Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, people took photos with a camera, removed the film, brought it in for developing, waited up to a week or more, and then — if they were lucky — wound up with a couple of good shots which would then go into a photo album or get tossed into a drawer forever.
Then came digital photography. And Facebook. And Twitter. And Flickr. And Instagram. And suddenly, it wasn’t unusual for a single individual to photograph and post dozens of images in a given week.
Enter Nate Westheimer, Charles Forman, and Jacob DeHart, founders of New York-based Picturelife, a business photo storage app that “stores all your photos and videos securely in the cloud, giving you access to them wherever you are,” according to its website.
Launched in 2012 with a $600,000 angel investment, the young start-up is poised to become one of Flickr’s fiercest competitors. This is due in part to the strong pedigree of all three of its founding entrepreneurs: Westheimer serves as President of the NY Tech Meetup, Co-Managing Partner to Red Bud Ventures, and Advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners; Forman founded game company OMGPOP — which he later sold to Zynga for a cool $180 million; DeHart co-founded Threadless, an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago.
“My advice to entrepreneurs is simple,” Westheimer told the Wall Street Journal Online. “It’s hard and unnatural to be on the lookout for a co-founder, but it’s easy and natural to be on the lookout for fans. Go out and find people whose work you are a fan of, and make sure you’re also putting your work out there for other people to see, so that others may become fans of yours. In the end, if the stars align, it will be because you got to watch other people work over time, and because they got to watch you work as well. Only then will it become time to become co-founders and start a business together.”
Time will tell whether PictureLife, a business photo storage, lives up to its hype, but clearly these three men are entrepreneurial whizzes to watch.
