Like most anyone else, I love my photos. They are incredibly valuable to me. Almost every other week, I hear horrible stories about people have lost their phones. The phone can be replaced but, the photos on it can never be. It’s gut wrenching. Even worse, people’s entire library of photos have been lost because their hard drive crashed. This should never happen to anyone.

Nothing puts life into greater perspective than looking at old photos. By looking at an old photo, suddenly, you remember exactly what you were thinking, who you were with, who you haven’t thought about in a while, what was important in your life then, and what’s important in your life now. It makes you a better person and allows you to appreciate life more.

My only regret in life is that I didn’t take more pictures.

In 1994, I had an Apple QuickTake 100, one of the first digital cameras. It was able to take up to 8 photos! You could hook it up to you computer and downloading them only took about 25 minutes. I must have taken hundreds of photos with that camera. The problem is, I have no idea where any of those photos are today.

I always stored all my photos on the hard drives of my personal computers for the past 20 years. Every time I would get a new computer, I would copy all of my files from the old computer to the new, hoping I got everything. Unfortunately, I must have missed a bunch of files, because my oldest digital photo I have today is only 10 years old.

I would give anything to get those old photos back.

In the past 10 years, a few interesting technologies revolutionized photos. The first is photo library organization software like Picasa and iPhoto. This was really great to have quick access and an easy way to organize all your photos. The downside is that all your photos are on one computer. Posting photos publicly was revolutionized by Flickr and made truly excellent by Facebook. However, the idea that I will upload every photo I’ve ever taken to Facebook is unrealistic. Most of my photos are extremely valuable to me, and to no one else. I would never want anyone else to ever see them, but I would never want to lose them.

Simply, I want a service that stores all my digital photos and provides me ways to view and organize them that is just as good as software like iPhoto. Why doesn’t this exist? The world needs this.

So we decided to take the great responsibility of building Picturelife. I guess the only way to predict the future is to build it.

The service would have to back up and store all of a person’s digital photos and video, and provide a beautiful way to view, organize and rediscover those photos wherever they are.

Honestly, that is just the trivial baseline of what Picturelife needs to do.

Outside of technically being able to support any source, any format, any view, any adjustment, or any output, there are some very difficult problems around photos that have not been solved, and many others that have not been attempted.

The most major problem is managing photos in families. It used to be that photos were taken on film. They would be printed at the drugstore. If you wanted to share your photos with family members, you could print copies. Photos were stored in physical albums, and could be viewed by anyone that was around the book. Now, mothers and fathers take pictures of their kids on their mobile phones. What if they want to see each others photos? What do they do? How do they send them to the grandparents? Who has access to them? I’ve heard a hundreds of ways families have hacked together solutions that range from plain not working to extremely frustrating.

This is a problem we will solve.

A picture is worth a thousand words. A collection of pictures is worth billions. Most people don’t understand just how much rich information there is in a set of photos. For example, simply using image analysis to detect the difference between duplicates and similar photos, suggesting ratings automatically for easy filtering, knowing when you go on a vacation and automatically suggesting albums, suggesting to share 4 really great pictures of your kids to your parents.

We want to answer the question, “Wouldn’t it be great if..?” with a feature that makes it happen.

As I’m writing this, I am syncing my latest 64,306th picture. Now that Picturelife supports video, my entire photo library is completely on Picturelife. I can access any pictures on my iPhone, on my iPad or on any computer, and it feels great.

What also feels great, is making Picturelife better every day.

If you feel as strongly about your photos as we do, I would love to hear from you. We want to make Picturelife the best photo service in the world. If you feel so strongly that you want to make an impact on Picturelife, we would love to work with you.

-Charles

After a couple of minor health issues, I decided to get my personal health in order. I decided to go to a three day intensive physical exam at the Mayo Clinic, the best hospital in the world. I left with more questions than answers.

In 2008, suddenly, I started hearing a ringing in my ears. My ears had rung before after going to a concerts a few times, but it usually went away after an hour or so. However, this time, the ringing never stopped.

I was living a high stress lifestyle: no sleep, eating like a slob, and no exercise. I only cared about work. I operated under the assumption that I could care about myself later. For a long time, I didn’t see any negative effects. I was maintaining my weight, I had the same amount of energy. I felt fine.

