Kevin Rose is officiously one of the most famous Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. He has co-founded Revision3, Pownce, and of course his most popular company Digg. Somebody with such an entrepreneurial spirit certainly has something to tell, so we asked Scott Rafer – who also managed successful start-ups such as MyBlogLog – to interview Kevin on stage.
So the first question that comes to everybody’s mind is: how can you handle three start-ups at the same time? Rose: “It’s a matter of getting the right management in place”. For example, Kevin appointed Leah Culver as the lead developer of Pownce. She runs the show from day to day, while Kevin makes the strategic decisions.
Digg however, takes a lot of time. Kevin: “Digg is like my full-time job, the one I work on for 60 hours a week”. Moreover, the Digg-founder told that the company is large enough now – 55 employees – for things to happen on their own. He used to panic when the servers crashed, now he has a team to take care of a crisis like that.
Scott also asked Kevin some questions about the future of Digg. Kevin: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”. So how will Rose and his team do this? Well, they’re gonna follow the 3.0 trend by letting in the experts.
Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?” So Digg will make connections and introduce you to other stories that might interest you. Some of them might not even be popular yet. They’ll make those connections by, amongst other things, following the so-called pressure users: the users that have an eye for good content. Based on their digg-behavior, the team can make better recommendations.
So ‘Digg suggests’ is an upcoming feature. If you can’t wait for that service to arrive, you might want to try the DiggSuggest web-app.
Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .
