This week we welcome Michael Hussey, the founder of PeekYou, which officially launched in Beta Mode in July ‘07. Michael is the creator of the Internet’s most popular education websites (RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com) and is often credited as the original inventor of online rating and opinion websites (RateMyFace in 1999).



ASE: Hi Michael, welcome to CEO Spotlight.
Michael Hussey: Thanks for inviting me.

ASE: Where are you right now?
Michael Hussey: In New York City… 20th Street.

ASE: Office or home?
Michael Hussey: Office. Home is downtown, below the World Trade Center.

ASE: I’d like to ask you some biographical questions first, if you don’t mind… where were you born and when/why did you come to NYC?
Michael Hussey: Alfred, Maine.  I lived in DC for five years after graduating from the University of Maine.  I moved to New York 2.5 years ago because everyone in DC was focused on government, including most of the tech community.

ASE: So, what’s Alfred, Maine like?
 Michael Hussey:  About 2,500 people, in the southern part of the state.

ASE: Near Ogunquit? That’s one of my favorite summer spots.
Michael Hussey: A few towns up and inland. Off Route 1. A nice town. I’m headed up there this weekend.

ASE: You studied economics in college?
Michael Hussey: Yes. Economics and finance.

ASE: Ok. So you have all of these businesses- how do you manage everything and still create synergy (and profit!)?
Michael Hussey: I’ve got a great girlfriend. She lets me work a lot. My focus is on developing systems that can operate sort of as an independent machine… something I can step away from for a time and know that it will be operating smoothly when I come back to it.

ASE: How did it all develop after college? Were you always into technology and why did you make the choices you’ve made?
Michael Hussey: I’ve been in front of a computer pretty much since I can remember, I guess.

ASE: Cute photo. What’s PopContest?
Michael Hussey: It was what I was going to call RateMyFace.com –that’s how I got started in this– as a college student — I had gotten involved in some web projects — help get SocerSpot.com launched — a soccer Ezine started in 1997 and I realized the power of online community. I was sort of obsessed with rating things — knew I wanted to create a wide-range of rating sites.

ASE: In 1997?!
Michael Hussey: Yes, in ‘97. So in ‘98 I developed the concept of ratemyface — as the first in what could be many rating sites… I was19– a sophomore at UMaine.  I developed the concept for ratemyface in ‘98 and was going to call it pop-contest (for popularity contest).

ASE: Solo or with help from someone?
Michael Hussey: Solo. But then I brought in one of my best friends to help develop it (in 1999). I moved to Washington D.C. the year before graduation — summer ’99–and had an internship at a fiber optics company.

ASE: Was ratemyface an ‘amihotornot’ predecessor?
Michael Hussey: yes. They copied us.

ASE: Did you take legal action?
Michael Hussey: No, I wasn’t interested in just face ratings and there was no way for me to stop copy cats (today there are literally tens of thousands of copies). RMF was really only developed as a way to kick-start other more interesting concepts– like ratemyprofessors and ratemyteachers.

ASE: Were they profitable?
Michael Hussey: I don’t own RMF any more. Just RMT. That’s a long story — giving you the short version though now… I built RMF with my friend that summer — but we were not good coders and the program was pretty crappy. But it worked and in the first week, just from advertising it in some AOL chat rooms, we had over 100K people check it out.

ASE: Wow. Heady stuff.
Michael Hussey: So I decided to shut it down, graduate, get it reprogrammed properly
(Adding a new profile was this manual process that took five minutes — and we were getting hundreds of people trying to create profiles). So that’s what I did.  amihotornot launched that summer, too.

ASE: Who was your first profile?
Michael Hussey: Me!

ASE: Did you get a good rating?
Michael Hussey: Ha. Not sure.  That’s what it used to look like.

ASE: So you’re a bit of an exhibitionist too?
Michael Hussey: Ha, not really.

ASE: So you shut it down and then re-launched.
Michael Hussey: yes. With plans on developing the other sites soon after. We secured an investment too, but that was where things got messy. Quick side story about hotornot. This article might have changed my life: The New York Times had picked up on this face rating thing and they interviewed RMF and amihotornot that fall.  Then, at the last minute, the editors struck out our URL from the article because we had age13+ and hotornot was 18+ and they were nervous about it since it was a new thing. So I get quoted in there, name and that, but NO website.

ASE: Wow, what a blow!
Michael Hussey: So from that point on — hotornot goes on to get all the credit. Everyone in the country has heard of them. That’s what happened.

ASE: You must have felt so crushed. Did you change the minimum age?
Michael Hussey:  No, we didn’t. I guess I didn’t care too much. I was young too—22. I knew we had other sites we were working on. My lesson there was about how powerful the press could be.