Slowly, and I really didn’t notice it subjectively, I started to gain weight. I started to feel pressure from stress. I started to get sick often. I started to look older.

I went to a doctor a couple weeks later assuming there is probably some sort of medication to fix the constant ringing in my ears. After a perfect hearing test, he prescribed a light anti-depressant, and he said the symptom would probably fix itself in 2 weeks.

Two weeks passed, and the ringing was exactly the same. After reading tons about this on the internet, I discovered I have a symptom called “Tinnitus.” It is quite common in old people, rock stars, and military combat personnel. In most cases: It is permanent. There is no cure. There is no treatment.

Imagine hearing a constant ringing in your ears, every day, all the time, especially annoying when trying to go to sleep. It is maddening.

Over time, you just get used to it.

My main takeaway from getting tinnitus was that I may not be able to change some unfortunate qualities of my life, but if there are some decisions I can make to positively affect my health, why shouldn’t I act? I want to be in active control over my own health.

I joined a gym. I started lifting weights and running. I really cut down on eating out, and started cooking for myself. I quickly started losing weight, gaining muscle mass, and generally feeling better. The positive feedback loop continued and I found myself with more confidence, improved memory, and just feeling great about life.

As much as I hate tinnitus, I am almost glad that I got it when I did. It really kickstarted me getting my life in order. The constant ringing in my ears, as horrible as it feels to me, and others that have it, could be much worse. So to have a relatively minor wakeup call is a bittersweet gift.

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Withdrawal Pre-syncope

Through the past few years, I have kept up going to the gym. I have kept up cooking, eating much better than before. I’ve felt really great.

A year ago, I moved to Chicago to build a new company. I fell back into my old ways of waking up super early, going to bed super late, and lots of work in between. On my way to work, I would pick up a 4 pack of Red Bull. Every other day I was picking up another 4 pack in the afternoon. I was drinking 6 Red Bulls a day on average.

Once in a while, I would go back to NYC to see old friends and meet with investors. I would pack my schedule tight so I would be always meeting with someone. 3 days into my trip I started feeling faint, like I might pass out. So I went to sleep early.

The next day, I was walking on the street, and I felt like I needed to hold on to something. My vision started to grey out and I collapsed. I had no idea what was going on. Was I going to die? I went to the emergency room at Beth Israel. They did an MRI, CT scan, CBC, chest xray, etc. Everything was normal. They pumped me full of saline and sent me home.

I left completely disappointed in the hospital. I always thought doctors had an answer for everything. In this case, they looked at me, said, “Thats weird”, and then told me to come back if I felt like I was going to die. (After the fact, many doctors told me that the ER is one of the worst places to go unless you are absolutely going to die as you are more likely to die from a Staph infection or the inexperience of a exhausted student doctor paying their dues than the problem you came in for in the first place.)

The next morning, I felt worse. The feeling was like I was immediately being flushed with adrenaline and excitement, and then 10 seconds later, completely numb, and it would just repeat this cycle for hours. It was horrible.

After calling a bunch of doctors, the main question they had was, “Hey, do you do drugs?” Of course not. I don’t even like to take Advil when I have a headache. Their comments were that my symptoms were similar to anxiety attacks that happen from withdrawal.

It became clear to me almost immediately that after 3 days in NYC, I haven’t been feeding my body 6 Red Bulls a day. Apparently my body was angry about that.

It was alarming how much effect that seemingly innocent Red Bulls could have on the body. After reading similar accounts of people on the internet, and learning about how much Red Bull reserves to settle health lawsuits out of court, it was clear that Red Bull is much more dangerous than I thought. It would be wise to completely quit it.

In fact, I would make a few complete changes to what I put in my body. I would completely quit all caffeine. I didn’t really drink alcohol all that much before, but I would completely quit that. And lastly, I would quit eating meat and dairy.

A couple of my friends had suggested that I go to Mayo Clinic for a 3 day intensive physical exam. The Mayo Clinic is known for being the best hospital in the world - or at least the best staffed, and most funded. Basically, you fly to Rochester Minnesota, stay in a hotel for 3 days, get lots of tests done, and talk to lots of doctors. This program sounded great to me. So I called and made an appointment. I was surprised to learn that the wait list for this program is 7 months. So I put my name on the list.

