Innovator: DeviantART's Angelo Sotira How Angelo Sotira turned 14 million independent artists into a groundbreaking social network.
By Jennifer Wang •
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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."
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