What Friendster Founder, Jonathan Abrams' Learned From His Mistakes

Friendster started from a brilliant idea of Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO of Friendster.com. He was the talk of the town of the year 2003 when Friendster was finally open to the public.

Friendster was offered $30 million by Google but Abrams declined and rather go for the venture route, taking $13 million from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and Benchmark Capital--and that, he says, is where his troubles began.

"I had basically made a prototype which worked fine for a couple of million users," he says. "But we needed to really rebuild things if we were going to scale." He says his board and investors "didn't get Friendster and wouldn't focus on something boring like fixing the technology." He was replaced as CEO and watched as a succession of marketing deals failed and a parade of CEOs followed--three in one 12-month period. By fall of 2005, Abrams was gone. "I'm never going to make a ton of money off of Friendster like Mark [Zuckerberg] will probably make from Facebook," he says. "But I've learned a lot." (from www.fastcompany.com)

I do hope Abrams new networking site, Socializr, will get him to the top again.