Apr
23
new sources digested
Filed Under Uncategorized |
What went wrong with friendster? by Max Chafkin, Inc.com June 2007
Friendster has become a case study at Harvard as a model of how not to manage a tech company. Abrams says the failure was result of mismanagement and because he embraced a system that created far more failures than successes. Venture capitalists adopted a system to invest in 20 businesses expecting to have 2 successes. ” In the old days entrepreneurs would bootstrap and figure things out over the first few years.
Friendster came as an idea to Abrams to portray a offline life in an online world. Each user would have a standardized homepage that would link to the profiles of their friends creating a network. The idea seemed great, perhaps even better than some dating sites because of the network aspect. Every time a new user joined the network friendster calculated network wwithn four degrees of separation. They began having problems with loading times and the software needed to be reworked. However he ignored these problems thinking they would solve themselves.
Hired some VC’s that had some ideas to make the company as big as possible fast. They had to compete with myspace and facebook. One day he realized that thousands of the users were from southeast asia. This essentially meant they were paying millions of dollars advertising to the wrong people. From here it went downhill and myspace took off.
They were kicking themselves about missed opportunities like not incorporating music and videos. Also the functionality of inviting people and companies to groups