Interview

Let’s jump right in. My first question, of course, is: what inspired you all to do the MODE festival?

I’ve had this idea, off and on, for more than a decade. This desire to get together with photographers and celebrate photography. I’ve been to things like Sundance, right? And if you’re really into cinema, if that’s your thing, Sundance is this really cool energy and vibe of like, hey, I want to be there, and I want to be surrounded by people who are just as stoked to be there as I am. I think, as you probably well know, we don’t have that, and we’ve never had that in the photography space, right?

And if you love photography, you want to get together with other photographers. You want to make things. You want to share things. You want to, you know, interact. Fun, but a few dozen people at the most, is how that normally goes. What if it was bigger? What if we really built something, and got tens thousands of photographers in the same area, in the same city? What could we build? So it started with a pretty simple question of, hey, how cool would it be if we brought all of our favorite photographers to the same spot and did something really amazing?

And once you had that idea, what was the vibe you were looking for? What I’m seeing from the schedule is a very broad appeal. What was the inspiration for what you were trying to do there?

I think the first ground rule for me is: I want it to be experiential. I want you to have a camera in your hand pretty much the whole time. That was table stakes for me, and that was missing from industry trade shows and other things. I want to build things that inspire you to be taking photos the whole time. I don’t want it to just be a big camera shop. Yes, I want to go play with the latest in technology and long lenses and gadgets, but I can go to a camera shop. I want so much more than just somewhere to buy things. I want to create things, and so that was table stakes for me.

What can we do that would get people taking photos? So we’re building a lot of art installations and bringing in international artists. Everything was with the aim of: how would you want to interact with this in a photographic way? We have a breakdancing competition that we’re building so that people can get up close and take photos of things they might not be able to normally. Even as we think about the concert series, and you’ve seen on the poster that we have some pretty big artists. You can’t go into a typical Vince Staples show, for instance, with your camera. They’ll say, “don’t, keep that at home. You can use your phone or whatever.” But we wanted just from the get go to say, if we’re gonna have music, we wanted it to be about music and concert photography.

So that really was the inception of this idea. It really all comes back to that core thing of: will people want to take photos of this?  And that’s where we started.

Was there a place you were looking for as a guide, a north star in terms of what kind of talent you wanted for the music? What kind of photographers you wanted?

Photographers, I would say, was easier for me because a) I love photographers, and so it’s, like, everybody, just bring everybody. But also, photography is just so varied. I want fashion photographers and food photographers and travel photographers, all sorts of photographers. I want people who are exclusively shooting on film and people who are making their whole living on Instax and Polaroid. So we had a pretty big hit list, and that was pretty easy with a company like ours, as you can imagine. Everybody very quickly started filling up their lists.

With musicians specifically, and other artists, we hoped we would get some alignment. I think Tycho is a great one. Visual designer, photographer, very much in this sort of space, so it’s like okay, cool, you put on an incredible concert that’s going to be really fun to photograph. You also get what we’re doing, and I think we were very lucky to get the lineup we got. These are all artists who trusted us on a year one event. There was no proof of concept in the past, right? It’s not like, “oh I saw clips of your show last year and it was incredible.” They put a lot of faith in us, but it was fun to get some alignment with some of those artists who wanted to be there when they heard what we were doing. They wanted to be there because of the photography.

As someone who has been on Flickr a long time and kind of worried about Flickr a long time…

Yeah…

Were you making something that was meant to be profitable, or was that a secondary, or even tertiary, consideration?

We’re a family-run business. My brother and I own and operate the whole thing, so I don’t have giant venture capital or a private equity war chest to go use a lot of money for, say, a marketing stunt.. We believe that this can, and should, be a business in and of itself. We do know that it usually takes a year or two for an event to be profitable, and we didn’t anticipate getting rich on this thing in year one, or probably getting rich ever on it. But it will be a sustainable business. I think this is something that the photography industry needs (which feels very grand), but really wants, craves.

