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The First Digg Developer Dispels the Myths Surrounding Digg & Startups in General
- delano 17y agoThat's a very candid interview Owen, thanks (I'm assuming you'll be reading the comments!).
- ojbyrne 17y agoOf course. Wondering if there will be a backlash. I tried not to take more credit than was really due me and also tried to avoid coming off bitter despite the bait waived in front of me. I'm clearly better off because of digg, even if not comparatively to some others involved. An argument could be made that I'm better off than a couple of different people involved early on, but if I had my way, they would also have seen more.
- terpua 17y agoYou'll now have to change your HN profile from the "built digg for $10/hour" to "$20/hour + equity" :)
- merrick33 17y agoBTW I was the one that mentioned the "bait" to Andrew, but not to bait you but rather to have others learn from your experience. I think it's important that people building a company know about liquidation preferences going in.
- nickb 17y agoExcellent interview! Congrats Owen.
- breck 17y agoI had assumed that Owen was in his 20's. Whoops. Very cool.
- ojbyrne 17y agoIf you can figure out a way to make me be in my twenties, you can have all my digg shares. ;-)
- by 17y agoJust consider it as hexadecimal.
- ojbyrne 17y agoUnfortunately as of my last birthday that wouldn't work either. 0x30 :-(
- wave 17y agoIs there any specific reason why would like to be in your twenties again?
- ojbyrne 17y agoA multitude of specific reasons mostly related to physical things. Of course I was referring to the standard fantasy of being able to be younger while still retaining all the things I've learned along the way. And my salary.
- vaksel 17y agogood interview, but I don't recommend watching it, just listen. The audio is horribly out of sync. The "your ip" website idea, just goes to show you, that digg was a fluke.
- ojbyrne 17y agoFluke isn't really fair. Yes there was luck, but once that initial luck happened there was a lot of hard work by Kevin, me, and all the early employees to build upon it.
- scotth 17y agoBut hard work very often results in nothing. I'm sure many on this site can attest to that. That considered, you're more likely to get lucky if you work hard.
- jonny_noog 17y agoOwen said: It’s a bit of a myth that it’s all young coders. There actually lots of people in their late 30s and their 40s. I’ve been a programmer for 25 years and I’ve actually worked hard to keep up with new technology. That's quite encouraging. Sometimes I think one could be forgiven for getting the impression that if you're over 25 and you haven't made it in start-up land, then you may as well quit.
- ojbyrne 17y agoAs I believe I said in the interview, the second developer we hired at digg was older than me (I was 45 at the time we hired him).
- kubrick 17y agoI'm 45 and spend all of my time (currently) consulting with startups. At one, the average age is maybe 28. At another, at probably about 48 (no kidding). At yet another, probably 40.
- edwardog 17y agoI was really happy to hear you say that when we met at your TravelPod presentation; I wish there was more focus on older hackers – sure gives me something to look forward to. -Edward from Shopify (around the corner from you guys)
- joshu 17y agoI was 31 when I started Delicious as a company. That probably rounds down to 25 though.
- nailer 17y agoIf your were giving your age in octal, it's the same thing. :-)
- eugenejen 17y agoThe only thing for youth is the tolerance for risk can be higher than 40 yrs old for most engineers. But as long as engineers keep up skills. Their experience are very valuable. It was the same when I worked in PubSub then. CTO Bob Wyman hired a bunch of 40 something engineers and they really can do cool engineering than 20 something. -- edit -- Engineers in PubSub then are at least 30 yrs old in 2005. The youngest engineer is very talented but he started to write programs in forth when he was 10 on Apple II. Of course the draw back is the salary is higher and old engineers may have too much distractions from their children. I think most of time, the myth for young engineers is to encourage students to join the rank. And the engineers in first world face big competition from countries with lower salary. But I always feel funny because for people working in software, US is the original birth place and the most experience engineers are here. But people probably would rather to pay an expensive old doctor to heal them than an old engineer to build something that works because they don't feel the value for what they pay in perceivable fashion. -- edit -- And thanks for Owen to dispel myth from PR.
- kyro 17y agoOwen, a quick question. Who is Eli? I recall several times Kevin saying that he hired a guy named Eli from elance to do some personal web stuff for him, and then hired him to do Digg.
- ojbyrne 17y agoEli White was the 3rd developer we hired. Kevin must have been confused because I'm pretty sure Eli never participated in elance.
- iamelgringo 17y agoGlad to hear that your story is getting a little more press, Owen. You deserve it.
- known 17y agoSomebody please create Wikipedia entry for Owen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Owen+Byrne&sourceid=Mozilla-search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Owen+Byrn...
- Technophilis 17y agoThis description http://www.crunchbase.com/person/owen-byrne http://www.crunchbase.com/person/owen-byrne doesn't sound like the real story =)
- AndrewWarner 17y agoI edited that after our interview. I guess they didn't accept my edits. Strange. They usually take my post-interview edits. Maybe they need more time to a approve it.
- newy 17y agoGreat hearing directly from you Owen, too bad the interview style was kind of distracting. The interviewer seemed to want to tell the story more than letting you narrate and kept beating the dead horse on certain points :)
- ojbyrne 17y agoThe impact of this story amazes me, and reinforces one point rather well. I lived in San Francisco for 2+ years, and would tell the exact same story to anyone who would listen. Nobody ever bothered to listen. It took someone from Southern California to actually get the story out there, because the PR culture in Norcal is so busy sucking up to power that they neglect to ever look for anything resembling the truth. Silicon Valley would be much better off if Techcrunch, Mashable, PaidContent, and every other PR blog there went out of business tomorrow.
- abl 17y agoOwen, It would be very educational to hear you go into the details of the liquidation deal that you would prefer and recommend to people joining a new startup. Or, if you could recommend some reading material on the subject?