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Digg just needs a new leadership team. Kevin and Jay spend so much time promoting themselves ("parallel entrepreneurs" hasn't worked out all that well for anyon

by ojbyrne 18y ago

Digg just needs a new leadership team. Kevin and Jay spend so much time promoting themselves ("parallel entrepreneurs" hasn't worked out all that well for anyone) that they've done significant damage to the business. They need to go. Even this article is full of half-truths. Employees are "committed for the long term" yet the bulk of them have been hired during the last six months, and 40% of the early employees have left.

staunch 18y ago
Unless someone is going to buy them for a few hundred million dollars they're completely screwed as far as I can tell. Digg is a business that could have been run really frugally and sold for $50-$100 million. It's not a business that should have been blown up to 80 employees and hundreds of servers. I agree Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson messed things up, but how is new leadership going to undo the spending of so many millions of their investor's dollars?
- ojbyrne 18y ago
  Tell me about it. 1. Wind up revision3.com and move diggnation back to digg where it should have been. 2. Lay off 80% of their employees. 3. Instead of endless refinements of the "digg" concept (which nobody really cares about anymore), leverage the traffic to make the site more portal-like (I know those are bad words but they'd work for digg). Simple first step - expand into the huffpo realm. Admittedly this is wishful thinking. Probably the first step to actually making it happen from a CEO's perspective would be a lawsuit against Jay, Kevin and Rev3. Which probably wouldn't go so well.
brandnewlow 18y ago
I don't get how "promoting themselves" has done significant damage to the company. I mean, Kevin is the company. The company is Kevin. When Digg had a town hall meeting in Chicago, people were there to meet Kevin and have him sign their iPhones. He's gotta be out there as much as possible. I concede having no knowledge on any of these other fronts, but I don't understand how all the good PR that comes from Rose's ubiquity in tech media can be anything but crucial to Digg's success.
- ojbyrne 18y ago
  I think you've answered the question. Kevin is the company. It was not always so - in fact in the early days he downplayed his role in the company, and it had massive momentum. Instead of concentrating on making a better product, a lot of energy went into the "web 2.0 poster boy" campaign as a marketing strategy. I don't think it worked.
  - brandnewlow 18y ago
    Ok. I understand your point of view much better now. Thanks.

by ojbyrne 18y ago

staunch 18y ago

Unless someone is going to buy them for a few hundred million dollars they're completely screwed as far as I can tell. Digg is a business that could have been run really frugally and sold for $50-$100 million. It's not a business that should have been blown up to 80 employees and hundreds of servers. I agree Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson messed things up, but how is new leadership going to undo the spending of so many millions of their investor's dollars?

ojbyrne 18y ago
Tell me about it. 1. Wind up revision3.com and move diggnation back to digg where it should have been. 2. Lay off 80% of their employees. 3. Instead of endless refinements of the "digg" concept (which nobody really cares about anymore), leverage the traffic to make the site more portal-like (I know those are bad words but they'd work for digg). Simple first step - expand into the huffpo realm. Admittedly this is wishful thinking. Probably the first step to actually making it happen from a CEO's perspective would be a lawsuit against Jay, Kevin and Rev3. Which probably wouldn't go so well.

brandnewlow 18y ago

I don't get how "promoting themselves" has done significant damage to the company. I mean, Kevin is the company. The company is Kevin. When Digg had a town hall meeting in Chicago, people were there to meet Kevin and have him sign their iPhones. He's gotta be out there as much as possible. I concede having no knowledge on any of these other fronts, but I don't understand how all the good PR that comes from Rose's ubiquity in tech media can be anything but crucial to Digg's success.

ojbyrne 18y ago
I think you've answered the question. Kevin is the company. It was not always so - in fact in the early days he downplayed his role in the company, and it had massive momentum. Instead of concentrating on making a better product, a lot of energy went into the "web 2.0 poster boy" campaign as a marketing strategy. I don't think it worked.
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  Ok. I understand your point of view much better now. Thanks.