Friendster Cont.
Building more on the what-is-success and what-is-failure thoughts that bounce back and forth in my head, comes this profile of Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster.
The lead in quotes: “Jonathan Abrams created the first online social network and enlisted Silicon Valleys best and brightest to run it. Yet Friendster flamed out spectacularly. What went wrong?”
In the body of the article are assertions like this:
“Friendster–a bold idea backed by experienced investors and the best managers money could buy–was destined for greatness. Instead, it failed spectacularly.”
and
“Indeed, Friendster now has the dubious honor of being the focus of a Harvard Business School case study on how not to manage a tech company.”
Which is bullshit. If you read the case study it is written as a ‘what would you do’ question that details the history of the company’s mistakes and then broaches the options of how to recover.
The trouble with saying Friendster is a ’spectacular failure’ is the niggling fact that the site has millions of users and is growing quite ‘’spectacularly” itself. Just not in the US and not in the same league as MySpace.
Frienster was a failure for Jonathan Abrams and the series of CEOs who played musical chairs. It was a failure for the angel investors and VCs who injected the initial round of $13m. But I am pretty sure it will be a nice winner for the VCs who injected more money into the company in the two follow on rounds (primarily, Kleiner Perkins and DAG). Kleiner Perkins (who led the ‘failed’ A round) will likely make a nice profit net-net if the company sells for $200-300m when Americans realize that having non-US users isn’t all that bad. They are not worth as much, but they are worth something.
