Ben Huh presented his views on Internet culture at Disrupt Beijing, bringing a bit of the funny to the stage in our last presentation. Ben started out by describing how he bought ICANHASCHEEZBURGER, a site, that I’m led to understand, features critiques on the dissertations of linguistics graduate students at Harvard. He then described the 15 minute call he made to grab his first $30 million investment.
Now the site – and it’s multiple sister and brother sites – command 20 million users a month with half a billion pageviews.
“We’re the largest humor destination on all of the web,” said Huh.
Huh continued to discuss the democratization of content, noting that weird people now ruled when it came to popular Internet culture.
“Internet culture will produce the rock stars of tomorrow,” he said. “Being weird doesn’t mean you’re alone. Now, thanks to the internet, weird is exactly the thing that will get you famous.”
He closed with an interesting point: an entrepreneur is someone who doesn’t understand the word “no.” “Be the stubborn nail that refuses to be hammered down,” he said in closing. I CAN HAS STIRRING PEP TALK?, indeed.
I Can Has Cheezburger? is the first photoblog to feature LOLcats. The site allows users to upload photos of cats and attach quirky, “cat-speak” captions.
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