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 successful project. It doesn't matter if it happened yesterday or 10 years ago. It doesn't matter whether they had a little to do with it or a lot. It doesn't matter if they understand how to code or not. Once they have that reputation as being awesome it will stick around no matter how badly they perform after their initial success.
What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?
Just my two cents. I'm probably alone with this opinion, but it's extremely frustrating to see this stuff happen over and over again.
To quote pg: "A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make, is extraordinarily powerful."
As a developer, it is frustrating to see fellow developers place too much importance on being able to code as a necessary ingredient for startup success.
As a hacker, I'd say that most hackers know how to make, but don't know what to make. That is to say, most startups from these type of hackers with the "if I build they will come"[1] mentality end up basically degenerating into non-profits or open-source (when their intent was to become the next big for-profit company).
To my fellow hardcore hackers. Please get over yourself and learn some non-technical skills: sales, marketing, design, product UI/UX, biz dev, getting distribution, negotiation skills, heck - some people skills! (this comment not withstanding since I'm frustrated with the comment above).
If you're going to look down on people who can't code, you should get out of your own comfort zone and do all those non-technical things I've just listed above first. Kevin Rose has a rolodex, which I'm sure has benefits to whatever his entrepreneurial venture is. You don't? Why not? Learn how to hustle.
Just because you can't code, doesn't mean you can't build a business - and vice versa - just because you can code, doesn't mean you can build a business.
I think you've entirely missed his point. Note that he says: "It doesn't matter if they understand how to code or not."
His main point? "Once they have that reputation as being awesome it will stick around no matter how badly they perform after their initial success"
And I totally agree. In fact, after a success the odds are more in your favor. So if you can't succeed again, it calls into question your 'true' level of talent.
There's actually a good reason that you get credit for a long time and that is successes are so rare and valuable that you deserve credit for a long time.
The vast majority of these silicon-valley companies are built with investors' money (typically from Venture Capital firms). The VC business model generates outsized returns on a few successful companies which pay for all the failures. Careers and entire funds can swing to success based on the outcome of one company so if you're a founder you deserve that credit. It also means you've returned tons of extra money to investors that pays for all your subsequent losses.
Kevin Rose specifically is an interesting case because Digg was not a success for his investors, but her personally did well.
So wait, the "good reason" he gets credit is for not doing the thing that causes people to give people like him credit?
To me, this all sounds like the Fundamental Attribution Error. Kevin Rose is thought to have some special talent, when really all he did was get lucky, and really, not even lucky enough to get his investors paid. His subsequent failures would seem to support this.
However, we must have our stars and Time coverboys. I would say that the reason he keeps getting biz is directly related to his fame, and not so much his business acumen or skills. Call it Calcanis Syndrome.
Did Oink fail because of product, or market? If it's product, being technical will help, if it's market, being technical won't help. (edit: to add, the product worked - so it likely wasn't a problem with the product.)
Which is what I'm guessing as well. Since it's not a product-issue, Kevin's not-coding didn't hurt. Which was the point I was trying to get at. Even if he could code, that wouldn't help solve the market-fit problem.
Sometimes there may be obstacles to what you propose. Being good at networking etc. is basically a performance skill that doesn't just depend on mindset, but also on good looks, race/culture, age, sex, general likability or other external factors. This is not mentioned often, and I might be wrong but I think it is a factor, despite the fact that the startup world presents itself as the ultimate meritocracy.
I don't think 'good looks' matter as much as 'clean looks'.
Shave. Shower. Get a haircut. Despite the 'hoodie chic' look, make sure it's a clean hoodie. Or better yet, wear something nicer. (no, not a suit, but a step up from a hoodie will help people take you seriously).
As far as general likeability goes, usually that stems from people either complaining or saying offense things.
People's natural tendency to associate good looks with intelligence, etc. has been documented (IIRC), but I completely disagree that it cannot be overcome if YOU decide you will "fix" it.
Not attacking you personally - but anybody, .. anybody at all who gives me that response are basically chickening out. Consider this the opposite problem of "business guy don't want to even learn how to code, give all sorts of reasons". Technical guy don't want to learn how to hustle, give all sorts of reasons. Again, Sean Stephenson.
Yeah this is not meant to be an excuse at all. But it used to be that code/innovation mattered more than words, PR etc. Certainly the oldest tech companies were of the "build it and they will come" type. If nowadays who you hang around with matters so much, does that mean that information tech has somehow already peaked?
Customers don't care about your cool technology, they pay you to solve a real problem they have. That has always been the case. If you see a successful company with cool technology, it's because it ALSO solved a real pain the customer had. There's plenty of startups doing "cool stuff" but it doesn't solve a problem, and therefore it doesn't go anywhere.
So I'd reframe the question: it's more about solving real problems. If you can solve it with cool new innovation/code, great. I assume the goal we're talking about here is to build a for-profit business.
Well yeah, look at all the hot startups out there. Except for a few orgs at the extreme high end of tech, a YC style startup is a marketing project with basic IT. Dropbox and a couple others might be an exception.
I was at an academic conference earlier this month, and several of the speakers made affectionate jokes about one of the speakers - how he couldn't shut up, how he was impossibly argumentative, how he was terribly rude, and basically how he was a bit of a troll. And they were right, he was all those things, plus he looked a bit like a frog. Imagine a short frog with glasses, a thick Noo Yawk accent, and the social graces of a falling brick.
And yet he was such a persuasive and entertaining speaker than even when I thought he was dead wrong I wanted to hear more and find common ground with him. I liked him even when he was being an ass, and even in cases where I knew he was wrong (eg when he deliberately skipped over some significant issue because it undermined the argument he was making).
The things you mention help, but are by no means essential. You don't even need to believe in yourself, as long as you believe sufficiently in your idea.
I agree with you: "Just because you can't code, doesn't mean you can't build a business - and vice versa - just because you can code, doesn't mean you can build a business."
I have worked for start-ups where people told me what to do, and also have my own bootstrapped start-up. I prefer the later. I think it is important to be well rounded in abilities from coding to business development. That way, you can see through people's bullshit a lot easier, and there is plenty of that going around in the industry.
Having said that, you can be an ideas person, but those ideas better be successful more times than not. Success five years ago and failures at every turn since does not exactly invoke confidence.
This is a hits driven business. How many people do you see with a string of successes and zero failures? Kevin has had a few ventures, with varying degree of "success", which is more than most people can say. Consider the statistically typical case: it's complete failure and lost of time, money, and sweat. If you even break even, you're already way above average. So having even just a series of small wins is a big deal (not saying that Kevin's "win" was small - I have no inside info)
One of the reasons why companies do not offer relocation is that if person can be lured to move into Bay Area then the same person can be lured to move out of Bay Area.
I'm sorry but that can't possibly be the reasoning. They don't offer relocation because there are so many developers in that area anyway and startups are notoriously tight on their budgets (justified or not) so would rather not spend the money.
Being fairly new to the US, yet a long time developer, I attempted to get work out west (I'm east coast right now) but no-one in the bay area would pay to relocate it seemed so I guess I'll be staying here for a while!
Here's an idea from a non-idea-guy: do for those of us who have no clue how to approach your list of non-technical skills what Codecademy has done for those with no idea how to approach programming. Start us slow, treat us like we know nothing, but give us the chance to prove otherwise. Allow us to work on our own time, and charge us orders of magnitude less than an MBA costs. I would pay for that.
Probably not doable. Not good at this stuff myself, but at core it seems to be driven by recognition of emotional states and making emotionally intelligent responses. This sort of thing isn't beyond learning -- disciplines like art, music, sports develop the core skills, and we can all become more self-aware. But it doesn't lend itself verbally stated principles.
Obviously it can't look much like Codecademy and perhaps it is not about verbally stated principles. Maybe the bigger question is: how does the progress that has been made by people using technology to reduce the financial and social barriers to learning technical material translate to learning "softer" material? If we want to eventually live in a world where the university in its current form has been superseded (and I do), someone needs to answer that question. It sounds hard and uncertain but very valuable if successful - a winning combination if you ask me.
I am certain a world full of autodidacts would supersed the university system we see today. For these autodidacts the universe might truly become a "University of Life". I am also certain that the true barriers keeping most people from becoming autodidacts are not financial or social but rather built by the schooling system into our minds. This schooling system itself was probably setup to create obedient soldiers and weapons technicians so as to win wars. Can someone please queue Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall" [1]?
That barriers are "built by the schooling system into our minds" is exactly what I meant by my "social barriers". Sorry for not being clearer, we agree on that point. I still think there are very real financial barriers to education, perhaps not for the true autodidacts who can learn everything from a book, but for everyone else who requires some structured instruction.
Not one person is born with the skills listed. They are all learned through experience - Same as programming. If anyone has learned anything valuable from hearing "verbally stated principles" please send me a link to that podcast! However verbally stated instructions on how to pass through a specific educational experience are more likely helpful to the learning process.
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
Nothing you say is wrong, but neither is any of it an argument against instruction. It is incredibly helpful to hear and forget before you see and remember before you do and understand.
well said, and even they have some guys w/o titles, just to organize and filter employees' ideas, but still.. (of course if they are still working at google)
"if I build they will come"[1] mentality end up basically degenerating into non-profits or open-source (when their intent was to become the next big for-profit company).
I get your point and mostly agree, but just want to stress that "open source" and "for profit" are not mutually exclusive. There are a handful of companies out there making a nice profit specifically by focusing on open source.
That said, clearly it (building an "open source company") should be a conscious decision, and you have to understand the subtleties that go along with it.
In fact, I'd say you should do more. Stop being a programmer. It's hard to get a job as a developer these days, and it'll all be outsourced to India and China soon anyway. Instead, you should go into sales and marketing.
* It's hard to get a job as a developer these days*
...uh, where exactly? Everywhere I know of is crying out for developers. The case for outsourcing is hugely overstated- having your entire development team half the world and a seven hour time difference away is a very real issue.
Everyone claims to be crying out for developers, but they reject all the candidates they're presented with, so in practice it's hard to get a job as a developer.
I'd actually like to back him up on this, at least partially. There is an outcry for developers in the Bay Area, but mostly just in the Bay Area and mostly just for web/mobile developers. The shortage is hyper-specialized, and thus so are the job requirements, thus excluding most of us who call ourselves developers.
Hm, well I'd say that if you are any other kind of developer looking for a job, it's really not that difficult to transition into web development. If it isn't what you want to do then that's fair enough, but it's where the market is.
If you're actually a good developer (and easy person to get along with, not a serial murderer, etc) and in the bay area and can't find a programming gig... I don't know what you're doing wrong.
I'm not the best developer in the world, and I practically get offers in just going to bars in SF...
Can you please provide some advice on how to transition from my dead-end career as a programmer into a lucrative and fulfilling future in sales or marketing?
How do you think I became a programmer in the first place? I left marketing and hustled to become a programmer. I'm sorry you've shaved your beard or lost your passion or can't find a job. That's not the story for me. Hard work has taken me good places, and continues to do so.
Hope you don't spend the rest of your life either trolling or being a miserable wretch shitting on successful people. :)
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.
He had an idea and spent years working on it, iterating and improving until Digg finally hit the big time
Um he had an idea, paid someone to build it (ojbyrne on HN). Promoted it on air in his role at TechTV and had it take off.
Its not like he toiled in his basement for years slaving over it. (Though he did seem to spend a lot of time on it once it became his day job, I don't want to discredit that)
You can also say that the Digg 4.0 was his "idea" and its what effectively buried Digg and started the mass exodus to Reddit (which is now very true to the original digg).
Um he had an idea, paid someone to build it (ojbyrne on HN). Promoted it on air in his role at TechTV and had it take off.
Right, so he made it a success.
