NY TIMES — Oct 16 — Jonathan Abrams, Friendster's founder was in a spot in late 2003. He could take the safe bet and accept $30 million from Google for Friendster or sell a stake for $13 million and build Friendster into an online powerhouse worth hundreds of millions, if not billions. Abrams spurned Google and charted his own course. In retrospect, he should have taken the $30 million. If Google had paid him in stock, Abrams would be worth $1 billion today. "Basically, Jonathan wanted to meet girls," said Mark Pincus, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who provided Abrams with seed money at the end of 2002. "He told me himself, he started Friendster as a way to surf through his friends' address books for good-looking girls." Doerr and Kagle took seats on Friendster's board, as did investors, former Yahoo CEO, Timothy Koogle, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Ram Shriram, one of the first investors in Google. Abrams casts the board as the main cause of Friendster's stumble. Abrams has vowed never to accept another dime in venture capital. "Friendster ended up with three levels of VPs, CEOs and board members who, although they had great résumés, were not connected to the social networking concept and didn't really use Friendster," [an insider commented]. Siegelman, one of Doerr's partners at Kleiner Perkins, said Abrams was a founder in way over his head, which is why in April 2004, only a few months after investing in the company, the board replaced him as CEO.
The full article was originally published at IHT, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: I was fortunate enough to be one of Jonathan's group of friends that he called on to help him with Friendster in 2003. Kicking Jonathan out, big mistake. He was overwhelmed with it's growth, and he wasn't as smooth as an Alexa 100 internet CEO might be, but he knew every nuance of Friendster and why it was successful. Some parallel's can be drawn with the success of Markus Frind of PlentyofFish. I talk with Markus every few days now, and every time we talk he's received more calls from VC's wanting to invest. But, he refuses to accept funding or grow his team beyond a one man band. Some would argue he should grow it into a company worth hundred of millions. He would argue…he is…his way. It's the antithesis of the approach Jonathan took. I'm sure he'd be inspired by it.
PARADIGM SHIFT BLOG — Oct 30 — I was a little surprised to see Orkut is the #2 site in India. Maybe it will become the #1 site there, like it has in Brazil. India has 350 million english speaking users. When I launched PlentyofFish in 2003 it had explosive growth in India. The only problem was that in a short time I signed up over 60,000 men and 1500 women and an extremely large percentage of messages from the indian men where about sex. I ended up blocking the entire country. They would have ended up destroying my site. Dating is a very local thing. Indian matrimonial sites are seeing insane growth. Jeevansathi.com IPO'ed today and Shaadi.com plans to IPO soon as well.
