Caterina Fake: Building the Taste Graph That Transformed E-Commerce Recommendations

Caterina Fake spent years building key architectures of the internet before co-founding Hunch in 2007. Having established a strong reputation through early web projects and co-founding the photo-sharing platform Flickr, she turned her attention to how software interprets human decision-making. With Hunch, she aimed to bridge the gap between consumer preferences and automated recommendation engines, establishing key techniques for predictive digital services.

Pioneering Social Platforms and Digital Communities

Before launching Hunch, Fake developed her technical expertise through several foundational web initiatives. After managing community forums at Netscape in 1997, she gained insight into early social interaction online. In 2002, she co-founded Ludicorp in Vancouver alongside Stewart Butterfield and Jason Classon. Although their initial online multiplayer game did not launch, the team redirected their software to create Flickr in 2004. The photo platform grew into a major online community using social tagging, open application programming interfaces, and popular content algorithms.

Following Flickr’s acquisition by Yahoo in 2005 for approximately thirty million dollars, Fake joined Yahoo to lead its Technology Development group. In this role, she managed rapid-product development programs, including Hack Yahoo, Yahoo Pipes, and Brickhouse, before departing the company in June 2008.

Developing the Taste Graph at Hunch

In 2007, Fake co-founded Hunch alongside entrepreneur Chris Dixon to address the challenges of automated decision-making online. The company focused on constructing predictive technology capable of mapping user preferences. When the platform’s website launched in June 2009, it offered customized product recommendations based on individual interests.

Central to Hunch’s operation was a system known as a taste graph. By analyzing historical user choices and affinity data, the underlying algorithm calculated personalized suggestions and predicted future decisions. Hunch built early predictive models that allowed software to identify meaningful connections across disparate consumer selections, placing the company at the forefront of personalized web technology.

Acquisition and Integration into E-Commerce

The predictive framework created by Fake and her team attracted interest from established digital marketplaces. In November 2011, e-commerce corporation eBay acquired Hunch for eighty million dollars. The acquisition enabled eBay to integrate Hunch’s taste graph and preference-matching systems directly into its broader online shopping infrastructure to improve product discovery.

Although the public-facing Hunch website was shut down in March 2014, the core recommendation technology was retained to support eBay’s platform services. The integration demonstrated the commercial viability of early taste-graph models within large-scale retail environments.

Subsequent Ventures and Early-Stage Investment

Following her work at Hunch, Fake expanded her involvement across venture capital, corporate governance, and new product development. She served on the board of directors and as chairwoman of Etsy between 2006 and 2014, while also taking on board roles at Creative Commons in 2008 and the Sundance Institute in 2015.

As an early-stage angel investor and partner at Founder Collective, Fake backed numerous emerging technology startups, including Kickstarter, Cloudera, Blue Bottle Coffee, Uber, and BuzzFeed. She later launched the location platform Findery in San Francisco, hosted media programs including the podcasts Should This Exist? and Ingenious, and expanded into public speaking and artistic installations.