Friendster

“I remember when we both wrote Checks for Friendster, it was not because we thought it had any chance. We just were like, this is an experiment that needs to happen, because this is important for the consumer internet.”

“So Reed and I put up all the original money for Friendster as like a science experiment. We didn't think it would work.”

“And Jonathan Abrams was I'm very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close. In fact, he doesn't speak to me to this day. He feels like tribe. He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we we…”

“Famously, that Grove, I think, was part of the beginning of social networks. Well, apparently when Friendster came along, the idea happened because everyone would go to the Grove in the early internet days because you'd run into everyone. And the joke was that…”

“And so at the time they launched their platform, I think they were maybe like one fourth, one fifth the size of, you know, something like my space or even friends or orchid, like some of these are some of the names.”

“In a few years, we're going to look back, and we're going to say that Character AI was Friendster. And what I mean by that is there's going to be a company that is going to be very important, and we'll look back and we'll say Character AI was the precursor of …”

“Yeah, Reed and I put up the first money for Friendster. And then we were lucky enough to invest along with Peter in the first round of Facebook. The first on Twitter, so.”

“Reid and I bought them because we were worried that if Yahoo at the time had gotten them, or even Friendster, that they would have blocked the whole industry, so we bought them. We paid 750 K, which was a lot then, and we were accused of being patent trolls, a…”

“Which is what tied their hands and why they could not pursue an investment in Facebook.”

“And by the end of the summer in 2003, Friendster had over three million users.”

“And that's what makes it different than all these other social networks. Myspace existed. Friendster existed. But anyone could sign up for these. And in part, that meant that they had more explosive growth, because there was no governor on the growth. And we'l…”

“Friendsters out there trying to compute second degree friends of friends, which is this crazy hard computer science problem, especially as the global number of people growing, it's an n squared problem. And Facebook is over here, or the Facebook at the time, i…”

“One of the clever things that Friendster created, for those who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, this is way pre-Facebook. It's even pre-MySpace. Part of what it did to get people to put in a picture was it put a little gray question mark.”

“It turns out that a bad idea well executed is a problem because then you give it more money. Or a good idea, poorly executed, well, that hurts because you think, oh, I mean, we can think of companies like Friendster and think, oh, but the bad idea of poorly ex…”

“Specifically what happened was Benchmark had invested in Friendster, and so was conflicted out. Now you could argue that was an unavoidable mistake, you know, but like, boy does that hurt. And supposedly, I think it was Bob Kegel who was on the board of Friend…”

“Every time you would log in, it would calculate how many people were two degrees of separation from you. And it would fire off on MySQL thread where you would log in, it would look at your friends and it would calculate your friends and friends and show you a …”

“Reid Hoffman and I got excited about that. We both kind of at the same time discovered Friendster and put up the original money for Friendster, and both started our own networks, LinkedIn and Tribe.”

“Friendster, but they could have been maybe Facebook, but they got fixated on this idea that when you browse through profiles, it had to show you kind of the six degrees of separation between you and this person, and so that feature, it turns out, is sort of co…”

“Battery was an investor in Frencer way back in the day, and I think they were way ahead, but unfortunately grew too fast, they couldn't keep up, and Facebook ultimately won that market, which is unfortunate for us.”

“And selling the company six years later, we went through six CEOs in six years. I was, you know, sort of routinely excluded from board decisions and the, our software was rewritten into worse software. The website barely worked for a couple of years and a lot …”

“And that really was a hundred billion dollar idea.”