Find a movie: simple, sweet, seemingly easy to do and yet we’ve all been to blockbuster or shown up at the theater and looked at the rows and rows of movies and blankly wondered which one to choose. And so you think about the marketing you’ve seen, how you liked an actor in one movie so maybe you’ll like him/her again, or a friend of a friend apparently really liked it.

Finding a movie is a big problem and the goal of our site it to solve it. Easy right?

Not at all. Think of all the genres of movies, the mood you are in and how you’d like to feel after the movie, the sophistication, factor in what you’ve liked and disliked in the past, and on and on…..and all the choices, hundreds of thousands of movies and thousands more each year.

So we’ve dissected the whole process…and we are going to help you find a movie to watch.

 - Matt

Like most other subjects on the Internet, the online movie landscape is incredibly competitive. If you take a look at MSN, Yahoo!, IMDB, Rottentomatoes, Moviefone, etc, it’s immediately obvious that there are many large players in the space who have spent years developing strong movie portals. Many of these sites are also backed by huge companies with quite a bit more cash than we have.

Given the competition, we knew we couldn’t immediately start building a product without spending serious time thinking about what users still lack the ability to do on traditional movie websites. Thus, we started brainstorming in April of 2007 without any code being written until July. For three months, all we did was talk about features that other sites offered and what people liked most. MSN and Yahoo! were seen as mainstream, corporate websites with good information on recent movies. IMDB was seen as the number one source for raw movie data. RottenTomatoes was seen as the best place to get user feedback on movies through the Tomatometer.

After deciding on some things that we thought we could improve upon from these sites, we began to build. The Summer of ‘07 was spent working diligently on finding movie content, learning over 5 different programming languages, building up a movie database backbone and above all, scrounging around for food without open dining halls. If any future VCs ever have concerns about our ability to conserve money, all they need to do is go through weeks of Dominoe’s, Quizno’s, and Baja Fresh receipts.

With school starting again, it has definitely been harder to maintain focus. Drawing some cues from Tony D’Amato in Any Given Sunday, I’ve been doing my best to continue rallying the team. It is amazing to me that people can manage multiple problem sets and programming assignments, while still doing their best to build a company. I never had such an opportunity in school, but chances are, I wouldn’t have had the guts to take on the challenge while still trying to maintain my grades. This is a special group that I’ve been extremely proud of.

Below are some photos of the team, hard at work during one of our weekly meetings. Thanks to Eric for volunteering to be our historian.

- Steven

- Josh and Chris have a good laugh.

- Stan and Dave go over design issues as I look over.

- Dave’s son, Callum, reminds us that movies with trains are cool.

I’ve been asked to blog for HelloMovies, which, depending on your point of view, is either a great idea or the worst idea to ever hit the planet since movie theatres started putting trash cans far away from the bathroom door. Whether you sit with the former or the latter camp can largely be determined by how you reacted to that previous sentence. If you agree with my sentiments on theatre bathroom layouts, stick around.

Now unfortunately, HelloMovies can’t fix all the movie theatre bathrooms in the world, but we are out to improve every other part of the movie experience, from figuring out if there’s anything good out right now to finding the closest place to rent a movie, from discovering new films guaranteed to fit your tastes to finally finding out the name of that one movie you watched a long time ago with the totally tripped-out scene where a ninja does this amazing backflip over twenty zombies and ends up falling into a dumpster where he discovers the Magical Can Opener of Eternal Glory. Damn, have we been searching long and hard for that one.

Also, we strongly oppose preteen girls slobbering all over Johnny Depp with poor capitalization and excessive use of exclamation marks. That alone should sway you to our side.

So stay tuned for more exciting news as we get rolling on site development. We’ll let you know how things are going, and maybe even enthuse about Johnny a little…only, you know, real dignified-like.

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