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Kevin Rose Will Join Google

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Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#21
post #11

Wow, if Google did not acquire Milk outright I wonder what type of deal was worked out with the investors? There would have to be some type of upside for them otherwise KR's reputation would be seriously tarnished. "Sorry guys, remember that money you gave me to start a company?. Well no more company and I'm off to bigger and better things, K tnx Bye"

I would guess that they just paid off the investors. It was only $1.7m and Google Ventures was one of the investors anyway.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#22
post #5

Huh. It was just yesterday that they shut down Oink to "work on other ideas"- so that was a total lie? Heaven forbid they should just be straightforward about what's going on. As someone who'd love some VC money, it's a little disheartening to see $1.7 million of it thrown around and wasted based on one person's name.

No, you don't understand. He is going to "work on others' ideas" -- i.e. Ideas that are not his own. --- What will be really commical, is if he is going to join google with the intent to work on Google+ -- as if he were some success in the "social" play. Remember, digg failed because it alienated the users, attempted to wrap too much UI around the content; limiting the consumption rate, and pandering to media channel…

Remember, digg failed because it alienated the users, attempted to wrap too much UI around the content; limiting the consumption rate, and pandering to media channels.

To be fair, I think that was after Kevin left his role as CEO.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#26

Sorry if this sounds harsh, and I know he has a lot of fans out there. But this guy struck gold 5 years ago with Digg. Sure, he deserves props for this. However, he's not a developer. He's an "ideas guy" as far as I can tell. As a developer, I hate these kinds of people because more often than not their ideas suck. In any case, what I am saying is that it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous…

I don't want to be some sort of Kevin Rose defender in this thread, but I don't think it's fair to say that he just "had an idea". He had an idea and spent years working on it, iterating and improving until Digg finally hit the big time. I think he deserves credit for that.

As a developer, I agree that some "ideas guys" suck. But some of them are fantastic, and have a huge talent in taking a core concept and fleshing out requirements, objectives and so on. Often we developers are actually really bad at that, and we end up getting distracted by endless refactoring, or bringing down response times, etc. etc.

There is nothing wrong with a mix of the two.

Re: Kevin Rose Will Join Google

#29

Sorry if this sounds harsh, and I know he has a lot of fans out there. But this guy struck gold 5 years ago with Digg. Sure, he deserves props for this. However, he's not a developer. He's an "ideas guy" as far as I can tell. As a developer, I hate these kinds of people because more often than not their ideas suck. In any case, what I am saying is that it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous…

Google doesn't have any engineering problems, that's for sure. They want Google+ to succeed (assuming that's what he'd be involved with), but I think it's fair to say the problems they're struggling with there are at the "idea/design" level as opposed to the actual codebase.

Say what you want about Kevin Rose in terms of things he's created, but he does have a very good eye for great ideas, see early investments in Fab, Path, Zynga, Square, Foursquare, Twitter for evidence of that.

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