Ben and Don MacAskill are the founders and CEO & President of Awesome, the company that owns SmugMug and Flickr, among other brands. They specialize in online tools and platforms for photography and have changed the way photographers store, share, and sell their work. A few years ago, when they purchased Flickr from Yahoo, they discovered something unexpected.

In this Tugboat Institute® talk, Ben explains that he and Don were aware, of course, that Flickr owned and stored tens of billions of photos. But they soon also discovered that galleries, museums, and archives all over the world had also uploaded tens of millions of rare, unique, and historic photos. The power and impact of the collection struck them as important and absolutely unique, so they created a plan to ensure that these historic images never got lost to humanity. They created the Flickr Foundation. As they build the structure of this Foundation that is still only about a year old, they are focused on the goal of not just preserving the collection, but preserving it for the long term.