And the best way to make sure that it stays around forever, just like the best way to make sure Flickr stays around forever, is to make sure it doesn’t lose money. So we’re never gonna sit around going, “well, oh, it’s gonna be a hard year. What should we cut? Well, don’t cut the thing that’s making money.” There’s a strong future business here that I think we really built around it because I want to be going to MODE ten years from now, twenty years from now.

I saw a Los Angeles Times piece from, I guess, almost twenty years ago, and your father was featured.

The one with us sitting around our kitchen table, yeah.

Something that struck me was that, from the very beginning, what was the phrase? This “collective consciousness”, everyone’s got a voice, but also that you were, from the very beginning, understanding that you could meld this love of photography with business.

Twenty years later, doing this new venture with Mode, do you still have that same feeling you did when you were starting,  jumping onto your brother and dad’s project?

I would say even more so, now. We realize even more importantly, or on a bigger scale, how big and vibrant the photography community is, but also how much it matters to have photography companies that are really focused on those photographers. I love our industry and I love working with all of these big camera companies. But it’s easy to forget that most of these camera companies only make 10 to 20% of their top line revenue on photography, right?

Of course.

I won’t call out any specific brand names. But a lot of them aren’t even photography brands. Ccoming back to this idea of having a photography festival. I always hoped that somebody would make it, and I realized that I don’t think anyone else can or will. You’ve got to be big enough. You’ve got to be focused enough on photography that this is the dream. And then, of course, you’ve got to not be the competitor, right? If it’s Sony starting it, for instance, Canon wouldn’t show up. We get to be Switzerland. So I think, more than ever, we feel pretty keenly how important it is to retain our passion for photography, and to be focused on photographers.

That was actually the first question that Don and I asked of the Flickr leadership team when we started evaluating whether we were going to buy Flickr. I said, “How many people on your staff are photographers? Like, who is working on Flickr right now?” And turns out they were all really passionate photographers. And we still love to hire photographers. It’s not a requirement, but it’s really nice when we fill up the company with people who just have this in their blood.

What made right now feel like a good time to do MODE?

The first meeting I started taking with events groups to just feel it out was actually in January of 2020, which…terrible time. *Good* timing.

Yes. Oof.

So the good news was, it was so close to shutdown that I didn’t waste any time and effort. But I’ve been really thinking about it for a long time, and obviously we’re far enough past the pandemic, but the scars of the pandemic are left over, right? There are fewer camera clubs and there are fewer photo walks. There are communities that were once really vibrant, that have fallen into disarray or disuse. So that’s one thing, and people are craving that authenticity. But I’ve also seen there’s such a cool moment happening in photography, in my opinion, and from what we’re seeing from Flickr, the rise of  of weird cameras, yeah, and and you know instant’s back, and I mean Instax is blowing up, and the Fujifilm X100VI is apparently  the fastest-selling camera in the history of cameras. We’re getting all sorts of these weird devices coming out of nowhere again. Pentax released a new half-frame film camera, the 17, I’ve got one sitting on my shelf, and I started piecing all of those little bits together, realizing people are craving an authentic photography experience.

We all know what happened when iPhones and Android phones got really good, camera sales tanked, and there was this gutting in the industry. And the rebound is real. We’re seeing year over year over year camera sales rise. The most common question I get people asking me all the time, as you can imagine, is, “Hey, what camera should I get? You know, for Christmas, what camera should I get?” And the most common request is, “I just don’t want my photos to look like they were shot on an iPhone.” I think that people realize that they don’t take photos because they have to, or they’re compelled to, they take them because they want to, and we’re seeing this in the market.

That is a very long-winded way to say I’m seeing the the winds change, photography is having a really cool moment and we’re thinking we can help grow that, and I feel like it’s our responsibility, with Flickr and with SmugMug and those big communities, to help grow that. But we can also capitalize on that. We can do both. It felt like a good time to capitalize on that.

Big question: why Minneapolis? Look, my mother’s from Minneapolis, I have a lot of love for Minneapolis in my heart, so I’m not trying to be mean to Minneapolis, but it’s…an interesting choice.

