An Interview with MP3.com’s “High Geek”
Sander van Zoest is the “High Geek” and Senior Web Engineer at MP3.com, one of the Web’s most-trafficked sites. He also happens to have been among MP3.com’s first employees. The author interviewed van Zoest via email.
Scot Hacker: How long have you been a part of MP3.com? When did it all start, and what was the original objective? Where is MP3.com based?
Sander van Zoest: MP3.com is based in San Diego, California. It was launched out of The Z Company, which was founded by our CEO, Michael Robertson. The Z Company was a small web shop that ran many web sites, such as Filez, the Net’s largest and fastest file search engine, and Websitez, a domain name search engine. Greg Flores, our current Vice Present of Sales, told Michael about MP3, and in November 1997 they opened MP3.com.
The objective was to provide a one-stop site for the MP3 movement. It provided ground-breaking news and editorials by Michael Robertson, which can now be found on our site under the heading “Michael’s Minute,” and hardware and software sections to get new users started. In the summer of 1998 we started accepting MP3 music from musicians and artists around the world, to provide them with a revolutionary way of distributing their music.
I started working part time with Z Company in June of 1998, around the time of our first annual MP3 Summit, which was an attempt to gather all the influential people of the MP3 movement together under one roof. The event was held at the University ...
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