I just find it disheartening sometimes that developers (and I am one) seem to think that good code is all that matters. It isn't. You can have the most functional, highly-tuned web site in the world and have no-one use it.
Even if Kevin Rose is nothing but a giant hype machine then he deserves credit for being a giant hype machine. Digg would have failed if he wasn't.
developers are a dime a dozen. I can hire ten people from India or China who are better than you (xpose2000).
most developers hate successful people who don't have technical skills (Steve Jobs, MBAs, managers, non-technical founders, etc.) because they make the developers look a lot less important.
Most people from any profession would dislike anybody who thinks they are "dime a dozen" or "replaceable by ten people from India or China". Won't you? But disliking someone (like you) because they don't appreciate the profession is different from hating successful people.
As a developer who also has an MBA (and who's originally from India), I never understand why most MBA students at my school undermined developers so much ("Just hire ten people from India"). On the other hand, I also don't understand why many developers undermine domain experts and businessmen as "MBA types" or "ideas people".
It should be very easy to understand (for anybody who is smart enough to be a developer or to get an MBA) that the level of expertise you need from a software developer or a sales person or a finance person or a product person depends on your specific case. Not every business can be built by outsourcing all development to India. And not every business can be built (or be successful) without the help of a great domain expert / sales person / product person.
Looks like your post is getting a mixed reaction. I think you're both right and wrong.
You can outsource to a lot of cheap, technically talented developers (you can also very easily end up with awful developers, though). But they won't think on their feet or be able to make independent decisions- they are contractors, and they will make exactly what you tell them to.
If you're technically minded yourself that might be fine- you can give very specific, down to the pixel instructions. But if you're an "ideas guy" you're not going to have any answer when feature X is not technically possible, and the contractors aren't going to help you.
execution is not limited to personal skills. if the "ideas guy" doesn't have the skills to implement his ideas, he can hire/partner with someone who can.
Right on. I went to a hackathon as a facilitator/judge type. There were 3 idea guys for every dev. The devs centered on some good ideas or brought their own. There were several idea guys that left feeling like their billion dollar idea was just missing a code monkey cog to slide into the code monkey cog slot to make it happen.
One of them had come up with oink aka foursquare aka yelp aka gowolla ...
Not sure I see your point - one of those thousands of developers out there can partner with or hire one of those thousands of him out there as well. There are lots of people who can program and lots of people who have ideas, and not so many people who can work together to technically execute ideas into profitable technology. Which is kind of the point the people you have been arguing with have been trying to make.
> Ideas yes. GREAT ideas? rare. Great ideas + execution? rarer.
Beatle, I think the problem is with defining what "great idea" is. looking back today at "ideas" from couple years ago websites like youtube or even myspace would look like "illegal, won't touch it" and "oh, who would have time to build groups of friends and post stupid status updates". as we both know, both were/are worth alot in a terms of $.
Take example of Pinterest and read recent article with the founder -- even he wasn't sure about his idea at first. First 8 months there was no growth so you can easily say it was a "poor idea". I am pretty sure today he knows it was a great idea, but just because stats behind it that proves it.
There was a plenty of "good ideas" that didn't take off -- not because there were not great, but either market wasn't ready or internet userbase not mature enough or investors fighting over money, who knows? The bottom line, as much as your comment sounds smart, I think you are 100% wrong.
speaking as an American engineer who has had to deal with a lot of code produced by "cheap" Indian and Chinese programmers, I can't help but laugh at the naivete of this perspective. You tend to get what you pay for in a global market where the price is efficient.
Also in my experience ideas and idea people are a dime a dozen. I have notebooks full of hundred ideas I don't have the time, energy or money to execute on. Talent (and availability and interest, etc) is hard to find. That's the bottleneck.
> You tend to get what you pay for in a global market where the price is efficient.
I agree that the proposition is naive. That said, the global market for programmers' salaries (or contractor's rates) is most definitely not efficient.
Developers are unimportant. I'd rather hire bad developers than good ones as long as they're cheap; product quality rarely matters if you have the right market fit.
Sounds like unnecessary nickle-and-diming. In my experience, good devs don't cost astronomically more than their mediocre counterparts.
While it's true that you don't need to re-implement MongoDB in Clojure to create a successful product, it's not like product quality doesn't matter. Unreliable performance could certainly cost you clients - especially in the enterprise world. Why risk it just to save a few $k?
Twitter went down all the time and yet stomped all over its competitors, all of whom had far better uptime. Digg was outsourced for rock bottom prices. Facebook and WordPress are mountains of PHP code.
The reason those educational software products aren't selling has nothing to do with the fact that they were offshored and everything to do with poor market fit or marketing, I guarantee you.
He didn't start promoting it on air at techtv, he started promoting it on TWiT, Leo Laporte's podcast that was started after the screen savers was more-or-less cancelled.
>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.
I don't think anyone has argued against this. He does deserve credit for this.
The problem is that he has been given too much credit. I.E. that there were far more ideas of the same caliber. I am sure this must have been tough on him, to fail at producing again like the early digg iteration.
I see the evolution of the social content site to be:
Slashdot --> Digg --> Reddit.
Each a stepping stone for the next. And I do not think this is about THE CONTENT -- I think this is about the UX you provide the users, and the control over that UX you leave to the users.
Digg evolved /.'s model. Reddit evolved Digg's.
Reddit has provided a UX which allows for a VERY fluid and quick experience with the content, given FULL control to the users on what content they see, how it is categorized, modded etc.
Kevin took money from ivestors for his own little think tank - that money was largely given to him by charismatic reputation alone.
Now, after a very short period, he isn't even pivoting, or "shooting this idea in the head to work on others" -- he is abandoning the whole freaking endeavor and taking (unknown) position in struggling social company, Google.
This doesn't leave a good taste in anyone's mouth (Sour Milk? (Sorry)) because being given $1.7MM which he gets to walk away from is a slap in the face to the people who work their asses off on good ideas and don't get any of the valley coddling as Kevin.
