Taylor McKnight has always been ambitious.
In middle school, he was that kid flipping candy for profit. He learned to “buy low, sell high” in high school while the economy boomed. He came to UF a marketing major, thinking he’d one day be a big shot businessman.
“I wanted to work on Wall Street, make lots of money,” he said. “Then I kind of grew up during college. I realized, I don’t really care about money nearly as much as making stuff.”
Now, the 27-year-old McKnight is dedicated to helping people connect and share the things they love. As a developer for web-based enterprises like music discovery engine Hype Machine and the new music festival schedule generator, Sched, he’s the kind of hip, young businessman who finds success catering to his own and thinks offices are for suckers.
His interest in web design sparked around 2002 when he started a personal blog about his life; mostly the boring stuff.
“It was very LiveJournaly,” he said. “I mean, you read back on that stuff and it’s embarrassing.”
But it taught him the basics of web design and, when he got to UF, it helped him get a job developing sites for the university.
Soon after, McKnight quit his UF job for a position at gawker.com, a New York City-based blog focused on celebrities and the media industry.
In 2007, McKnight changed jobs again and joined his friend Anthony Volodkin on his project Hype Machine, at hypem.com, to create a new way for music fans to get their fix, and here was where McKnight really felt at home.
“It’s a music discovery engine powered by real people,” he said.
Blogs apply to get on the site, are approved based on originality, and then HypeMachine compiles the tracks they post for users to find and share.
In 2008, McKnight was inspired to start another site, sched.org, as a way for him to manage his time at music festival South by Southwest. Sched is the only schedule that covers all official and unofficial events of the week, of which there were about 8,000 last year.
It was covered by Wired magazine on the festival’s first day, and soon McKnight was getting propositioned by other festivals willing to pay for the service.
“I’ve had ideas where I’m like, ‘this is gonna be big,’” he said. “This was not one of those.”
His newest endeavor is a photo booth rental company called Phobooth that he runs with his family. Their booths can be found all over the state and have been featured at the annual Grooveshark parties here in town.
“Its kind of magical how, we built this silly box right, you go in there and take a picture, and you come out laughing,” he said. “It’s such an awesome thing because you don’t feel like you’re working.”
That statement basically summarizes McKnight. He’s part of a collection of new minds approaching business in new ways.
“Building things that help people share and discover is really awesome,” he said. “It makes me happy ... It’s like my little, narrow, niche scope of, ‘I wanna change the world.’ Well this is the one little way that maybe I can.”
