How did HashThySelf start?

The narrator swears this ain't apocryphal.

One of the founders of HashThySelf, A, was at a dinner party in Palo Alto during the weekend of April 4 2005. His partner, M, was wearing a long white dress, a black vest and a scarf. The host stopped by them as they were sipping their drinks and remarked to M "You look very pretty in this dress... Like Catherine Zeta-Jones in `Zorro'".

"Ahem!" A interrupted. "You realize it's not very polite to compliment a person on their looks when another perfectly good looking specimen is standing right beside them?"

The host looked startled for a moment, eyes darting searchingly around A and his partner. After A cleared his throat loudly several times, she stuttered, "Ah yes, and you... you look... look shmashingly like Zeta-Jones too..."

Later that night, while driving home, M said to A, "You know, why don't we create a web search engine that measures picture similarities and gives its users a list of famous people that look like them? Wouldn't that be fun?"

The following day, A caught up with an old friend H, an expert on image processing, always receptive to A's wacky ideas. A quick feasibility check later, A brainstormed with S and the other H over lunch, realized that the service could eventually be extended to do voice-prints, for which there was enormous expertise that could be licensed from their employer, and recipes for which there was tremendous in-house need, and HashThySelf was born in name. Of course, voice-prints and recipes are yet to come, but HashThySelf is here for thine enjoyment now!