This is the wrong storyline. Reddit didn't evolve from Digg.
They started around the same timeframe and it was as much Mac/PC in terms of fanboyishness. Reddit won because of the power of subreddits and capturing the long tail for content and communities.
What's out of touch with your story is that Digg users thought Reddit's UX was horrifying and avoided it like the plague. Even to this day without enhancement suites I wouldn't crown Reddit to be the pinnacle of UX. It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac.
Finally, this jaded bitterness that Kevin Rose got $1.7MM to piss away...
If you were worth getting $1.7MM to piss away you would have had $1.7MM to piss away.
I was not trying to imply reddit evolved FROM digg. (I have been using all three sites since their inception - starting with /. in 1997, I am familiar with their history).
I am saying the IDEA of social content sites evolved from one, to the next, to the next.
As I mentioned, it is not about UI, or content, it was about UX!
The UX that digg had, especially in V4 wrapped too much UI around the content resulting in a poor UX!
Reddit, while seemingly ugly - allowed for far faster and more fluid consumption of the content. It also left more control over what content users wanted.
>It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac
I think you're putting too much weight on the shiny.
I think anyone would agree that the speed and agility one gets on a CLI (linux) vs any GUI when you're a savvy user is incomparable.
Finally, I am not jaded/bitter because Kevin Rose got 1.7MM -- I am jaded bitter that anyone would get 1.7MM and so nonchalantly walk away from it AFTER making the types of comments he did.
I think I just have a different perspective than you, I also think you believe I am focusing on things which I am not. :)
> If you were worth getting $1.7MM to piss away you would have had $1.7MM to piss away.
So you are implying that a luck and contacts and more other things such as your experience, geolocation, etc. don't matter as long as you are worth getting $X, you will have $X to piss away.
uhm, is there any website to sign up? I want to try my skills against it -- perhaps I am "worth it".
And that everybody earns every penny that they really should. Nobody's ever born the wrong color or gender or nationality, or ever has bad luck that prevents them from fulfilling their potential.
But he got to plug it on ScreenSavers because he worked his way up from being the IT guy on the show to cameo appearances onscreen to actually having his own show. Major props on the hustle there.
He also wrote some of the code for the first iterations of Digg himself, so its not like he didn't do any coding originally. He just passed in on to more skilled people once the requirements were out of his league.
There's a distinction to be made between "idea guys" and "product people". You're criticizing "idea guys", while it seems that Kevin Rose might be more of a product person.
The "idea guy" is the guy who comes to a developer and start with "I've got this great idea for an app…", thinks it's genius but never dives down to all the details of said-app.
A product person might or might not know how to code but s/he will(/should) be able to articulate exactly what the product should do or not, how things should work together, etc. It's common for developers to think they don't need anybody to make a good product but a great product person will make a difference.
It doesn't matter if they understand how to code or not.
Indeed. That's not their role. Understanding how to code does not a good product make. There are tons of examples of that.
However, you have a point about the industry giving a pass to people with previous successful project(s). But probably with good reason: overall there aren't that many very successful projects, so if you had one, it's still much better than a lot of people.
This is where I sit on Kevin Rose. He's mostly a product guy, and he brings past success and a big 'test-market' following to ANY product he touches.
I'm hard-pressed to discredit someone who got Digg the attention it got, then maintained and built a personal following that he unquestionably influences, and THEN spearheaded a product that you may not love but did get 150k users and was damn beautiful to boot.
I'm not a fanboy, but Kevin Rose is on a short list of people who can really fuel a product and it doesn't require technical knowledge or even 'having the idea' for that to be valuable.
Salesforce's CEO, Benioff, is the classic idea guy. He kept a few coders in a dank apartment grinding on salesforce, then rode it to billions. Of course, he's a great salesman and made it big.
For the record, and this is just a matter of semantics and word play, but some people use the titles "idea guy" and "product guy" interchangeably. Some very good product visionary types even label themselves "idea guy".
I agree that knowing how to code is not utmost necessary. But don't you think it's highly important and, at least,very close to necessary? An idea/product guy will never come up with a solution he didn't know was technically viable. So his pool of solutions is more limited than that of a hacker. He'll also waste time overthinking ideas that are not technically viable. So he's not as efficient.
You don't need both legs to run a marathon. But it's so important to have them both. That it's no coincidence that every great runner has them both.
Yes, but to some extent only. (and typically the "idea guys" don't have a clue of the technical reality behind their "genius" idea)
To me, there's actually a difference between knowing how to code and knowing the technology. You can know how things work and what's technically possible without really knowing how to code it.
But this goes both ways too: developers don't necessarily have a good product sense, and without knowing about interaction and design patterns for example, or know what the current product landscape looks like, they would also be limited in their implementations. My comment above was mostly to contradict comments like the parent, that are fairly common: hackers can do it all, knowing how to code is the most important thing. Coding is not important. Knowing what can be coded is.
1) "Ideas" types do well at Google, they reward people for starting new things, not so much finishing things.
2) "it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous successful project." - works both ways, people also get tarred with one unsuccessful project. And like success depending on how hard the fail was it can be an influence on the rest of your career.
3) "What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?" - this guy has 'model googler' written all over him. Seriously. Lots of ideas, lots of ways to use existing technology tied together in fun ways. If the guy can convince two or three developers at Google to help him bring an idea to fruition he'll do well.
People also get tarred with one unsuccessful project.
This doesn't actually seem to be the case. The startup space is littered with ex-CEO's who can still raise capital. These folks are seen as battle hardened. I think all of the Color guys are going to end up fine despite that debacle.
Good point, but there are flavors of fail. There is the 'you reached to high and fell off the ladder' flavors which are generally seen as a good thing, and then there is the 'selling bungee harnesses to teenagers' flavor where people say "What exactly were you thinking would happen?"
I tried to help Ed Patterman build a Golf magazine on the web in '95 it failed because it was too early. Sony tried to create an e-reader where they charged money to put out of copyright works in PDF on to it for you to read. It failed because it was a stupid idea.