Over the next 7 months, I had a few more bouts of diminishing pre-syncope. Being completely off caffeine, I wondered if maybe it wasn’t completely related to caffeine withdrawal. I was excited to go to Mayo and get all the answers. 6 months later, Mayo called with my appointment dates and sent out an information packet and schedule. I made my travel plans.

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Going to Mayo Clinic

I flew into Rochester International Airport which is conveniently 15 minutes away from from Mayo Clinic. The airport terminal is the size of a small schoolhouse. Upon entering, there is a thick smell that can only be described as “old folks home.” The term “international” is a bit of a technicality. The only real air connections to Rochester are Chicago and Minneapolis. One runway was lengthened to accommodate private 747s from the royal family when they come in for checkups.

Upon arriving at downtown Rochester, you instantly get a sense for how small it is. It is about 4 blocks by 4 blocks square, with the Mayo buildings, parking, random shops, and hotels tightly packed into that area. Everything outside of that area is almost completely level.

Every building seems to be connected either on every floor or at least on the subway level (the subway has no trains). Therefore, if you need to get anywhere, you just follow signs to get anywhere you need to go. It was incredibly easy to find everything. I walked outside only 2 times my entire trip.

Prior to arriving, I was sent a packet with a schedule. The schedule was 3 days of appointments starting from 7am to 4:30pm everyday. The design of the schedule was really simple and explained exactly what I would be doing.

I filled out all my health information and insurance information online using their website. It was pretty straightforward.

At 7am, I left my hotel room, and went for my first appointment for a blood test. It took me 2 minutes to get there. I gave the receptionist my sheet, she confirmed in 5 seconds, and told me to sit and wait. Before I even got to the chair to sit down, they called my name. My first impression is that logistically, this is the most well run hospital I have ever been to.

I was led down a hall of rooms that look like they were designed specifically for the sole purpose of drawing blood. The woman that drew 5 vials of blood was super nice. In 3 minutes she was done, and I was off to my next appointment. There is no “checkout.”

2 appointments later, I had a little time to kill, so I logged into their website. My blood test results were already available and super easy to read. I was surprised how fast and smooth everything was. Reading the results, everything was normal, and my good cholesterol was quite good, and my bad cholesterol was quite good. I think that my vegetarian lifestyle and exercise is definitely paying off.

Midday, I met with my main doctor there. She explained to me all the tests I would be taking, all the doctors I would be meeting with, and that at the end of the program, she would meet with me again to go over all the results. All test results and doctors notes are made available to all doctors, so everyone is fully aware of everything that is going on.

My next appointment was an Electrocardiogram test. Basically they shave your chest, hook you up to electrode sensors, and have you run on a treadmill. Its like out of the movies and its pretty fun.

The two ECG technicians seemed most concerned that I wasn’t going to have anything to do while I was in Rochester. They told me that there are only 3 restaurants, and 2 bars. They said that the only young people in Rochester are young people that work at the hospital. The patients are almost exclusively old people, and that young people like me going through this program was fairly rare. While Mayo Clinic is a destination hospital, the city of Rochester wants to change itself into a destination city. They seem very very far off.

At the end of the day, I walked by the 3 restaurants that are opened past 6pm. I decided on Chesters. It’s actually very good, and as a result, very popular. I ate there 4 times while I was in Rochester. It’s the only place worth eating. Seriously.

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I really enjoyed my time at the Mayo Clinic. It is a great facility. Everyone was great, I learned a great deal from the tests. I will be going back next year and following years. I would furthermore recommend anyone to go there as I did if they have the opportunity.

After all my tests were complete, I couldn’t help but thinking that Mayo Clinic wasn’t built for what I was using it for. From the audiologist’s test words like “Grandson”, and “Wood chucking” to a survey question about how much I still enjoy radio programs, I couldn’t help but think I was 30 years too young to be there.

I met with my doctor to review all the results. Every test on my blood work was perfect. My cardio health is perfect and I have a 0% chance of heart attack over the next 10 years. My physical condition is perfect, and I only have 11% body fat. My hearing is perfect. My balance is perfect.

