Penenberg: Certainly, besides a nice chunk of change, Flickr has brought you a level of fame.
Fake: I design Web sites, its not like I'm Angelina Jolie. I think you need to tune that stuff out, otherwise you're never going to be able to build stuff, be an entrepreneur, take risks, fail. That's part of entrepreneurialism, being able to launch a stupid IM client. The hardest part about Flickr being successful is wanting to do it again. I think there's a benefit to being one of six people that no one knew. No VCs would return our calls and we were broke and bootstrapping it and operating under the radar so we could focus on the most important things: the product, the users, what we were building. There's all this noise, the tech-crunch, which you have to tune out if you want to build good product. None of that stuff is additive; it all takes away from building a product. You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.
via fastcompany.com