Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Build on what you uniquely know
A Backward Choice
Garry Tan graduated from Stanford into 2003, when Web 1.0 had just ended, the NASDAQ had crashed, and the two job offers he had were Microsoft for Windows Mobile or Expedia. Everyone said the web was dead. He had done a lot of web programming, and he left it for Windows Mobile because mobile looked like the next hot thing.
The timing was exactly backward. Web 2.0 was about to begin, Facebook did not exist yet, and Mark Zuckerberg was probably working on FaceMash around then. Five years of web and social experience would have put him ahead of everyone, and he could have built any kind of social software.
Trusting Experience
Holding to what you know takes courage. When a blog post or a tweet contradicts your own direct experience, you can simply disagree, because you believe what you have seen yourself.
How bad was the dot-com crash?
The Nasdaq Composite closed at a peak of 5,048 on March 10, 2000. It then fell about 78 percent, bottoming out in October 2002. Many internet companies shut down or cut staff, and hiring for web roles dried up. The index did not close above its 2000 peak again until 2015.
How did Web 2.0 change the internet?
The term Web 2.0 was popularized by publisher Tim O'Reilly at a 2004 conference. It described sites built from what users contributed, instead of pages that companies published. Flickr launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. Wikipedia, founded in 2001, was often cited as the model.
How did Facemash lead to Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facemash at Harvard in October 2003. The site let visitors compare photos of students, and the university administration took it down within days. He launched Thefacebook from his dorm in February 2004. It was open only to Harvard students at first, then spread to other colleges.
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