Facebook Flash Player Hack
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A story about how GIPHY managed to get GIFs onto Facebook despite initial resistance from Mark Zuckerberg.
"We were growing 10x every year for the first 4 years - from 300,000 to 3 million to 30 million to 300 million users. We got to a point where we knew we couldn't hit 300 million without getting onto Facebook. But Zuckerberg had just said he would never put GIFs on his platform like 2 months before, and everyone told us we were dead.
We refused to accept that. We needed to get GIFs onto Facebook, so we hacked together a solution using a Flash player that could actually play GIFs on Facebook. We implemented it, and it worked - we hit our 10x growth.
The next year, we were on stage at F8 with Mark Zuckerberg himself, and he was sending GIFs on the GIPHY platform."
Alex Chung
Currently the founder and CEO of GIPHY. His latest startups include Artspace, a leading ecommerce destination for contemporary art, The Fridge, a private social network acquired by Google, and General Displays a GE venture developing GE's next generation of HDTVs.