I’m sitting here watching William Wallace lead his small Scottish army against the English. I’ve seen this fight scene a million times, remembering the time when my high school friends would rewind over and over every arrow in the arse, every sword through the chest, and every head getting smashed. We’d laugh at the English getting mooned - from both sides. It’s ridiculous, but glorious at the same time, one of the most uplifting and triumphant movies I have ever seen. Why Mel Gibson would move on to do What Women Want just a few years later, I have absolutely no idea. I forgive him partly because Braveheart was so damn good and maybe because deep down I still have an affinity for romantic comedies.

I grew up in Fremont CA, suburbia at its finest. If you remember Michael Bolten blasting his rap music on his way to work in Office Space, you can picture a lot of the people I grew up with. Two dollar hot dogs at A’s games and hanging out in movie theatre parking lots was how I spent most of my youth. These days, you’ll find me working way too much at a venture fund on the opposite side of the Bay, close to where I graduated at Stanford.

VC’s do a lot of networking - at art galleries, at law firms, at go-kart raceways. I was fortunate enough to meet one of my best friends, Matthew Fix, at one of these events - on a boat cruise of all places. As a married guy who’s a few years older than I am, he oddly clicked with me on a lot of levels. We both play basketball and we both like to skateboard. Matt looks a lot like Luke Wilson or Alan Ruck, and I sound a lot like Keanu Reeves from his Bill and Ted days - all pretty light-hearted characters who don’t take themselves too seriously. We’re probably the only two VC’s to skateboard along Sand Hill - much to the old security guard’s disapproval (who drives a Prius by the way… only on Sand Hill). Over a game of hoops and some mild conversation around a Jessica Alba movie, we decided to build something, not just anything, but one of the greatest movie websites ever. Matt’s done some work in television, and I’m a nut when it comes to watching good films. It’s amazing how talking about a good movie or celebrity can bring so many people together.

Matt has a pretty interesting background, which I leave for him to discuss in a future blog. He’s a Berkeley grad who will not stop making fun of how bad our football team is this year. Together, we want to build a movie site that these two schools can be proud of and we’ve recruited the help of students from both schools to join us in our goal. Over coffee with students at the COHO (which sadly is being torn down) and a few conversations with family and friends, we managed to assemble a team of 6 Stanford students and alumni for our project: Christopher, David, Eric, Josh, Stan and Tai-Jin.

If you can imagine some of the brightest students working together on our movie site, some foregoing chances to work with the Googles and Microsofts of the world, you’ll have a sense for the team and you’ll have a sense for how vested I am in making sure this project prevails. I love my team, enough to fore-go sleep and enough to fore-go the fun (nightmares) of dating. Of course, every young team needs seasoned guidance, and for that, we brought in Dave Burgess, one of the chief architects of Yahoo as a technical and spiritual advisor. Over the course of these blogs, you’ll learn more about the personalities of our team, what we think about other movies sites, what we do on a day-to-day basis and get a small taste of what we are trying to build. Our team is small and flexible. We meet every week in a dorm room at Stanford. By the time this is done, we hope every college student will have something to say and something to contribute to our work. If you’d like to get involved or learn more, please send me a line at feedback@hellomovies.com. Thank you all and please stay tuned,

Steven Fan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 6:55 pm and is filed under Overview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.