ASE: It was like ALMOST winning the lottery.
Michael Hussey: Well, yes.

ASE: What did you do next?
Michael Hussey: I guess I should have dropped out of school the year before. Well, we started working with these investors, a technology law firm.

ASE: Do you regret not having dropped out?
Michael Hussey: No, not really.  So the tech law firm put in one of their interns (32 year old Georgetown law student) as our managing partner. He spoke a lot of mumbo jumbo. I guess I was impressed.

ASE: I’m guessing this was not a blessing.
Michael Hussey: I basically was charged with managing the development of our new sites and developed a plan around a sort of franchise model- like McDonald’s where we would get operators for the various ratemy sites we would develop. We were working on software to develop a new ratemysite in a matter of minutes. So for instance, if you wanted to operate ratemyorgangejuice.com, we could create that. You would pay us for the rights to operate it and split ad revenue.

ASE: That’s kind of brilliant.
Michael Hussey: I thought so!

ASE: …and you collect loads of market research, which you could sell.
Michael Hussey: We opened up some test franchises: ratemypets.com, ratemywheels.com, recipe.com. I really wanted to do teacher and professor ratings though — that was an idea going back to college — where we would evaluate professors at the end of the semester — all I really wanted to do was to see the other student’s evaluations.

ASE: Were you busy dreaming up domain names and buying them up?
Michael Hussey: We bought 700 of them.

ASE: Did the investors fund this? 
Michael Hussey: Yes. I had quit my day job by then, though, and didn’t take any salary.

ASE: What was your day job?
Michael Hussey: I was hired by the company where I had been interning – managing their intranet.

ASE: How were you supporting yourself? 
Michael Hussey: It was outside of Baltimore. I made pretty good money there, so I saved a lot. I was either going to buy a house or become an entrepreneur. I decided on the latter.

ASE: Was it a good decision?
Michael Hussey: Yes, I think so.

ASE: So what happened?
Michael Hussey: I was going to develop ratemyprofessors and then I found a guy in California who had launched the same concept but hadn’t executed it well: teacherratings.com. We had the design and the traffic from ratemyface to make it popular, so we went in 50/50. It was great. Made it into a great site. Developed ratemyteachers out of it. Anyway — the managing partner was kind of doing his own thing. Going up to NYC and LA. I wasn’t paying enough attention. He was claiming to be “lining up partners” or something. But really, he was just spending money. And started bouncing checks. Two days after 9-11, DC criminal investigators were calling and our investors were spooked and pulled out. It was a mess and everything basically collapsed. So the operators got to take control of the sites they were running so at least the existing sites could continue on.

ASE: Where did that leave you?
Michael Hussey: I was the only one trying to keep it together — I guess I was naive and young and it was my concept — everyone else just wanted to salvage something. I didn’t have much money left either for a good lawyer, so I ended up getting some consulting gigs around DC — trying to develop a new concept — called iMConnected.com, which was basically Friendster — I even presented it to Microsoft — but no one was interested. Didn’t think it could make money– this was the depth of the dot-com crash. So I don’t blame them. Too bad, though. It was a great concept, proven by Friendster and Myspace, etc.

ASE: It’s a tough concept to sell without seeing it for yourself- in theory it sounds silly.  I would have never thought. And now I’m addicted.
Michael Hussey: Well, I got back on with the people who had gotten control of ratemyteachers and devoted myself to building it up and that’s we did…over the next three years. Made it into a “machine” — profitable and very useful. I had learned the power of the press from the ratemyface/nytimes, and really set about mastering that.

ASE: You did the publicity yourself?
Michael Hussey: Yes.

ASE: how did you make the press connections?
Michael Hussey: One of the checks our hotshot CEO bounced was to Ruder-Finn a big PR company. So from observing them — how they generated press, I kind of figured it out and did it myself for ratemyteachers. I created my own lists. I would target a few cities I wanted local press in. I’d target press releases to the local news outlets. It worked every time.

ASE: Do you have a PR firm now?
Michael Hussey: Right now we are in-between firms, but we’re about a hire a new one for PeekYou.

ASE: So you have financing for PeekYou and a budget for this sort of thing?
Michael Hussey: I have a great investor- someone I met here in New York last year.

