It was 4 years ago in August 2006. I had just come back from London after graduating and I had just made the decision to not join an investment bank but instead to get together with Ming to start what would eventually become Nuffnang. We had assembled a small team in Penang to start building the first version of www.nuffnang.com.
It was a huge step for me. A leap of faith. Turning down an opportunity to work at a good job that pays well and jumping really into the unknown. Into something that may eventually fail. I needed inspiration so one day I decided to go into a bookstore to find it. As I was walking by the magazine section, this cover of BusinessWeek magazine caught my eye.
Kevin Rose his name was. The guy who invented Digg. The article I read talked about how he made $60 million in just 18 months after starting Digg.com, which was at the time one of the most popular websites in the world. I read his whole story… and that inspired me to go on. At one point Google even offered $200 mil to buy it but the deal didn’t work out.
Fast forward to 2010 though and things seems to have changed. Digg is no longer one of the top websites in the world that it used to be. It also announced that it was laying off about 1/’3 of its staff and now people online are wondering whether it’s going to die in the next few years. It’s not all gloomy though. Digg.com still has some 15,000,000 unique users a month visiting it’s site and that’s a lot of traffic. Now the thing about the world is that the media magnifies your success or failure. Online now you can find lots of good articles about Facebook and Twitter now that it’s breaking new boundaries but you’ll also find articles about the failures. Digg isn’t the only one. There’s MySpace who was once the biggest social networking site of all time, Bebo who was sold by AOL for some less than $10 million when it was bought two years ago for $850 million and who can forget Friendster.
Bebo’s Founders who cashed out big time from AOL buying them
These ups and downs of life don’t only happen to internet companies. They happen to businesses from all industries (Richard Branson is one of the entrepreneurs today that I admire the most simply because he has gone down and managed to pick himself up so many times). We just happen to hear about the internet companies the most. Knowing these things about business remind me every day how not to take anything for granted and how to keep working hard and be thankful for whatever we have today. Today Nuffnang, ChurpChurp and all the companies we have under our wing are still growing at a really fast rate but who’s to say where we’ll be in the next 5 years. We’re nowhere in the comparison of huge sites like Digg or MySpace that have made a huge impact all over the world. If they can go down, anyone can.
The Founders of MySpace who sold to NewsCorp for $650 million
The silver lining about these stories is that it’s not like all of them have gone down to zero. MySpace is still one of the Top 50 sites in America at least and the founders have somehow along the way made money. MySpace was sold to NewsCorp for $650 million back then (which are numbers we never hear on internet companies in our part of the world). Kevin Rose from Digg is said to have made some money and was one of the early investors in Zynga and Twitter.
I guess no matter where their companies are or how they end up, they are no doubt still successful people to me at least. They have at least the experience, the memories and the stories to tell from whatever they have achieved from their lives. Like they say, it’s better to have tried and failed, than to never have tried at all.
I wonder where Facebook and Twitter will be in the next 5 years.
PS: You can read the article I read on BusinessWeek 4 years ago here.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space