by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs

• Join - It's Free!
• Log in

Take Some Time Off: Allen Murabayashi

Allen Murabayashi’s story: After spending his childhood in Honolulu, majoring in music at Yale and designing, with two other technologists, the site that would become HotJobs.com, Murabayashi still didn’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up. It took an 18-month car trip to each of the 48 contiguous United States before he figured it out.

“After Yale, I moved to New York City without a job and thought I would hit the pavement and see what happens,” says Murabayashi, 35. “A friend from Yale was working at a technical recruiting company. He said, ‘I’ll send you on interviews, but you should talk to my boss. He’s looking to start something on the Internet.’”
That turned out to be HotJobs, a successful job-search site that at its peak had 675 employees, 13 offices in four countries and more than $100 million in annual revenues. It was eventually purchased by Yahoo.

Success Didn’t Fit

The job became too big for Murabayashi. Climbing the corporate ladder became an expectation instead of something he wanted to do. So he left, uncertain as to exactly where he was going.

That was 2001. Murabayashi, who’d always loved photography, bought his first digital camera and jumped in the car. “I was trying to combine a couple different passions,” he recalls.

“I’d always wanted to road trip it. I want[ed] to see every single state by car, so I would wake up each morning and pull out the atlas and point at a city and start driving. It was a really cool way to recharge the batteries.”

On the road alone, he had “an awful lot of time – no lack of introspection and talking to myself.” That journey, both literal and figurative, helped frame his next venture.

A New Idea, and a Better Fit

After the trip ended, Murabayashi had a ton of photos of places and people he’d seen along the way. Where to store them? Already technologically savvy, he started pondering the popular shift from film to digital. And it triggered an idea.

“We’re collecting so many digital assets – photographs, MP3s, Word documents – it’s staggering that we still store things on our desktop hard drive because we all use different computers,” he says. “There’s a need to have ubiquitous access online.”

One cold December night in 2004, Murabayashi met some former Hotjobs colleagues for dinner in New York to brainstorm. They wanted to resolve the evident problems with archiving and distribution of digital photography, and at the same time create a streamlined marketplace for images.

“I didn’t want to never work again,” he says. “I couldn’t be idle and just drive around. It didn’t satisfy this burning desire to feel like I’m making a difference.”

So PhotoShelter.com was born. Legally formed in February 2005 and beta-launched in June, the company employs eight people and stores the work of more than 3,200 professional photographers online for a monthly fee.

Time Off to Turn Back On

Without the time off, Murabayashi says he’d never have found his niche and started a successful business that he loves.

“Historically, there’s been this drive to keep climbing the ladder,” he says. “If you’re idle for more than three months, there’s a real sense that you’re not in the loop anymore.

“People don’t feel validated unless they’re moving from entry level intern up the corporate ladder. There’s a real danger in doing that.”

So many folks have no clue what they want to spend their lives doing. Like Murabayashi, they “follow a circuitous path to enlightenment and happiness” – a path much like a cross-country driving tour.

“It was time well spent,” he says.