Kevin Rose Resigns From Digg, Closing Round On New Startup

Accidental downvote, sorry! You make a good point of course.

According to his Wikipedia article, he spent some time at UNLV pursuing a Computer Science degree (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Rose#Early_life)

I think you raise one particularly good point in that while not everyone has the coding skills to make things many people have as you say "big" ideas. Bringing them to fruition by any means possible helps everyone as it brings the field forward. Digg started a trend of such sites and has in doing so made the web a better place to browse, even if the original site is no longer the best example.

How was Digg fundamentally different from Slashdot? No editors?

He had some amazing achievements, but got too greedy and didn't sell on the way up. Problem is, on the way down you don't get a premium price...

ahem, you are mistaken that Kevin has no tech skills..his degree area of concentration was CS in fact..

Kevin is still a smart guy and he does have good ideas, digg just got out of control and suffered from some bad timing.

Now Kevin will be free to really prove his worth again. I'm excited to see what he does.

And just as that cover was full of hype, his "demise" is just as hyped.

i was in that article. what an awful piece of "journalism"

I remember him saying that the photo on the cover was one he explicitly asked not to be used as it was just taken as a fun shot.

I would argue that both Reddit and Digg are like drinking from the Ganges river; in that the amount of shittiness is related to where along the source you decide to drink from.

Your analogy lost me ;) but I too didn't understand the twitter comparison.

I sometimes feel like the TC folks live, eat, sleep, breathe, and shit twitter all day long, and their perspective is much different. Maybe for them it is the source of all that matters? I don't know.

I go to twitter when I wonder, what are others saying about X?

The combination of live conversation style TWiT shows and the highly produced Rev3 stuff would really be unstoppable.

I think we all see where you are REALLY going with this..... The screensavers reborn.

Personally I think it's the best thing that could happen. Digg has been roundly defeated by low-profile engineering companies (reddit and stumbleupon). In my opinion that was almost entirely because of their cult of personality approach. I don't think Kevin was even comfortable with it.

It's been looking up because they've already abandoned that. This just confirms it.

Kevin has not been actively involved with Digg for months. The slight up has had nothing to do with him and his official resignation will make no difference

Digg is on an up? Are you sure? I just went to the front page, and the stories there had a total of 126 comments.

How is that an 'up'?

Startups are (very) high-risk investments. I doubt he's quite that wealthy that $1m is peanuts to him, so taking outside investment seems like a good idea.

You typically get more than cash when you raise a round of funding.

What cash has he made from digg? What is his share of the company now?

Even if he can afford to do the whole thing himself, remember the old adage:

If you need advice, ask for money. If you need money, ask for advice.

He may have raised money specifically to bring in some investors who can contribute some wisdom and experience.

There's a thing that happens a lot with tech company growth stocks. Digg is a case in point, where they grow fast, and on the way up they get several offers, but they keep holding out for more and more... until suddenly their exponential growth crashes to a halt, and the big offers suddenly dry up.

The trick is to sell on the way up, not when you're at the top. You're at 'the top' for such a vanishingly small period of time that the odds of selling at the perfect time are vanishingly small.

I seem to recall Digg over the years while it was still growing getting (and knocking back) offers of 30, 60, and ~100 million before the famous Google 200 fell through.

I understand the urge to push hard and get everything you can for a deal, but if at $200 million the other guy feels that there's nothing in it for him, that it is strictly break even, then maybe at the last minute the deal falls through, and you kick yourself a year later for not selling at $180MM or even $150MM.

Yes, you should negotiate hard, but you should always leave something on the table for the other guy. Even if you're completely screwing him over a barrel, you should still leave him something for him to brag about to his buddies or board of directors or journos.

This is Techcrunch we're talking about here, not the New York Times.

Maybe. Digg is also old enough it was structured and architectured under an old-school (You need at least 15 to 30 engineers) approach for a content site. In that way, it was a sort of bridge to what we've got now -- it got the social crowd-sourcing of content part together, but it didn't have the minimal engineer part together.

You can bet that getting the money to pay all those guys, who then needed sales guys to make the big sales to pay them and the engineers, who then ... contributed significantly to Digg losing its place in the world. I betcha that the new startup has significantly tighter hiring policies.