At a Tech Cocktail Chicago Sessions event held earlier this month, Cheezburger founder and CEO Ben Huh joined us on stage to share some insight on what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. And apropos of the man responsible for making lolcats/I Can Has Cheezburger go viral, Huh shared a pretty astute observation of being an entrepreneur, especially within this startup space:
“[For] a lot of entrepreneurs – part of this is our vision to disrupt and to build great things, but part of this is just because we’re stubborn assholes who don’t want to go back to doing what we were doing before.”
Before starting Cheezburger, Huh made his way through several companies, starting off at Cars.com, founding his first company (Raydium) which ultimately failed, and then ending up at Intava before finding his way to head one the most trafficked network of sites on the Internet. Along his professional track, though, Huh certainly did things that he admits – in retrospect – were not at all professional. For instance, he once tried to get fired from InstallShield after the company got acquired by Macrovision by simply not showing up to work (like, literally not going into the office). Another: when raising money for his first company, he stuck to his stubborn ways (paying no attention to outside advice) and was convinced that he could raise enough money, have enough time to work on the product, and generate enough sales (the company shut down after 18 months).
However, this stubbornness and reluctance is really kind of what makes an entrepreneur – that the reason entrepreneurs out there doing their own thing and making great stuff is because they’re not fit for the status quo. Check out what else Ben Huh has to say in the video recording of our Sessions event, below:
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