Alexis Ohanian isn't a developer, but he's one of the names behind reddit and hipmunk. I don't think anyone would argue he hasn't had a big role in either company's success. Clearly you can be a non-developer founder without being that "ideas guy".
Kevin Rose worked his way up from being a behind the scenes IT guy to doing cameos to running the Screen Savers to founding Digg[1]. Is he a coder? No, but he's at least technical enough to find and recruit pretty good engineering talent. Moreover, he's also had strong angel investments and shown an ability to do it again with Oink (a solid product with good reviews on the App Store).
As a developer, I hate these kinds of people because more
often than not their ideas suck.
But Digg obviously did not suck as an idea. It did not achieve world domination, but it was pretty damn popular as a site for a while and the category (as exemplified by Reddit and even the Like Button) is still strong.
There are people out there to hate on, but Kevin Rose is not one of them. He would be a great product manager at Google.
I'd go one step further: don't hate. It's a negative feeling emotion that will do yourself more harm in the long run :) Be happy for people's success. Would you want people to hate you when you succeed?
What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?
Actually, product people with experience about trendy consumerish topics is what Google needs. Too many engineers, not enough touchy-feely people there.
That being said, based on his recent changes in directions, it doesn't sound like a long-term fit just yet. Time will tell.
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.
This is true but Google has always been an engineering-led organization as opposed to a product-led one. Social networking is less of an engineering problem than it is a product problem. This is true for other social products as well.
Fundamentally, Google is taking the wrong approach. Listen to how Vic Gundotra talks about Google+ as opposed to how Zuckerberg talks about Facebook.
This may be a step in the right direction but it will mean more than just hiring idea people. Those people need to have real power in the org if they are going to make a difference.
It's more likely that Kevin Rose will end up like Dennis Crowley. He'll try his hand at Google, will realize that he can't make much of a difference given his position and leave in a few years to scratch that itch at another startup.
I think you've deluded yourself into thinking you can read minds. Vic knows better then you or any of us exactly how much G+ is getting it's ass handed to it and not just by FB.
The other thing he's done well is engage his audience. If he can help Google+ become more engaging, more 'sticky', then he'll have done great. That's assuming he'll be working on that product.
However, the Digg redesign was prematurely deployed because the old code could simply no longer handle the load. At least that was the story. Who knows what it could have been if it were released on the intended schedule.
What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?
Knowledge of how things fail, as much as how they are started. He's not just an ideas person, he's also a signing-the-checks person and a making-the-deals person and a catching-the-flak person. In short, a business guy.
I have never liked or used Digg so I'm not carrying any water for him. But I've had that 'I do all the work and he gets all the credit' feeling, only to realize that the difference was that I had taken a job rather than starting a business. Code is just a means to an end. Sure, architecture and good code are important, but they're important so that users don't have to care what's making it work. When I walk into a store, my life is in the hands of the architects and laborers who built the structure; and having worked in construction, I can tell you that they did a hell of a lot of hard work. However, that's incidental to my purpose in entering the store, and I don't hold it against the store owner that he didn't personally build any of the structure his business operates in.
FWIW Diggnation could be considered a second, successful, project. I consider it fairly independent of Digg, as either of them could really have operated independently.
I'm not sure how successful they are financially but just based on the fact that they're still around with many many shows going, I'd guess they're doing just fine.
To be fair in October of 2004 Rose interviewed Rob 'cmdrtaco' Malda and one of the questions included what Rob would have done differently with slashdot if he were to do it today. Digg appeared in December following that interview. You could argue that Rose paid someone to implement Rob's idea.
Shipping ideas is hard and is a multi phased process in which technical building is only a small portion. Finding an audience, not f'ing up your product once adopted, growing your team and letting the experts do their job without hopping in to meddle is just as difficult to do. I am not the biggest fan of how Oink was handled, but this guy clearly creates and understands leverage and in 9/10 cases that is more valuable than the perfect technical product.
Why do these people become stars? Economics suggests it's because they're already proven to some degree; eg. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/04/why-not-superstar-slav... summarizes a Tervio article predicting superstardom when the following conditions are met:
Desired abilities are rare and lasting.
It is very expensive to try someone new.
Everyone can see which trials worked or not.
Winners are free to demand more money or walk.
#1 is arguable whether it's true, but people seem to think it's true - any endeavour by someone like Rose comes with built-in interest & buzz. Why? Personal affection? No, because people think it's better than a random newly launched project. #2 is fairly true - how do you test someone on whether they can build a successful Facebook clone or innovate on it with less than thousands of dollars of their time and other resources (at a minimum)? #3 is pretty true, especially for web communities. #4 is very true; as Hacker News people love pointing out, it's a free country.
I agree. I hope this isn't the start of those weird campaigns where an organisation start picking up recognizable names rather than deal with fundamental failures. Google of course is no failure but it seems like I roll my eyes at Google decisions more than ever before.
Like you I have no clue what this guy brings to a company as big as Google and their products.
You would understand what he brings to the table if you had any idea how difficult it is to create "one previous successful project" on the scale of Digg. Kevin has demonstrated an ability to create something with a huge following from nothing, which is a skill set that your average Google developer does not have.
It's really tough to hit two home runs in the entrepreneurial game, but one home run is really all you need to get investors to think you will come up with another success. Kevin may be an "idea guy" but he is also a "product guy" and I think this will be his role within Google. Google's main mobile app is terrible so maybe they think he can help with this product. I personally wish Google would go back to their roots and build a simple mobile app that just has a search box.
He has the skill to assemble and lead/manage a group of quality engineers & designers. He connects people. People who want to program it, who want to invest in it and users who want to use it. His ideas might not be that great (or better put, fitting) these days but that doesn't make him less useful. He's also a thought leader and someone people look up to. He's a great asset to any company really.
