
Why Did Friendster Fail? - sajid
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html?ex=1318564800&en=3e9438ed349f7ce7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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ced
Interesting 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>

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aston
Looks like someone didn't know that doubling the radius quadruples the area.

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Goladus
Why they think Friendster failed: the mostly non-technical board of directors
did lots of bone-headed things.

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willarson
While 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.

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nostrademons
The 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.

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sajid
There'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" !

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nickb
Notice how many mistakes Digg is now repeating? Amazing... they haven't
learned from Friendster.

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timg
""" trailing even myYearbook.com"""

To be fair, that site literally bought 90% of its users.