ASE: Is PeekYou your top priority right now? Tell ASE about your vision…
Michael Hussey: Yes. Ratemyteachers was in a position that was self-supporting and I was itching to do something new, so in April 2006 I dreamed up the concept of re-indexing the web around people, instead of keywords and page rank (as Google has done) and started getting excited about all the applications we could build with such a database. The first application was obvious — a people search engine. By July 2006 we had a prototype. It cost $5000 to build it. A very early prototype, just to show investors. We didn’t alert the public. Only had 5000 people on there. So we agreed to work with Baldev Duggal. Upon the investment, we started developing all sorts of ways to collect and sort info and web spiders and bought some databases. Spidering isn’t so hard — organizing it is the hard part. I have a lot of respect for these large companies who maintain these massive databases- marketing databases, etc. Anyway. I knew when I dreamt of it, that I had to do it or someone else would. Basically as with most of my ideas, it was kind of an obvious thing, but most of the best ideas are obvious in hindsight.

ASE: Good for you. Where do you get your confidence? What do your folks do?
Michael Hussey: Mom is an art teacher. Father owns a greenhouse in Maine. To my mom’s credit, they bought me that TI-99/4a when I was pretty much a baby.

ASE: Amazing!
Michael Hussey: They had me typing in the basic programs, if I wanted to play them. I was lucky, yes.

ASE: Any siblings? Are they entrepreneurial too?
Michael Hussey: My sister is a math teacher and competitive runner, and my brother works for AT&T, but also DJ’s. Maybe not so much entrepreneurial, but everyone works hard.

ASE: That’s key, along with confidence, support.
Michael Hussey: My mom works the hardest and they’ve helped me out a lot when times were tough, so yes, I’m very lucky for that.

ASE: So, tell us about where PeekYou is going and your ultimate vision…
Michael Hussey: Last month we launched a new way to search Google using the Google Custom Search engine. It is the second application of our database we’ve launched and we have a slate of new applications launching in the New Year. Google encourages mashups — I just haven’t seen anything as extensive as this.  So we’re obviously lucky for that… We’ve taken the world’s greatest search results and we’re showing you the people behind those results. Humanizing Google, so to speak…something that is only possible with a site and database like ours.

ASE: That’s a beautiful way of explaining it, ‘humanizing Google.’
How big is your team?
Michael Hussey: Four here in the office, a couple part-timers, and a couple of people overseas.

ASE: What about your marketing strategy?
Michael Hussey: Online, the best marketing strategy is a product that works and improves people’s lives. If it doesn’t work, it’s easy to forget about it and move on. We’re lucky in that we can advertise on ratemyteachers.

ASE: Where else are you advertising?
Michael Hussey: All advertising is simply to kick-start what you hope will be a long-term relationship with a new customer. We’re also advertising on ASE — mostly because we like Charles and his blog — and read it most every day.

ASE: Thank you for that!
Michael Hussey: And we’ve played with Google ads.

ASE: Effective?
Michael Hussey: I’ve been testing various strategies-it can get expensive, but can be effective.

ASE: It’s fun playing with Google Adwords.
Michael Hussey: We’ll spend more time on that in the New Year.

ASE: Ok, just a few more questions.
Michael Hussey: Sure!

ASE:  Any hobbies (outside of inventing new businesses)?
Michael Hussey: I watch a decent amount of sports, big Boston Celtics and Red Sox fan, play soccer and basketball.

ASE: Do you go to the games?
Michael Hussey: Yes, a few times a year.

ASE: What’s on your ipod now? 
Michael Hussey: Oldies, mostly. I have a zune. I like the Beatles and listening to channel five on XM. Zunes are pretty cool — and cheaper.

ASE: Do you play a musical instrument?
Michael Hussey: Nope. Played drums as a kid, my dad was in a band as I was growing up, but I have poor fine motor skills– my mom being the artist and my father the musician.
I’ve got nothin’. I like 50’s and 60’s pop music though mostly. And the band Cake.

ASE: Okay, last question. What comes after web 2.0?
Michael Hussey: I’m not sure what web 2.0 really was. I guess sites like ratemyteachers sort of defined what people refer to it as. I think the most effective web applications were always about people, contributions, be it amazon.com, or wikipedia. I think there will be fads like ratemyface to friendster to myspace. Now its facebook. What attracted me perhaps most to developing PeekYou was that the one central component of the web that will never die is the ‘link’- the weblink- and behind every weblink is a person, a real live person.

ASE: (Hopefully)!
Michael Hussey: That’s why PeekYou, I hope, is fad-proof and will only getting better over time. We can link to your facebook or linkedin or whatever you else people join up to in the next few years, we just have to identify the person behind that link — and every site is different…so it is constantly a new challenge.

ASE: Thank you, Michael. Congratulations on your success and Happy Holidays!

Natalya Murakhver is a freelance writer/PR consultant based in New York City.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 4:23 pm and is filed under CEO Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.