Day 58 of 100

“I dunno, like seven bucks?”

One of the companies I worked at early on—Lijit—operated in the blogging space where we put search boxes on blogs that searched all of your social content. This was like 2008 when doing that was innovative and novel.

The way we planned to make money was just like Google. We showed ads when people searched for things. So to make a lot of money we needed a lot of people to search for a lot of things.

On the internet, there was one blog network that was larger than any other…ICANHASCHEESBURGER…with hundreds of millions of page views, it was perfect for Lijit. So to land the deal, I did 30 speaking engagements in a year, where 18 of them included the CEO of I Can Has Cheeseburger, Ben. Over the course of the year we became friends, and eventually we worked out a deal to put Lijit on the network.

But that’s not the story.

At one speaking engagement in LA Ben was talking about the sheer size of their blog network. Huge numbers were flashing on the screen. People in the audience were clearly impressed. Until a little hand raised slowly, and a quiet voice asked, “What is it? Is it a blog?”

Ben didn’t know what to do, he pulled up sites from the network. “Yes, it’s a blog, a BIG blog,” he said. “How have you not heard of cats on the internet?”

The crowd laughed. “In fact, we have the founder of the site here today,” and he pointed at a guy sitting in the back row.

Eric is an unassuming man, who with a friend started posting cat memes online and it exploded into one of the largest sites on the internet. He waved. Ben asked, “Eric, when the site was at its biggest, how much did you pay for hosting?”

“I dunno,” Eric answered, “like $7 a month?”

The crowd went wild. (Ed. note: I realize now how big a nerd I actually am)

We went out for lunch afterwards to Rubio’s and had lobster burritos.

And, that’s the story how Eric and I became friends.