LiNkS

Back in October 2000, Jim and I were roommates living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jim was in his seventh year as a grad student at UC Berkeley, while I was unemployed. In other words, Jim spent all his time playing pool and riding his motorcycles, while I went out and partied a lot.

One late Tuesday afternoon, Jim mentioned to my brother Tony and I that he thought a girl we recently met was a perfect 10. Meanwhile, I was drinking. Ever hang out with your friends drinking and come up with a totally crazy idea based on something someone said? Well, that's exactly what happened.

Jim built the site in a few days, and then HOTorNOT was "launched." Actually, all we did was email a bunch of our friends, telling them about the site. Within an hour, we started getting submissions to the site from people we didn’t know! It turns out that everyone we sent it to had passed it on to their friends too.

Word started spreading fast, and within a few months, there were articles about HOTorNOT in a bunch of newspapers and magazines like Salon.com, BusinessWeek, Playboy, and Slashdot. We were amazed by the interest- we made Entertainment Weekly’s "It" List, cited as among the 100 most creative people in entertainment, won a People’s Voice Award at the Webby's, and showed the site off on the Sally Jessy Raphael show. We heard that Conan O’Brien and Letterman even talked about the site. If you saw that, let us know!

We can hardly believe that the site has already counted over 2 billion votes! The coolest thing was when my parents told me that my cousins in Taiwan saw pictures of Jim and I in some magazine there. It’s also helped us get back in touch with people that we knew in elementary school!

Starting HOTorNOT.com has definitely been an incredible experience, we love our job and get lots of cool perks ;) It’s really satisfying to know that there are so many people that like the site and that there are lots of happy relationships and even marriages as a result of what we’ve done.

There have also been a ton of parody sites out there that we think are absolutely hilarious. We have a list of our favorites.

We can only really take credit for drinking the beer and putting in a lot of hours to keep the site running. The bulk of the credit goes to all the cool moderators, especially Pete, Aggy, and Lily, and to people like YOU who submit their pictures to the site.

We appreciate your support and hope you continue to enjoy the site.

hotornot.com A leading local portal and transactions company that provides in-depth local content and services to help people "get things done" online.
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