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Why Did Friendster Fail?
- sajid 20y agoThere's a funny line where a social networking startup has a meeting with a VC. The startup guys claim they're going to the next MySpace. But the VC isn't impresseed, he retorts "Tell me why you aren't going to be the next Friendster" !
- Goladus 20y agoWhy they think Friendster failed: the mostly non-technical board of directors did lots of bone-headed things.
- willarson 20y agoWhile the article certainly emphasizes that the non-technical board was a detriment to the company, I think that the fundamental problem is revealed in the quote We completely failed to execute. Their product didn't work well, and this problem existed before the influx of money and board members. Blaming it on the board is conventient, but even the best board can't make a company successful if their product is broken.
- nostrademons 20y agoThe board, however, can direct attention toward fixing the broken product. From the article, it sounds like Friendster's board didn't do this. Instead of focusing their attention on fixing performance problems and making the site usable, they had pie-in-the-sky notions of beating Google and Yahoo and getting into the VOIP space. One of the best pieces of engineering-management advice I ever got goes like this: "Engineers do what you tell them to do - repeatedly." If the board is spending all its time thinking about cool new features, the engineers will implement cool new features. If the board starts talking about performance and communicates that downwards, the performance issues will get fixed. Remember how Microsoft won the browser wars: Bill Gates took all the company's best developers, put them on the IE team, and refused to speak to anyone unless it was about the Internet. That's the kind of single-minded focus you need to turn a company around.
- Goladus 20y agoI'd agree, if the article was about how the board tried to stimulate a cult of quality within the company, and despite their best efforts they simply weren't able to salvage anything from the software. In spite of the software issues, they had a head start in terms of popularity and users.
- ced 20y agoInteresting read. Sadly, the article's chart takes figure distortion to new levels. (is that even deliberate?) http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/10/14/business/15friend_Chart_ready.html http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/10/14/business/15friend_Chart_ready.html
- aston 20y agoLooks like someone didn't know that doubling the radius quadruples the area.
- nickb 20y agoNotice how many mistakes Digg is now repeating? Amazing... they haven't learned from Friendster.
- timg 20y ago""" trailing even myYearbook.com""" To be fair, that site literally bought 90% of its users.