It was not the most obvious location for us, either. I had some wishlist locations. We looked at potentially taking over Balboa Park in San Diego, that could’ve been a really fun, sprawling festival location. My personal dream wishlist, and I went down and met with them many times to see if we could pull it off, was San Juan, in Puerto Rico. Take over all of Old Town San Juan and turn it into a photography paradise. But when we got to Minneapolis and sat down with the mayor’s office, more than anything, they understood what we were trying to build, and so that was a great start. They understood it wasn’t just an “ooh we could make money if we bring a lot of photographers, here.”

They understood and started offering us ideas on how to build it in the right way, they’ve been a phenomenal partner. We’re shutting down six straight blocks of the main drag downtown, Nicolett Mall. Most other cities were not going to let us shut down traffic for an entire weekend in one of their main areas. And then, all the things that make Minneapolis such an incredible city in general-all the greenways: we can walk right down to the Mississippi River and do birding photography right down there. We can do all the music venues and the musicians. Of course, it’s got such an incredible legacy of music, that city is one of the great music cities.

We have all the professional sports teams, so we’re doing sports shooting clinics in the Minnesota Twins baseball stadium, which is just two blocks from where the main hub of our festival is. So people can walk over there. We’re we’re partnering with the MLB organization there to do things. So, the ability to build and put down roots there was really exciting for us. They were also very excited about us becoming a part of their community and being there every single year…we’re going to be shaped by the community and help shape the community. We’ll be there every single year for decades, until they don’t want us anymore.

You bear this sense of responsibility with joy, it seems, and it seems like that has been the case for your entire career. Where do you think that comes from?

It’s a good question, and I’ll be really honest. I didn’t actually get into this from a deep love of photography. Back a little bit before the LA Times article came out, I thought it was cool. But I only really understood what my brother Don was starting to poke at, and my dad was poking at with SmugMug when I backpacked around Europe. I took a little Olympus pocket camera, spent two months floating around with a rail pass, and suddenly I had photos I want to keep forever. So that was the start.

What I discovered as we got going and when we got building is: photography is inherently emotional. It’s your art, or it’s your memories, in my case, it was my memories. It eventually became my art as well. Or it’s your business, or all of those things all at once. We have this really rare and probably totally unique opportunity to be so deeply emotionally connected to our customers. They are entrusting us with some of the most important things they have. Whether again, it’s the memories of their kid’s first birthday party, or it’s their art that they slave over, or it’s running their business. They connect with us in a way that no other brands really get to connect with their customers, or very very few, right? They have a deep emotional connection, and so from there, I just fell in love with our customers, they invited us into their lives and their hearts, and you quickly become completely enamored with the photography universe.

I think it’s hard not to fall in love when you’re put in that position.

I’ve seen a lot of people start in an industry with a lot of passion, but eventually, business takes over, right? And it’s very few people who never become, for lack of a better phrase, corrupted by business. How is it you’ve kept that passion for so long? And I assume that it’s true for the rest of the family.

Yeah, it’s definitely true. You touched on it right there, which is the family aspect.I don’t have investors asking me to make the sorts of decisions that would slowly grind at you. The people who pay me are my customers. And so I answer to my customers, not my investors, not the big boss people who are…I mean, you know, because you were on Flickr this whole time, but you saw how Yahoo would shift a lot, trying to figure out what to do with Flickr. It should have been bigger. It should have been Instagram, or it should have been this, or it should have been that. And it’s like, no, it should have been Flickr. Let’s build for the Flickr customers, and so I think that helps. I don’t have to compromise. I’m not being asked to compromise. I’m not being made to compromise or demanded to compromise. We get to continue to build for passionate customers, full stop. We get to build for passionate customers, so that’s all we’re asked to do. As long as we do that, they’re happy, we’re happy, and it’s awesome.

It reminds me, it was 12 years ago. Flickr had a “20 under 20” exhibition. I don’t know if you remember that.

Yeah, I remember.

It was lovely,  and they also said at the time that this would be something they would be doing year after year, and…that was the only time they ever did it. Have you already built or set up structures to make sure MODE is repeated over time?