Yet on the subject of Tinnitus and why I feel faint sometimes, there really aren’t any answers. She said there really aren’t any more tests to be done, and no one else to consult with. She said outside of those things, I’m perfectly healthy and I should carry on.

I think that the reason a question can’t be answered can only be attributed to laziness, ignorance, or complete disinterest.

I left disappointed.

Even though the Mayo Clinic may be the best institution, they don’t have all the answers.

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Rant below

I’m disappointed in what we don’t know - specifically in regards to neurology. I’ve heard that you can fill an ocean with what we don’t know about the brain compared to the grain of sand of what we do. However, given what we knew 50 years ago compared with the 10 years ago and today, discoveries are being made at comparative lightening speed today. It’s extremely exciting to think about the opportunities to discover how something works that is largely undiscovered. Knowing that the worlds smartest and creative minds are working on this and the hope that major discoveries will be made is comforting.

As for my personal health, I’m in my thirties, I know I’m getting older, I know I’m going to die someday. I know I’m fairly healthy, and could easily be more Laissez-faire. But I also know there is a ton of stuff I’d like to do while I’m still alive and I’d like to be best equipped to do it for as long as I’m able to.

Ive noticed that you become who you are surrounded by. If you are raised by overweight parents, you will likely live your life overeating. In New York and San Francisco people on average are in great shape. Living in New York being surrounded by people in great shape was a constant reminder that health is very important. Living in Chicago, it seems that Chicagoans have an attitude about personal health that is similar to being cool in school for not knowing the answer. It’s disgusting. If Chicago lived in New York, it might be as great of a city that it thinks it is.

I want to know how I should be living life in a smarter way. I want to know the answers to questions no one knows the answers to. I want to know how to do more. I want to know how to be happier. I want to know why I have a constant ringing in my ears. I want to know why feel pre-syncope sometimes. There is no good reason not to find the answer.

We should continue to ask questions. If we aren’t satisfied with the answers to those questions, we should try to find the answers. We should know that some things we think to be true will become invalidated.

For many intelligent young people, wellness is the new religion. We are looking for institutions and experts. Unfortunately, wherever there is a demand for experts, there is no shortage of people available to fill the position. And they certainly can’t have all the answers.

For example, I look at motivational speakers, fad diets, vitamin websites, etc. many of which I have been exposed to by my trusted friends with particular skepticism. Even during my time at Mayo, I met with a dietitian.

As the wives of rich men, dietitians have completed a bachelors degree and a 6 month course, ultimately arriving at the apex of their career in a small windowless room, with a bucket of plastic food and USDA food pyramid posters on the wall. They complete such tasks as, calorie counting (the same task done better as a free iPhone app), talking about milk endlessly stressing the importance of calcium, and how good antioxidants are, even though large 10 year clinical trials have detected no benefit, and declaring pizza a vegetable. In your Sally Struthers ICS career list, you will find dietitian below chiropractor and above astrologer. According the the wikipedia page, the top issue for dietitians is how to spell dietitians. And that seems about right.

I kid. Yet, I find no information invalidate this.

I would like to be part of community of like minded people interested in positive health choices, aging in the best possible way, and helping others by providing information and tools through conducting research and creating tech - at least at some point before I die.

If you have been thinking a lot about this, I would love to talk to you.

I founded OMGPOP, a video game company, that developed Draw Something, and ultimately sold to Zynga. I have lived in a few great places: Chicago, Tokyo, Seoul, and New York City. Gawker has called me the most interesting new millionaire playboy in tech. In reality, I’m not all that slick with the ladies and whether or not I am interesting, is debatable. I am currently the founder and CEO of Picturelife, my most important work to date.

I grew up in Chicago. I loved 2 things: computers and video games. When I was 7, I taught myself basic on an Apple IIe at our school computer lab. I bought an Atari 2600 and 12 games for $20 at a garage sale. When the Nintendo came out, I had to have it. I had to mow a lot of lawns to buy it. Duck Tales and Super Mario Brothers 3 were my favorite games. My first computer was a 486DX. Not soon after, I got a 2400 baud modem. I got a list of phone numbers for BBSs. I spent a ton of time on BBSs downloading files and designing ANSI art. I ended up designing my own BBS.

