy, selling out, angel investing, and breakdancing: