How to Kill a Great Idea! Net media darling Friendster should have become a billion-dollar company. Whathappened? Founder Jonathan Abrams who invented social networking tells us all.By:
Max Chafkin, Inc.com, Published June 2007
Jonathan Abrams created the first online social network and enlisted Silicon Valleys bestand brightest to run it. Yet Friendster flamed out spectacularly. What went wrong?It's not easy being the brains behind one of the biggest disappointments in Internethistory. Sure, there are those who describe you as a visionary, but in the same breaththey'll deride you as a lousy businessman. Bloggers attack you, call you "a real asshole"and "a very lucky idiot savant." Former investors badmouth you. Other entrepreneurscopy your ideas without giving you credit.
The New York Times
makes reference to your "ballooning ego" and the local Fox affiliate can't even get your name right.Jonathan Abrams--founder of Friendster, the first online social network, and a pioneer of one of today's hottest trends on the Web--tries his best not to think about these things.And with two new companies, he has plenty to distract him. Last September he openedSlide, a stylish basement lounge in downtown San Francisco. And in March, he launcheda new bid to make it big on the Web--Socializr, a website that lets users invite people to parties and other events.And yet the story of how Friendster, once the hottest start-up in America, became the buttof a business joke continues to preoccupy him. And no wonder. By the rules of SiliconValley, Friendster--a bold idea backed by experienced investors and the best managersmoney could buy--was destined for greatness. Instead, it failed spectacularly. "I did whatyou're always told to do as a young entrepreneur," Abrams says. "I brought onexperienced investors to help Friendster fulfill its potential. But the all-star team was thecurse of death."If he had invented something as mundane as a brilliant customer relations managementapplication, no one would know Jonathan Abrams's name. But as the creator of the firstonline social network, Abrams promised something truly exciting: to change the way people communicated with one another. As
Fortune
put it in October 2003, "There may be a new kind of Internet emerging--one more about connecting people to people than people to websites." In the months following its launch earlier that year, Friendster garnered millions of devotees, who used its name as both a verb and a noun. By the endof 2003, the company Abrams founded in his San Francisco apartment had raised $13million from the same investors who'd backed Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Yahoo(NASDAQ:YHOO), and eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) and had appeared in scores of major magazines and newspapers. Friendster was a company the world could understand, participate in, and dream on. It was the next big thing.
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