Not constructive at all. As far as I can tell, Kevin Rose struck gold at building a company through his efforts. As a hacker, you may value hiring developers, promotion, etc. at zero, but Digg's users do not. I'm willing to bet many HN readers could learn something useful from Kevin Rose, no matter what his formal or informal training.
I agree on people seen as successful based on one prior successful project. I have seen it playing out a few times before. It didn't matter what the circumstances were (e.g. mostly luck) or how the story was spinned, once you can place a successful exit under your name, VC's seem to fall head over heels for you.
"What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?"
He makes insecure high level corporate types look successful. The guy who didn't hire a famous guy this year is going to get fired. Fame is a useful product to some people.
But isn't this like hating on the architect because he didn't actually build the beautiful building by hand? You still like the building and give the architect credit for it, not the builder(s).
Kevin is an successful angel investor and an influencer in the techs space. Not to mention that every company that he has worked with have nothing but good things to say about him.
Google currently employees more than 20,000 people. I'm sure at this point they have plenty of engineers. A couple guys with some sense of design will not hurt the bottom line but have huge potential to add some much needed polish to Google's social initiatives.
A web developer does not outsource his pet project to someone else to code. He did not do any development on his projects. I've heard him talk about coding and he openly admits that he's been out of it for so long that he is no longer qualified on the subject.
Developing makes you a developer. I did a lot of math during my degree, but I never use it, and would in no way consider myself a mathematician because I've lost most of it.
Anyway, I quite like Kevin Rose from what I've seen. You need all types in the industry, not just technical people.
I don't get the KR bashing. Kevin is both a product and content guy. From TechTV (where he went from a tech support guy to a TV show host) to revision3, Diggnation, Foundation, Random. This guy is always creating content, very much like a hacker. He built the first prototype for Digg. This is the type of guy HN/Startup school aspires to produce.
Lets see what could he bring to google??
He studied computer science and university and has spent basically his whole life working in the tech industry. Oink had 150,000 downloads in a month. He's probably one of the most influential people in the tech industry and he obviously knows social (which google struggles with). Plus he had an awesome team thats going with him to google. Some of the best designers and DEVELOPERS that he (again one of the most influential people in the tech industry) could get to work for him.
Thats just off the top of my head.
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.
He is going to "work on others' ideas" -- i.e. Ideas that are not his own.
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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 channels.
Unless KRose can pull a magical pivot on his own visioning abilities - this would be bad.
However, I will send good thoughts his way. Let's hope we see him do something truly revolutionary to + (if that is what he is going there for) and lets hope he follows the mantra of the new Reddit CEO: "Don't Fuck It Up'
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.
Don't expect the trend to stop, just the other day were several HN threads regarding Y Combinator accepting people without ideas. You don't even need a track record anymore, if you can create a viral video on techcrunch to show what a hustler you are somebody will probably throw some money at you.
It's like VCs watched the movie Moneyball (or read the book) and are applying what they saw to the VC world... but in reverse.
Wasn't Rose the main guy who pushed Digg over the cliff and over to Reddit with the famed v4 disaster?
Don't get me wrong, the guy did great work getting Digg to where it was, but if he was behind Digg v4 he killed it within a matter of days over a decision that no one wanted, and that puts him in a worrying position at Google if he is to work on the social aspects of the company.
Didn't he also tank publicly with Pownce? Again a service with functionality that no one really wanted, that turned up at the wrong time and was eaten alive by the likes of Twitter.
In many ways these high profile failures could be a great thing for him and Google, because the best lessons comes from those who have been there and lost it all. His acquisition could stop Google from its own "v4" moment.
"Rose has also had an impressive run as an angel investor, putting money into companies like Fab, Zynga, ngmoco, Foursquare and Twitter."
Does anyone know if Rose was one of the first few to actually invest in these companies, or did he just have the connections and put his money in while they were already "hot" companies? If the latter, I wouldn't consider it that impressive...
Details in CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/kevin-rose Fab (Series A), Zynga (Series B), Twitter (Series B), Foursquare (Angel). Only Foursquare looks like an Angel, the rest look more like he knows the right people and/or has the right name.
You do realize that all of those companies grew immensely after their Series A/B rounds of funding, right?
Regardless of what I think of the guy, there is a lot of hate on here, and it's easy to look back and say "well of course Twitter did well, he's so lucky he got to invest in it in '08" as if it was common knowledge that it would be this big.
Sure. My view is that Rose has done a very good job of making a name for himself and translating that into personal wealth. It is not clear that that adds anything to Google and if Google thinks it does then my view of Google is diminished.
I see what you mean. I guess it will all depend on what kind of role he will have at Google. If he's going to be appointed "VP of Next Cool Ideas", I think you are absolutely right.
I'm sorry if the question is naive, but if he made such a great amount of personal wealth, why would he still want/need to "get a job" (regardless of company)?
Because money is not everything. Once you have reached financial security like he did, you start yearning for other things like power or a legacy. He still has a long way to go to achieve all those things. If he "retires" now, before long, the name Kevin Rose will be forgotten, because there are plenty people in this industry who have achieved his level of wealth and success.
It has a higher probability of success on both accounts, as opposed to getting into a new venture that might discredit whatever personal brand he built up for himself.
Sorry. The way you phrased your question made it seem like you were asking why he would continue working rather than just pissing off somewhere with his money.
There are loads of reasons why someone would rather work for Big Corp. than doing a startup, especially when they've already checked "build a successful company" off their bucket list. I can only speculate, and I don't feel it's right to in what was probably a very personal decision.
Apparently Google thinks Kevin Rose is "The Fonz" and intends to have him jump a tank with a shark in it. At the last minute, Rose decides to found a new company called "Soda" instead. Leaves Google scratching head and previous investors still wondering where their money went. Crowd unhappy because they wanted to see their hero/villain successful/eaten.
Google certainly seems to have a trend lately of spending their huge cash reserve to acquire companies to fix perceived problems or holes they have. This is sound business strategy but to a lot of us involved in software/development/technology, it certainly doesn't seem like a proven winning method.
I think he means that Google is like "Happy Days" at their peak, and hiring Kevin Rose is a desperate attempt to still look cool like the Fonz, but in fact are foreshadowing that their market capitalization will probably now decline.
More of a PR move in that google is trying to get Kevin Rose fans (or whatever you want to call them) in the deal.
If Rose goes into google+ maybe Google wants him as a focus point or part of a public image... these are what I see Kevin Rose as with this but I of course may be wrong.
I don't know however how you got "anyone that hasn't heard of Google has heard of Kevin Rose" from my statement however.
If it's jealousy and hatred, then it's not because of being jealous of success. A lot of developers work really, really hard on their startups for years bootstrapping, just scraping by, and being ignored by investors because they're not famous. And Kevin Rose comes along with a half-baked idea of posting pictures of the food you're eating to the Internet, and his "startup" that he's "really dedicated to" get's almost a couple million just dropped in his lap for no reason and year later just whimsically quits and gets a job at Google with no real engineering skills or anything tangible to bring to the company other than stories of what actual developers produced at Digg.
That half-baked idea got hundreds of thousands of users in 3 months. That is success.
Just because your definition of skills is limited to writing code does not mean having connections, being good at marketing, PR or selling has no value. It's exactly the same mentality we developers hate when idea-men want to hire us as code-monkeys to implement their perfect vision.
Reading stories on tech blogs does not mean you know how much hard work someone put into their whimsical-seeming startup. Being a celebrity certainly does not automatically imply you don't have to work hard.
And just working really really hard also does not entitle you to success. Life is unfair. Get used to it.
That's exactly the issue, Kevin Rose is getting dollars for shuttering an unsuccessful web service. Why does Kevin Rose get to cash out for being a failure, simply because his name is Kevin Rose, while all the hardworking nobody engineers slave away to build successful companies without any help or millions of dollars splashing down on them for their supposed greatness which is unsupported by evidence?
You're implying that Kevin Rose is like an NBA superstar, but his startup didn't earn a single penny and got shuttered. How is that anything like a basketball star who throws the ball in a hoop well?
NBA superstars don't get paid purely for skill, they get paid for because they bring in crowds of people and sell merchandise. That's where the money comes from.
Acquisitions are not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, go into a business where what goes on is more like a meritocracy.
I would be surprised if it would have got many users if it hadn't got the press it did and have the Kevin Rose name attached. Of course anyone who has this power to market is going to take full advantage of it, you would be stupid not to.
What it does though is translate into a lot of people giving the app a try, that marketing isn't going to have people continue to use something if it isn't any good. Obviously it wasn't good enough to hold peoples attention, user retention or engagement must have been bad for them to shut it down.
half-baked idea got hundreds of thousands of users... That is success.
No it isn't. Success is earning money and staying in business. Oink earned zero dollars and failed, so how does did this failure translate into success for Kevin Rose? Was Oink just something to add to his resume? I don't get it.
A lot of developers work really, really hard on their
startups for years bootstrapping, just scraping by, and
being ignored by investors because they're not famous.
Their startups have no users and they are just scraping by because they are terrible at marketing, or at knowing what people want. Achieving a low cost-of-customer-acquisition is a real, quantifiable skill.
There are basically zero hot startups that have problems raising money. Getting to "hot" is the hard part, and it is not just making something, but making something people want. Good promotion is just as much of a skill as good UI design.
Yeah well Kevin Rose's startup had a couple hundred thousand users and made $0. So what makes Kevin Rose so amazing that he deserves a bailout, while the rest of the startup world whose name isn't Kevin Rose has to do things the hard way, like grinding it out, or EARNING a job at Google, or starting another startup?
It's funny that you think that "deserve" has anything to do with it. Makes me think of "nice guys" who get passive aggressive when the girl they like doesn't want to go out with them, because they did nice things for her and they "deserve" it. But of course, that's not how it works.
This is the way the game is played. If you don't like it, play another game. Raging against how the rules aren't fair and people aren't getting what they "deserve" just smacks of denial.
I couldn't have said this more perfectly myself. So tired of the B.S. around here with failure being rewarded. The golden parachutes have arrived from the finance and corp. exec. world for the chosen ones sprinkled with pixie dust. How about these "stars" step aside, go do something to make the world a better place now that they've made their money and let someone else succeed. (Looking at you Caterina Fake too)
We don't need more B.S. webapps that let people comment on food, people, or anything else. We're all stocked up.
I think the term everyone here is looking for is "overrated". If you really think he is, stop talking about him and go on with your business. You're giving him the attention that you claim he doesn't deserve.
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"
Well they would still need to have seen the returns they expected (or were happy with) since the money did not come out of the funds just to get "Put back" without any upside. Speculation: 3-4 million payoff Google "we don't need the company just shut it down and come to work"
This feels like a stunt on the part of Google. They have the money to throw around at ideas at the moment; KR seems to be a beneficiary of this. They get to hire a trendy name and hope that they can turn around G+ and other services.
Say what you want but Milk has a tight team that is capable of turning out high quality apps. When you compare this to the $100m+ that (supposedly) offered Path and the $220m+ they paid for Slide then this seems like a steal.
Honestly, they are paying pennies for a team that they KNOW can produce solid product and have the personalities and operating capability to do it in a tougher environment. Adding Kevin's celebrity and understanding of social and marketing is a huge bonus that will help G+.
The allthingsd article specifically says Google is NOT acquiring Milk. They have hired Kevin Rose and a few key members of the Milk team. The techcrunch article says Milk is being acqui-hired, for $15-$30 million. I wonder which is correct.
It's nice to see the investors taken care of, if that's what happened. But it doesn't sound like Milk or Oink will survive past today.
Congrats to Kevin and all who were hired. I still stand by my position that it kinda sucks that they abandoned their customers at the drop of the hat. But at least now it makes some sense.
As his last couple startups (Digg + Milk) have seen fairly bumpy roads of late, I can't blame him for wanting to leave the startup scene in favor of a little stability, courtesy of Google.