In 1994, I was accepted into a program created by the American Library Association to allow kids dial-up access to the internet. I downloaded Mosaic. I taught myself to write HTML. I saw the potential in the web. However, I thought the activity and community on BBSs was still way more interesting. In 1995, I built graphical user interface on top of a BBS system I ran at my high school. It was similar to AOL at the time. It was nice because most people didn’t have dial-up internet at that time, so a website would have been useless.

Around the same time, I became very interested in video game development as well as the demo scene. The demo scene was a community of amazing graphics programmers that pushed computers to the absolute limits. The first demo I saw was Future Crew’s Second Reality. The music was amazing, the graphics were amazing. I downloaded just about every demo I could. This was the point were I really started getting serious about game development.

Not long after Nintendo 64 came out, a home-brew hardware development interface was sold out of China. In reality, it was used to play downloaded roms of N64 games. It was funny to me, because most N64 games were so bad, it wasn’t worth the download time to play them. Anyways, I downloaded the PSYQ N64 devkit from someone on IRC and I started hacking away, making 3D models that I designed in 3DS Max rotate on my TV screen. I thought this was pretty awesome.

From there, I bought a flash rom kit for the Gameboy, and I started working on a platformer game.

I really loved video game development, and I’m sure I would have become a professional video game developer.. however, the video game industry didn’t pay very well at all. Furthermore, the internet was booming at the same time. Even though it was much, much less interesting, I started making web pages, doing web site design, and writing Perl, for $60 an hour.

The internet developed slowly. Interesting tech popped up like Java, Javascript, VRML, however, it was clunky, slow, and just didn’t work, compared to the speed and amazing performance of video games on the same hardware!

New media was the term people used around the internet. New media also included making CDROM applications for marketing, education, and simple video games. Macromind Director was the tool of choice. There was a simple programming language called Lingo. I actually liked it a lot because of its loose typing, similarity to basic, and relatively fast speed.

Macromind became Macromedia, and they released a plug-in for Netscape that would run Director files called Shockwave. Like most things on the internet at that time, Shockwave content was mostly garbage.

For the first time, I saw the opportunity to do some interesting things on the internet. I basically just took concepts I learned from the demo scene and game development and made some nice visual / tech demos. I post my demos regularly on my website, setpixel.com.

Some of my demos included: particle effects, 3d depth of field, NES tilemap viewer / map editor, marble madness clone, volumetric lighting. The demos were all open source, and I wrote articles with each one.

I wrote an IRC client in Shockwave and embedded it on the home screen of setpixel. I would just hang out and talk to people on my site. One day, I was chatting with some anonymous person.. “Hey where are you from? I’m from Chicago too! Let’s hang out!” That anonymous person was actually two people, Jake and Jacob. We hung out and became friends.

Jake had just won an online t-shirt design competition and thought it would be cool if people could win t-shirt design competitions all the time. So Jake and Jacob built Threadless. At the time, they were working at a small consulting agency. I convinced them that they should quit their jobs and we should get an office in Ravenswood. Interested in design, we built a design community forum called YayHooray. Worked on various other web projects, and I built my tech demos, and worked on video games.

Having spent my whole life in Chicago, I really didn’t know anything different, and I was painfully aware of that. I really wanted to live somewhere completely different. Almost immediately, I decided to move to Tokyo. Tokyo was at that time, the mecca, and in hindsight, at its apex for video games and cell phone technology. I had never had a cell phone before, and on my second day, I had one with a color screen, a camera, and it was connected to the internet. It also cost 1 yen.

I was really interested in the fact that you could easily take pictures with your mobile phone and post them to the internet immediately. I wrote a lot of photography software while I was in Japan, and even built a service I called Kpix. I met some really great people in Japan. I attended an event called The First Annual Moblogging Conference. There was a guy there named Joi Ito. Everyone seemed to really be crazy about him. He had just invested in something called TypePad a hosted blogging platform. I remember talking to a bunch of people at the conference about how I wanted to create a mobile blogging service where people could take pictures and post them live to a personal online gallery. They told me that it would cost a lot of money to run the service and that with someone like Joi Ito investing in TypePad, there was no point. Despite having fully built the service, I chose not to pursue it.

Thanks dream-crushers.

Despite some really cool things happening in Japan, I couldn’t help but notice that everything being built around the internet was intrinsically lame. The design was bad, the user interaction was bad, every website looked like 1995. I remember thinking that the weekend web projects Jake and Jacob would hack together would be infinitely more interesting than I saw in Japan.

I had heard about a social network in Korea called CyWorld. I took a trip to Korea to try it out. It was honestly the most amazing thing I had seen on the internet. As interactive as Facebook is today, Cyworld was in 2002. The most interesting thing was that you could buy virtual items to decorate your profile for real money, which really blew my mind.. 1) that people would pay for it and 2) that everyone was paying for it. They were making tons of money.

Furthermore, the video game industry was even more interesting. Piracy was so rampant that no games were imported legally, and Korean game developers couldn’t make money off selling games. So they developed games and gave them away for free. Because Korea was highly networked, almost all the popular games were realtime-multiplayer. The game companies made money by selling items in the game that would allow you to look better, and do better.

While in Korea, I met with Yahoo and told them that I wanted to take this amazing model and bring it to the US. They asked me how much I would need to build it. I told them 100k. They laughed at me.

After 2 years in Korea, I decided to move to NYC. I wanted to build something real, without battling language barriers and homogeneous markets.

Dan Albritton, a guy I knew from Japan, was moving to NYC on the same day to attend NYU’s ITP. We decided to become roommates. Dan had an idea for a SMS based application platform. One day, Dan told me that he was applying to a program where instead of college kids getting a summer job, they can hack away on a business idea, and they will give you $6,000 for a piece of your company. It was called Y Combinator. I thought, “Sounds dumb. Good luck with that.”

A week later, he told me that his application had made it to the second round, and that he had to go present his idea to the partners with his co-founder. Being without a co-founder, he asked me to go and help him pitch the idea, and that if he got in, he would would find a real co-founder to do the program with. I thought, “Free trip to California. Why not?”

We flew out.

We knew we only had 5 minutes with Paul Graham and the 3 other partners. We told them about the SMS platform. It was obvious that we were bombing. “Why would anyone ever want anything like this? This idea is shit and no one will ever give you money for this in a million years.” is what Paul said. Dan looked disappointed. I was fairly indifferent because it wasn’t my idea.

“BUT. You are smart guys, do you have any other ideas?”

When at parties in NYC, the topic of what you do is almost always the first thing to come up upon meeting people. I used to jokingly tell people that I ran an auction based dating site. At first, people would be disgusted. But I would explain to them that dating sites are nothing but spam, allowing men to send 1000s of messages to women creating 1000s of heartless unread, unreplied to messages in an overall useless system.

With an auction mechanic, the woman decides when she wants to be contacted, giving her total control, and as men are limited in their behavior by bidding a virtual currency she knows that the man is really interested in her, and she has her choice from the top bidders.

The more I told the story, the more people loved the idea.

So when I told Paul the story, he said, “Perfect. Would you like to work on that?” I said “YES!” Dan didn’t look so enthusiastic.

This was the third Y Combinator, and would take place in Cambridge Mass. over the summer. We moved to Cambridge and started working lightly. After exploring Cambridge for 1 hour, I realized that Cambridge is boring. If I was going to spend a summer in a leisurely fashion, I would rather spend it in NYC. So I decided that we were going to go at this full force and work our hardest. My objective was to win Y Combinator.

We started working on iminlikewithyou.

We learned rails in 1 week. I thought it was funny that rails was made by 37 signals. Jason Fried was a friend of mine way back in the day in Chicago. I talked to him on the phone and told him about what we were building.

“WHAT? You took money from VCs? You’re one of the smartest guys I know, and you just did one of the stupidest things. You just signed your life away.”

He hung up on me.

I guess being a hypocrite also comes with being a dick.

Y Combinator was really great. Everyone in our class was super nice, super smart, and very helpful. I really look back at my time there fondly and I miss everyone in our group

Anyways, we built something pretty cool, that worked pretty well after 2 months. We gave a great presentation…

Please wait part 2. This is way too long for a single blog post.