Yeah, I mean we’re definitely looking at that, especially as we build year one. We’re looking for efficiencies, like, please let’s not build this from scratch again, right? We’re already getting warehouse space in Minnesota, so we can move things that we’re fabricating and stuff, so that we have the efficiencies year over year. At the end of the day, we just have to make it a financial success, and then we’re good. Which you know, in a year one event where you don’t know almost anything, it’s scary and it’s a big leap of faith. But already, every decision we’re making for this year is looking at year two and year three.

Okay, and how are you feeling, a month out?

I’m so excited on so much of this. Pretty much all of it. I’m very nervous. Ticket sales ramp up towards the last few weeks, and so I would love to say that we’re sold out on tickets. No, we’re not sold out on tickets, and I won’t be happy until we’re sold out on tickets and that sort of stuff. But I’m starting to see the ideas come to life. I’m starting to see the art being constructed and starting to get really, really excited.

The last time I was in Minneapolis, I did a walkthrough of the venue, and I’ll actually be there later this week doing a walk through the venue. I could suddenly start seeing what it was going to be, and oh, it’s going to be so cool! I’m really excited, and I’m really nervous.

When you all bought Flickr in 2018…do you think that it changed you guys? Was there an evolution after the purchase that affected Awesome and SmugMug?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, seeing how close we got to losing Flickr, it made me realize a lot about things we take for granted out there, and that’s why I think it helped us…I hesitate to say “take responsibility” for the community, the industry, but at least be mindful of the fact, don’t take it for granted.

If you want something, you know, build it, hence we’re building this festival because I want it to exist, and I do think it helped us be a little bit more ambitious about what we could accomplish. With SmugMug we built something that, man, I just love. It’s incredible. There’s hundreds of thousands of people running their businesses on that, which is blows my mind every day. We have working photographers in every single non-embargoed country on planet Earth on SmugMug. That’s crazy to me. But at the same time, you could easily sink back down into, “yeah, but we’re this cute little family-run business.”

Once we had Flickr, suddenly all eyes were on us, at least for a while there, I mean, Flickr gets in the news pretty regularly. We started to realize we had a much bigger reach, and we can do much cooler stuff…it got us out of our shell.

Does MODE feel like the first time you’ve really been able to leverage that idea of being able to do bigger stuff? You bought the company, and first you’ve got to save the company, right? You’ve got to do the migration, and then COVID happens, so we’re all just trying to stay alive. Does it feel like this is the first time you’ve really gotten to use the power, having had the responsibility for a while now?

Yeah…yeah. Flickr gave us the courage to be able to go do this. We have enough eyeballs that we would hope we could get the awareness. I don’t know that we could have built this with just SmugMug, even if we had all the money. It’s so much more than that. It emboldened us with the ability to go out, because we have all of these photographers and all this community and all of this awareness, and then, yeah, Flickr was no longer dying and was starting to thrive. And so, okay, what’s next? What else can we do here? If you  walk back the timeline, we’ve been working on this for over two years actively, now. We escaped pandemic. We were able to continue building or stabilize, everything’s back, and now what do we build next? And that’s this.

I think most of the users don’t have much of a sense of what’s going on with the company…would you say that Flickr is thriving right now, from a business standpoint?

It’s a great question. We’re not a public company, so we’re not putting out quarterly results. I would definitely describe it as thriving. I know there’s a lot of stuff we still need to do better, and I’m sure you’ve got a long laundry list that you would like us to do better.

Hides laundry list of suggestions under the desk

But it’s growing. It’s healthy. It’s profitable, just barely, but it’s profitable, which means it can last. All I need is one more dollar than we spend, right? We can grow this thing forever. So, you know, I think we’re seeing that we have entirely new generations of people coming in, but also a lot of people who loved Flickr from the very beginning coming back.

I actually was just at the Boston Public Library a few weeks ago, and they got their account reactivated. The Boston Public Library, and they love it again. They said they’re so happy to be back, and the community has embraced them. And I’m like, yeah, this is awesome. I love it so much.

Why do you think people are coming back?

I think they still don’t have anywhere like Flickr that they can go, and they want somewhere, right? I know you know that Flickr is not Instagram, and it’s never going to be Instagram. And there’s this giant Flickr-shaped hole, which is: where do I go interact with photographers? Where do I join communities and Groups? And, you know, how do I find my friends and find inspiration? And there just still isn’t anywhere like Flickr.

