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Andy Yang, 500px Show Notes Andy Yang is the CEO of 500px and an advisor with MaRS’ https://www.marsdd.com/our-sectors/information-and-communications-technology/consumer-commerce-cluster/ (Consumer & Commerce cluster). He has spent more than 15 years in technology as an investor (angel and institutional), banker, consultant and advisor. Currently, Andy is CEO of 500px, a premium photography community funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Harrison, Metal, and ffVC. Previously he was an investor at Extreme Startups and a venture capitalist at Relay Ventures. Most passionate about today Currently I’m the CEO of 500PX which is a global community for photographers, so I’m really passionate today about connecting people through their visual story telling. A picture is worth a thousand words, we believe everyone is creative at their core, they were born creative and it’s our mission to drive that creativity out of them.  500PX’s mission is to enable and rewards visual creativity. We are providing the tools, inspiration and platform for doing that. It’s amazing to see how many people love the platform and are so enthusiastic and passionate about 500PX and photography. So one of my passions is to work with the community. Your company 500PX was started by two amazing entrepreneurs. The first was Evgeny Tchebotarev, a professional travel photographer. He unofficially started this company back in 2004 and this was a few months before Flicker started. He was searching for a place to post his best images, and he couldn’t find one, so he started a blog on Life Journal and he started posting his best images, and he got amazing traction, a lot of people were reviewing the images and his personal and professional network started asking him to post their images on his blog. He had two rules: It has to be among your best works It has to be at list 500 Pixel in dimension. That’s where the name came from. It grew organically for 5-6 years, than Evgeny met his co-founder, Oleg, an amazing developer, and he had the insights and foresights to say let’s take the blog to our own platform. So they launched the company on 2009, then things really started to take off and they opened it to the community. As for how I joined the company, I moved to Toronto six years ago and I covered 500PX as an investment, I was on the venture capital side. I really loved the platform, loved the community and loved the founders. We kept in touch and then I joined the team a couple of years later. I‘ve always been a really big fan of what they were doing and about the global community. Who your customers are? It has changed over time… as I explained the history of the company, it was definitely geared toward professional photographers mainly in travel, as the founders turn it to a platform, and they started getting a much more diverse set of content and a much more diverse set of photographers who joined in. As mobile exploded it really diversified our customer based. Our customer personas: At the very bottom of the pyramid we have casual users that are in to view images and galleries, hoping to be inspired or to post in our site. As we move up the pyramid there are the hobbyists. People that see photography as a hobby (they also will usually own a dedicated camera). This composes the largest group in our site. They are very interested, they want to learn and to get better, and they invest in their community. As we go up the pyramid there are what we call the semi-pros, they will potentially shoot commercials, are interested in monetizing their work. They own much more sophisticated gear. At the very top of the pyramid is the last group, our pros those are people that are fully dedicated professionally, they will shoot commercials, license images, go on assignment for different clients. We kind of serve those four personas. We found them out over time by interviewing and understanding our audience. So for the entrepreneurs...