While recovering from a bout of food poisoning, Stewart Butterfield had a sick-bed epiphany. Part of the online game let users share photos with other players, and Butterfield thought that feature could stand on its own as a Web-based product. “It was a very different idea, but cool,” he says. He came up with ten pages of notes and designs for Flickr, the popular online photo-sharing site.

That was on December 8, 2003. The first version of Flickr was launched by February 2004, and it was an immediate hit. “From the outset, potential acquirers knocked on the door,” says Caterina Fake.

Unlike other photo-sharing sites, Flickr focused on building an online community. Fake and a colleague spent days and nights greeting people on the site and introducing them to each other. “If you build a social network that takes off, that’s the Holy Grail,” says Fake.

But six months later, in March 2005, Yahoo bought Flickr for about $30 million. Butterfield and Fake celebrated by buying a new Prius. They moved their offices from Vancouver to San Francisco, and their entire staff of 24 moved with them. Butterfield continues to run Flickr for Yahoo, and Fake is in Yahoo’s technology-development group.

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine