MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Fall Winter 2019

42 Kyle: We’d sit around brainstorming new features or concepts for the site. Then Adam would have to make them a reality. Back then there wasn’t really any other examples to pull from so we’d have to figure out how to build everything. Adam would often say, “I don’t know if that’s possible.” Then he’d find a way to make it happen. We had a feature where you could see who had viewed your profile, that was a huge thing that everyone was into. I remember LinkedIn did that like seven years later and I thought, “finally figured that out, eh?” Joe: Being able to see who had viewed your profile was a big deal. I think paid members were able to go dark, and pros. Kyle: Stealth mode wasn’t limited to pros, anyone could do it but you had to know how. So, then it became that if someone showed you that they were checking out your profile; that meant something. GregWeins was a snowboarder living in Vancouver when he got the job as Snowboard.com’s first salesperson. Greg: At the time, it was not easy to sell online media. It was right after the dotcom crash—the dotcom millionaires agreed the internet was the next media platform but no one could figure out how to monetize it. They were trying to replicate print. I remember being at the Vegas trade show and Rick had pissed off some nerds or something and they were bombing the site, giving us a hard time and causing problems with the servers. Rick and I were there in Vegas with printouts of what the website looked like so we could show people. Rick: It wasn’t me pissing off nerds. Snowboard.com became the lab rat for a Russian university hacking course. Hacking is an official career in Russia. They posted their course material online, with a few days’ delay, in Russian, and we could follow along (translating it to English) about all the various techniques and methods of how one should go about hacking a social networking (although that wasn’t a word at the time) website. At one point they managed to corrupt our database and we had to resort to restoring from backups, which caused the site to lose a few weeks of content activity. Dano Pendygrasse was already a top snowboard photographer by the end of 1999. He’d later write a book Out West: Snowboarding , Westbeach , and a New Canadian Dream , generally accepted as the definitive history of Canadian snowboarding. Dano : I was an early adopter, probably in the first 100 people. It was way ahead of the curve with sharing photos quickly. You could share photos that you’d shot very recently. It was insular, and self-protective—if someone came on that was a skier trying to be cool we’d be like, “this isn’t the place for you.” It was an extension of the culture, and snowboard culture was always progressive. The whole thing felt like it was ten years ahead. For the next decade some new platform or idea would come out and we’d say, “oh that’s like snowboard.com. ” Adam: It was an interesting thing to build, an exploration process. I was trying to build things on the web that we now use every day. We had chat functionality like MSN messenger, notifications, photos, videos, direct messaging and email. We had chat functionality like MSN messenger, notifications, photos, videos, direct messaging and email. ABOVE Leanne Pelosi. RUSSELL DALBY. BOTTOM RIGHT Poolside après. SPENCER FRENCEY