The interesting thing about Friendster is that it was recently bought for around $100 million. Not Facebook returns, but not bad.
Looks like less - $26M according to Crunchbase.[1] Far less than the capital it raised. Maybe you mean FriendFeed?
How to Kill a Great Idea
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't you actually read my comment? I said that old people with no achievements aren't going to suddenly become great entrepreneurs. Jimmy Wales - extremely successful options and futures trader Steve Jobs - I forget what company he was involved with before NeXT, but I think it was pretty big Jeff Bezos - one of the top people at D.E. Shaw, right under Shaw himself John McCarthy - programming languages don't real…
Now I know you're trolling. Good day.
How on Earth is that trolling? I completely refuted your argument, and you can't respond so you call it trolling. None of those people were 30-year-old career software engineers who had achieved nothing and dreamed of entrepreneurship. They were all already successful.
And I know Hacker News is mostly that type of person, but you people need a reality check. You can downvote all you want, but it won't change anything. I bet you really wish it could because forums like this are probably all you have left. You're going to wake up tomorrow and do what you're doing. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and do what you dream of doing.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#43Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right…
What are you, 12?
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#44Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right…
That's a pretty sad piece of advice. If you're over 30 and haven't made something of yourself the best thing you can do is realize that time is passing you by and get moving rather than listen to this defeatist crap.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#45Friendster, the first online social network
Factually inaccurate? Friendster was launched in 2002, LiveJournal, for example, in 1999.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#46The interesting thing about Friendster is that it was recently bought for around $100 million. Not Facebook returns, but not bad.
Looks like less - $26M according to Crunchbase.[1] Far less than the capital it raised. Maybe you mean FriendFeed? [1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster
I seem to remember there were a number of news articles reporting the $100 million figure. I'm not privy to any inside information on this so I don't really know the answer. Tech Crunch is probably the most reliable for this kind of information.
A few of the $100 million articles:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-bought-1...
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-caution...
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unk...
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friends...
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#47This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam. So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam…
When your company has no revenue, the "obvious" answer is to sell as hard as you can until your cashflow positive. But it's not going to help unless the product actually works.
This seems to be the gist of the comments here, but I'd like to propose a third requirement: operations.
Ultimately, a business has to become self-sustaining, and that can't happen until the acts of building the product and selling the product become sufficiently well defined that they can be handed over to a professional staff. (See also: E-Myth)