The Inside Story On Why Kevin Rose Never Had A Big Hit

Matt Lynley | Business Insider

Just six years ago, Digg was a hot startup fielding big buyout offers. News Corp. wanted to buy it for $60 million. Al Gore took a look at snapping it up for his Current TV channel. A Google deal for around $200 million came agonizingly close to fruition.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at Digg’s fate, because its creator—a tech whiz and creative product inventor named Kevin Rose—has a way of creating amazing products and then neglecting them. You could say his own career is the ultimate example of this cycle of unfulfilled promise.

Colleagues paint a picture of Rose as a brilliant product designer with an uncanny sense for the perfect user experience who was plagued with an utter disinterest in day-to-day activities.

The twilight days of his two biggest projects—an experimental app laboratory called Milk and the news aggregator Digg—are eerily similar, and speak to his core nature.

The tech world is not made up solely of Mark Zuckerbergs’ or Ev Williams’ or Steve’s. Nor are you just a heel for not hitting all your marks and making it into that class by your own mistakes (Gary Kildall). There is room in the middle and their is influence, passion, and inovation which comes from it.

The world is better for having Kevin Rose in it. Just because he values life experience and happyness over making that one masterstroke product doesn’t make him a failure. He has gained influence, respect, and (yes) a salary many in the Valley would kill for.

There is no entrepreneur as cool as Kevin Rose. If you came of age in the 2000s you wanted to be him. Wouldn’t you want that kind of success?