We had a much bigger vision than creating a dating site.
— Tom Anderson
I seem quiet. But when I get upset, I talk too loudly. I'm sort of an alarmist.
The entertainment industry is a very noisy, crowded marketplace.
It made a lot of sense to me that the music part of our site would work for filmmakers as well. They'll be able to upload clips. There will be a section where you can watch what they are doing. They'll tell where their screenings are. It took a lot longer than we wanted to because we were growing so fast.
We didn't expect it to be cool, with people trading URLs instead of phone numbers.
MySpace is so much more about culture and about creativity and expression. So in other words, you go on MySpace and you can find music, and you can find video, and things about politics, and things like that.
I think people are feeling more artistic and creative with something like Instagram that makes editing easy. That's a good thing for sure.
I tend to 'splurge' for convenience. I'll pay a lot to not waste time.
When I left the work world, I started designing my dream house. I dived into architecture and bought seven vacant lots. My plan was to build one house, move in, and build the next. If the next was better, I'd move in and sell the previous one - so on and so forth.
The very first plan I wrote for MySpace was that it would be a portal, but a portal wrapped around your user profile.
It always helps to have someone who can say, No, we can do it faster this way, or We have to break the rules, even our own rules, to get things done.
I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster, and I thought, 'They're thinking way too small.'
Ultimately, our goal is to provide all artists with the opportunity to make a living on MySpace.
Another part of my background was that I was in film school.
And I always say sign up for MySpace and see what your kid is doing. Be his friend on MySpace. Know what your child is doing online because you're going to know more there than you'd ever know when he goes to school.
Newscorp has always been, for us, very easy to work with and they respect our opinions and let us run the site we wanted to. And, in fact, they wanted to keep us on. They weren't saying, hey, let's throw these guys out. They were buying into what MySpace was and the founders, and so it's been very good for me.
The less the camera is able to capture what you're seeing in a scene, the more editing it needs.
Time is the most important thing to me - how can you do all the things you want to do with such limited time… I'm hoping science of life extension makes progress.
Google is basically too big for anyone to go against in a serious way.
We asked people why they didn't go to MySpace. A lot of people thought it was too hard to use, they thought it was a music site, or a content site. Privacy was a concern, or they'd say it was a site for teenagers.
I have a very negative attitude toward business and businessmen.
Creative freedom and self-expression is what MySpace is all about.
On Friendster, if you were a band and you made a profile, they would delete it. They didn't want bands on their site.
We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn't stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace.
In one sense, Facebook is very focused as an address book, as efficient communication. It's like e-mail or like IM or something like that. And we do those things, too, but we do so much more. We try to focus on the whole world and all the things that people are interested in, rather than just people to people, or one to one communication.
I don't know exactly where my life will lead. Adventure and the unknown has always been appealing to me.
If you knew me before Myspace, you'd probably thought I'd have been a scholar teaching philosophy in a university my whole life. If you met me before college, you'd probably have thought I'd be a musician for my entire life.
Instagram has really changed the travel industry.
I wouldn't single out Facebook as a concern, because we've got different local competitors around the world.
