Innovator: DeviantART's Angelo Sotira How Angelo Sotira turned 14 million independent artists into a groundbreaking social network.
By Jennifer Wang •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Angelo Sotira fidgets like a kid caught without his PSP2. Skinny, fashionably unshaven and looking even younger than 30 in ripped jeans and a True Religion thermal, he scoots back and forth on the couch in his office, bounces his knees and leans over the coffee table as he talks about launching the biggest, longest-running social network you've probably never heard of. The tabletop is littered with pieces from the Lego kits he works on when he wants to unplug (he goes through about three a month), and a chat alert periodically pings from the big-screen computer across the room.
"When we started this," he says, fingers tapping against his leg, "we wanted to build the deepest, most vertically integrated network that ever existed."
By all accounts, Sotira has succeeded. He is co-founder and CEO of deviantART, an online artists' community that started in 2000 and now has a staggering membership of more than 14 million. DeviantART users, lovingly referred to as "deviants," sign up for free accounts that come with a personal profile page, a blog and a space to post artwork and photos, along with the ability to chat, message and comment.