Especially a place where you’re not being bombarded. Every once in a while I look at the site while not logged in and there are ads, but there’s no bombardment. It’s such a clean, safe feeling. It feels like a very safe place to look at photography. You know, no one’s trying to scam you. No one’s trying to take advantage of you, be it a human being or a company.

Yeah, somebody recently described it as maybe “the last friendly place online.” I was like, “oh, I’ll take that. I will take that.” We try very hard.

Am I correct that this is the only job you’ve ever had, working at Awesome?

Pretty close. I worked in video games before. Okay. I was in college. I actually worked for a university. The last paycheck I got from anyone else was what, 2001 or 2002 so…

Is MODE part of how you  keep it fresh for yourself? How do you keep yourself engaged with the company you’ve been with for  going on 30 years?

I think this helps. I love trying new things. I didn’t know I would have it in me to try something new again. I’m loving it, absolutely loving it, and I think it does take some maturity over time to fall in love with building and refining the same product, the same platform. As you can imagine, we have a company full of people. Many people have come and gone over a three or five year stretch, a normal tech thing, but a huge portion of our company has been here more than ten years. The average is actually a little over ten years, and  something like 80% of the company has been here longer than six years, and I think that there is a mindset shift of “let’s continue like our work is never done and we’re building something that people love and we can always do better.”

Our feature request list, just internally, without even talking to customers (which we do all the time) is longer than it’s ever been. We have more things we want to build on these two platforms than ever, so I think we do a pretty good job of keeping it fresh.But yeah, it’s been really fun to build something wildly new.

Are there ideas that you’re coming up with, you know, for yourself for next year? Are there other projects that this is now inspiring you to think about?

I mean, outside of the festival, we have at least two other ideas in incubation. MODE is my baby, and my brother Don is working on his baby as well, which has been really fun. We have a big enough and mature enough company now that I don’t have to be in every single decision for SmugMug, every single decision for Flickr, and that’s starting to open us up to build cool new ideas. Also, very photography focused, but allows us to do other things, which is pretty cool.

Do you have a roadmap for Flickr and SmugMug for the next however many years? Do you guys think in terms of  “two years from now we want our companies to be doing this”, “ten years from now…”

We definitely have roadmaps. I’ve seen some really, really exciting stuff focused on Groups on Flickr. We’re putting a lot of work into improving Groups this year. We have a product manager role open right now that is specifically talking about community engagement. So it’s not super-top secret. If somebody was snooping around our job space, they could figure out what we want to be working on right now. But I’ve seen a multi-year, you know, 12 to 18 month roadmap with some we know and some we don’t know, right? We know we want to start building this, and by this point we hope we know what else we’re building. But very focused on groups.

I think it’s one of the things that makes Flickr very very unique in these sorts of spaces is these communities of communities. There are such cool Groups, Lego building groups, smoke machines, and strobe lights, where else are you going to find that? That’s so cool. And so we’ll be investing there. You know, on the SmugMug side, we just launched the earliest stages of multi-seat sort of stuff. We’re seeing more and more collaborator logins. We’re seeing more and more of these photography businesses and photography studios who have a a bunch of different photographers working. One of my dear friends works rodeos and livestock shows, and she often has twenty photographers working a single livestock show, so we’re helping expand that sort of stuff. There’s a lot of stuff that we still are focusing on and building, and we do try and take a long view of that. We try not to just flail around and release the feature and hope it works.

Would you say that the company’s vibe is the same as it was when you guys started?

No, I wouldn’t honestly, and I mean that in a really great way. I loved that company, and I’ve loved our company all the way along the way. But you know, we also were growing up and maturing. We’re a better company than than we were when we were younger. Part of it is, we were started by a bunch of kids, right? I mean, more or less. I was in my early twenties. I hope I’m better at it now than I was then. We have a better view of both how to run a healthy business, how to take care of our employees, but also how to be ethical out there in the world. We’re doing things like, 1% For The Planet. Flickr donates 1% of its revenue to environmental causes around the world, and we are heavily involved in using our voice for things that are advancing everything from social causes to environmental causes. We have the really cool Black Women Photographers grants going out right now, and at the same time, we’re also working with the Wilderness Society on a photography contest highlighting conservation work around the United States.