It will be interesting to see what role he ends up playing at Google. He's not much of a developer, so I suspect his role will largely be a promotional one.
Either way, I wish him luck with this latest endeavor. Having seen the Digg implosion, followed by the failure of Oink, I hope this third venture proves to be the charm.
I'm simply surprised that Google would do this, but I guess there was a foreshadow in early November when Google Ventures invested.
I don't know what they expect to come of this move, but I'm actually, all else aside, wanting for this Google+ thing to work out. I'm actually still a fan.
As for Kevin Rose, sometimes I listen to him speak and it seems like he's on the ball and has his finger on the pulse, and at other times he just sounds dumb. I was a little bit unsure if he had an in-depth understanding of what was really going on or if he was just sounding the part, but after listening to his webcam pitch and seeing the subpar Digg v4 that came of that line of thinking, I'm going to say he doesn't really understand a thing.
But maybe that doesn't matter, because knowing the Google monster he'll probably be nothing more than a pawn. Time will tell.
On another note, Google+'s problems are reallyreally obvious to me, so I'm at a loss at to why they don't just fix things. Maybe they are trying to "stage the rollout to minimize how much they spook people," but then again what sounds reasonable and true is often reduced to nothing more than another line of politics driven BS'ing with these people.
Just get on with it already!
I have no problem with the Milk team getting an exit. I am not one to be jealous of anything like that. And all this talk about Engineer-entrepreneurs working their ass off for years and not getting anywhere doesn't make me shed a tear either. There are a few Engineers for whom things just didn't work out, but by and large if you were working on something that long and had nothing come of it, then put the hard work aside-- your product/business/positioning sucked! Get over it.
It makes sense the more that I think about it. Rose has said on his podcast and in other interviews that he regrets that Digg raised so much money. They had to focus on revenue instead of building the product. I'm sure he's a little disappointed at Milk's success thus far too.
I guess he's possibly thinking that this will give him the opportunity build a huge product that he's always wanted without having to focus on the business side. If google is funding it, he doesn't have to work on raising money or increasing revenue. He'll also have hundreds of employees that can be thrown at his project.
Tumblr and Twitter have both raised a lot of money and haven't had to focus on revenue. It is more about who your investors are rather than how much you raise.
The 'focus on revenue' part of later Digg is what killed it.
Like I said before[1], what is up with all this Kevin Rose hate? He has a successful portfolio, seems to have a level head, and knows about tech. All this whining about "well I'm a dev and need VC why do they give him to him?" stop thinking you deserve something and get out there and make something; like he has been proven to do time and time again.
If you're not being facetious, depth in this context refers to the overall quality of your staff.
A good example of a lack of depth would be the Indianapolis Colts, who with the loss of Peyton Manning had a dismal, almost winless season.
A good example of a team with a lot of depth would be Ask Ketchum's pokemon. He's got a Charizard, a Butterfree, a Wortortle, a Pidgiotto, and Pikachu. If one of his pokemon gets injured, he has a handful of equally good pokemon suited to other tasks that can fill in.
Good for him! I've been a fan since tech TV days. I think this board is suffering from an overdose of hateraid. Yeah Digg blew up and then sunk, but to be involved in so many sucessful businesses this guy is talented.
Agreed. I met Kevin at a launch party a couple years ago. Upon seeing him, my first thought was "Hey, it's the Dark Tipper!" I prefer to focus on someone's positive traits. The fact that Kevin still works and tries to make a difference is admirable. Even if Digg is his only big hit, that's still an impressive accomlishment.
I detect that you bring this to our attention because it's bad in some way, but I don't get why. Google invested in his company. Now he works at Google (with 30,000 other people). Who cares? Why is this good or bad?
All of you who are saying things in judgement of Kevin Rose's behavior, have some perspective. This is the planet you live on: http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/earth-1.jpg
It has lots of problems, waiting for good solutions. Instead of explaining the nuances of your latest opinion of Kevin Rose, get up, and start fixing things!
An important question is whether Kevin will thrive in Google's environment. I imagine they've promised him quite a bit of autonomy, but what happens when Kevin feels constrained or governed?
Will he succeed on a very personal level when he wakes up knowing that he's earning a salary from Google instead of continuing to create his own? I sincerely hope he does succeed.
Never saw so much jealousy/flaming targeting one person here on HN. I got to say I'm a little disappointed as member of this community.
I'm pretty sure Google didn't hired him just for his pretty eyes or the 'cool' factor. Specially when 99% of these comments don't know jack of what they are saying.
Will be interesting to see of they are all assigned to current efforts like G+ or if they are given some independence and freedom like the slide team. Probably assigned to current efforts as it seemed some slide base efforts in Google were fairly half baked.
Google+ is not cool. It might be a better product then Facebook, but when it comes to social you need a network of people to make a product fly. I see the hiring of Rose as an attempt to give Google+ some street cred and make it cool.
I think Kevin is a smart guy but for some reason he just seems to lack some focus on products and I wonder if going to Google will maybe somehow wack him into place a little? Hmmm
well, there's a lot of big names already working in Google who once owned companies. They probably have more leverage/freedom than the average google employee
Talk about Google scraping the bottom of the barrel.
"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."
Bingo. Unless users fell in lock-step with Kevin Rose's thoughts he'd institute the ban hammer.
I wonder if they are bringing him in, to setup an internal incubator of sorts, now that labs is shut down, perhaps they think its time to do it in some structured form. I know that there was talk of it, sometime back inside the company.
In any case, what I am saying is that it seems like people in the industry get by based on one previous successful project. It doesn't matter if it happened yesterday or 10 years ago. It doesn't matter whether they had a little to do with it or a lot. It doesn't matter if they understand how to code or not. Once they have that reputation as being awesome it will stick around no matter how badly they perform after their initial success.
What could he possibly be bringing to the table with Google?
Just my two cents. I'm probably alone with this opinion, but it's extremely frustrating to see this stuff happen over and over again.
/end rant