Kevin Rose Started Digg.com as an Experiment
I was fascinated by Kevin Rose’s story which is featured in Readers Digest (Aug. 2009) on how he started Digg.com
During his childhood he was fascinated with computers. As a child in Las Vegas, Kevin was the most “unpopular kid in school,” who at age 8 spent hours on his family’s Commodore 64, typing code to summon an animated balloon. In the early ’90s, he persuaded his parents to buy him his own computer, which he used to talk tech with other “nerds” in chat rooms.
Kevin’s passion sometimes took precedence over schoolwork, prompting his mother to confiscate his keyboard when bad report cards arrived. “I drilled a hole in my desk and put a chain through it so she couldn’t take it again,” Kevin says.
At age 15, he was repairing computers. By 19, he had a computer-support job at the Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site while he was going to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And by 21, he’d dropped out and moved to Silicon Valley.
Kevin came up with the idea for Digg in 2004 while hosting a cable news show about tech trends. Social networking sites like Facebook had just taken off, drawing users who could post photos, links, and video and then talk about them. Kevin created a site that would take that approach to news. It debutted in 2004. “It was an experiment. I wanted to see what kind of news would surface and whether it would be of good quality,” he says. . . “By 6 a.m., I was up and on the computer. It was the sheer fear of not knowing what was on my own home page,” he recalls.
Users post news stories and images — found anywhere from the websites of big newspapers to small blogs — and with the click of a button, other users either “digg” the items (meaning they like them) or “bury” them (meaning they don’t). On a given day, you can find breaking news about Iraq next to such headlines as “Bacon Flavored Jelly Beans!” and “Another Road Sign Warns of Zombies.” “Sometimes you’ll look at those headlines and say, ‘No sane editor would ever put these next to each other’. . . That’s part of the charm,” says Kevin, 32.
Today, the site gets 35 million different visitors a month. One link from Digg’s home page can produce a tsunami of traffic that can turn a Web newcomer into a real player — or crash an ill-equpped smaller site.
Investors are banking on the idea’s value; just last September, Digg secured $28.7 million in new venture-capital funding. Many believe Digg is worth much more: Last summer, Google was reportedly in talks to buy it for $200 million. Readers Digest says — neither company will comment.
Kevin says a big cash-in was never part of his plan. When he started Digg, he thought. . .
“If this can pay my rent and I can chill in my apartment and drink my tea and have an awesome little office, that’d would be more than I could ask for.”
In the meantime, he still checks the homepage every morning when he gets up. But he makes a cup of tea first, then sits back to enjoy the mutiny.
Today, Digg is among the most-visited sites in the United States.
Read Next: Internet Home Business Startup Tips from Kevin Rose
Source: Readers Digest, Aug. 2009, pp. 47, 48, 54