Those are things that, when we were just  some nerds counting out code twenty years ago, we weren’t focused on the bigger, broader things. So It’s a better, more mature vibe. It’s definitely rooted in the same ideas, but I would say we’re a better company now than we were then. And I hope to look back in ten years and say the same thing about right now. I can’t wait to be better than we are now.

How would you describe your day to day as the COO for people who aren’t you know kind of familiar with what you do?

It varies a lot, which I like. Right now, I’m heavily involved in the operational weeds of getting MODE going. I can tell you exactly where our insurance is and which permits we secured and which permits we’re working on and where the beer garden is going to be and how the stage is going to be oriented for the music. I can get all the way in those weeds right now, but a lot of the rest of it is is working at a very senior level with these teams.

So as we go look at, say, Groups, I’m not planning a Groups feature myself for Flickr, but because I’ve been doing this long enough and I’ve been engaged with our community long enough, there’s a lot of both wisdom and oversight, where I can come in and say, “Yeah, oh, I really like this,” and I now have enough experience building products that most of the teams want to collaborate and workshop out some of these things. So sometimes it’s just compliance and working with my CFO and figuring out what the books look like for the next year, what the budget is. But most of the time,  I get to dream and work on the next features and roadmaps for our businesses.

Okay, and the most important question, we ask this of all our interview subjects: Which do you prefer, the process or the result?

I am a results person. I really like getting something in the hands of a customer. It’s really fun to build, and, to open the can of worms right at the end, things like AI and stuff like that. Like as tools get better, I can get more out there, and that’s really highlighted that what I really, really want to do is have something built. I want to get something in front of the customer. I want them to experience it. One of my hobbies is woodworking, and I will take my time and not necessarily need to finish a project because I’m kind of out there just staying busy.

Yeah.

But for work, I want to get something done. I want to get it out there. I want people to see it. I want to accomplish it.

So you know that that brings up two different questions. The easier one is, in your art you would say the process?

Yeah. I think that’s an interesting distinction, too. I take a ton of photos, and I publish very few of them. I mostly take them for me, and yeah, you can go look at my Flickr feed. I’m terrible about posting my photos. I’m on Flickr all day, every day. Every day, I grab a different camera when I go out, but I publish very little. And some of that insecurity, you know, people look at me as the COO of Flickr, and I should be a better photographer than I am, that sort of thing. So I love the creation for me in that regard.

The other question that was brought to mind is: what role does AI play in Flickr and SmugMug as a company, if any?

We use AI for all sorts of things,  long before these current LLMs. We use AI for everything from internal analysis on what customers are doing and some great analytics tools, to some coding with it. We’re not afraid of AI, and I think we take a fairly measured approach. Where I am very grumpy, anti-AI, is how much of it was trained on stolen Flickr and SmugMug data. So I have a different relationship with, say, image generation than I think a lot of others would.

You know, I’m a union man myself. Is there thought about how it affects the company, the employees in the company?

We’ve never done layoffs, and gosh, I really hope I never have to. And that’s on me to run a responsible business. We build so intentionally and carefully and slowly to not do that. I have no interest in replacing humans with AI. No interest personally at all. I would love to give my humans better tools. I think about factory work, the ability to have a single person do more is really interesting to me, but I don’t want a fully robotic factory. I love working with humans.  The coolest thing about the job is being able to work with humans. So, I would love to give better tools to the people that I work with, but I don’t have any interest in replacing them with those tools.

That is the right answer!

I’ll be honest, when the announcement for MODE was first released. I was skeptical, but it’s a very strong and incredibly varied lineup. So kudos.

Thank you, thank you.

And that’s all I got. Thank you so much.

Awesome. Well, thank you. Yeah, this is a delight, and hopefully we’ll we’ll cross paths sometime soon with cameras in hand, I hope.