MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

40 Kyle Treleaven grew up in Whistler and was snowboard.com’s fourth employee. Kyle: I saw a photo of my buddy on the internet doing something highly inappropriate and thought, “what the hell is this?” The next day Rick was over for dinner because his girlfriend was a nurse who worked with my mom. He was talking about snowboard.com and I was like, “no way, I ended up on it yesterday.” That’s how I became employee number four—I guess the job title today would be “community manager.” I was doing marketing, trying to get the industry involved, create content, and solicit feedback on what working and what wasn’t. I was 18 years old.” Adam Arsenault was snowboard.com’s original programmer. Adam: I got the job as a co-op student from the University of Victoria. That was 1999 and I would have been 21. I remember the job posting was popular, a lot of applications but I think I got it because I had so much ski, snowboard and skate history. I had the culture. Joe Barnett was the other co-op student hired to build snowboard.com . Joe: Like most start-ups, we all had a lot of stuff to do. I was front-end developer, graphic designer and the computer and server hardware guy. We’d buy our servers off eBay, no real idea what condition they were in, and I had to figure out how to connect them. All the servers were just in Rick’s house back then. Rick Godwin conceived and owned snowboard.com. Rick: We had to heat the cabin exclusively with the wood-burning stove because the servers drew so much power that the main breaker for the cabin would trip if we tried to use the electric baseboards. The heat from the servers themselves also acted like a furnace for the cabin. My tech background was more in infrastructure and management, but I came up with the idea for snowboard. com based on what I knew I couldn’t do with a traditional publication because of overhead costs and competition with all the other magazines. I wanted something where you could interact and upload pics, where the community created the content, but I couldn’t find any prewritten code to upload an image. Adam: Rick was way ahead in that respect, he could really see the future and had a vision of how technology was changing and how people would use it. He owned a ton of domain names. Joe: Rick talked Telus into installing the largest residential internet connection in Canada into his place, an A-frame he rented in Emerald Estates. Rick : That was the year 2000. I got a fibre optic “T-1 line” which at the time was an insanely huge internet connection and cost $5,000 a month. A T-1 line is 1.5Mbps. Ninteen years later, I have a 300Mbps connection for $90 per month. The History of Social Media Telegraph – 1835 Telephone – 1890 Conference calls – 1956 Cellular phone – 1973 WebPersonals.com – 1994 (first online dating site) SixDegrees.com – 1997 (first social media website) Pinkbike – June 1998 Napster – June 1999 (peer-to-peer file sharing) Snowboard.com– November2000 Friendster – 2003 LinkedIn – May 2003 MySpace – August 2003 Facebook – January 2004 (Harvard University students only) YouTube – February 2005 Twitter – March 2006 Instagram – October 2010 We had to heat the cabin exclusively with the wood- burning stove because the servers drew so much power that the main breaker for the cabin would trip if we tried to use the electric baseboards.