Overview
As one of the first front end developers at YouTube, Chris noticed a problem. The way we serve images online was broken. We designed it for a web that was text-heavy, desk-bound and bandwidth-rich. But the web was changing. Visuals dominated, even as displays fragmented, mobile flourished and bandwidth-crunched wireless became many people’s primary connection.
The answers available no longer fit the real problems. So Chris founded a company to fix it — imgix. Fast forward six years later, imgix has grown from “coffee table web servers” to a service that handles billions of images daily. In this session, imgix CEO, Chris Zacharias will share the story of building the service that companies like Reddit, Foursquare, and Dropbox use to serve visuals, and reveal some of the lessons he learned along the way.
Objective
Gain perspective what it takes to build a company to tackle a hard problem, and insight into what’s coming next on the visual web
Target Audience
Entrepreneurs, would-be entrepreneurs and anyone interested in what it takes to tackle visual experience on the web
Five Things Audience Members Will Learn
- Why images almost did not make it into the first versions of the web
- Why images, not video, were one of the biggest problems in the early days of YouTube
- Lessons from building one of the first at-scale HTML5 video players
- What you need to know before you leave a big company to found a startup
- What comes next — the flexible, responsive web we’re heading toward
