A website that allowed users to rank women working at Corgi, an AI insurance company known for its 24-hour cafes and whimsical social media presence, was taken down Thursday after the startup threatened the website’s owner with legal action.
For its three days of existence, CorgiGirls.com displayed photos of Corgi’s female employees in side-by-side comparisons, letting visitors vote on who they thought was more attractive. The website now shows a domain name error.
The website appears to have been set up by Sebastian Mandal, a San Francisco-based startup startup founder who describes himself on LinkedIn as a college dropout and a professional Minecraft player. On Monday evening, Mandal said in a now-deleted tweet that he had purchased the CorgiGirls.com domain, asking his 279 followers, “what should i do with it? have an idea, but it may not be politically correct.”
He then tagged Mark Zuckerberg to ask for his input, presumably as a nod to Facemash, a similar “hot-or-not”-style website that the Meta chief built in 2003 during his sophomore year at Harvard.
Erika Lee, Corgi’s head of brand, told Gazetteer SF the company first became aware of the website on Tuesday when someone sent the link to one of her female colleagues, whose photo was being ranked on the website.
“She was really disturbed,” Lee said. The employee shared it in a company group chat. Beyond the side-by-side comparisons, the website also included a real-time leaderboard. “It was all these people we work with every day, compared to each other based on attractiveness, which is really demeaning.”
Lee said she suspects Mandal used an AI agent to scrape Corgi’s LinkedIn page to gather the photos, which even included female baristas who work at the Corgi Cafe on Claude Lane downtown, and spin up the website so quickly.
Corgi’s legal team swiftly took action, Lee said. On Wednesday, after its legal team had sent Mandal two emails, Lee said the team assumed he had voluntarily taken down the site, which appeared to be down. “It was actually because there were way too many people on it,” Lee said, noting that there was a pop-up on the homepage Thursday morning claiming the site had seen more than 200,000 unique visitors.
Corgi has captured new attention online in the past month, thanks in part to a handful of its marketers who post frequently about the company’s lighthearted and sometimes absurd stunts to their tens of thousands followers. Most of these marketers are women. Lee said this led some people to believe that the company itself was behind the website, which she emphasized was not the case.
“There are people I haven’t talked to in years texting me about it, like, ‘Is this a marketing tactic from your team?’ But why would it be a marketing tactic from my team? It actually damages our reputation,” she said.
“Corgi was in no way, shape, or form involved in the creation, operation, or publication of the website,” the company said in a statement. “We take the protection of our employees seriously. We will not tolerate anyone using our employees’ names, images, or identities to target, harass, embarrass, or exploit them. We fought to get the website taken down, and it has now been removed.”
Lee said no one at Corgi has any relationship to Mandal. Mandal did not respond to Gazetteer’s request for comment.