This Sunday I raised a concern regarding Digg’s Kevin Rose raising money for Revision3, when Digg’s success was anything but a fait accompli. Yes, the company has supposedly crossed the 20M unique threshold, but that is meaningless to the people that have money at stake: the company did not find any buyers at the $150M asking price they had last year, and I doubt many people will buy a company where its users can take it hostage at will.
With that in mind, I also said that Digg could largely be on auto-pilot specifically because of it user-generated nature. Revision3 is to some extent the anti-Digg: it’s all about producing content, which is frankly a pain in the butt (disclaimer, my actual job is not pontificating on this blog, but rather, produce video content at WatchMojo.com, amongst other things).
But, while it was almost like an admission that user generated content will only go so far, it was very ballsy to raise $8M for Revision3 after raising $10M for Digg.
Well, today, Rose announced his third startup, the misspelled Pownce. I understand me telling anyone to focus might be ironic given the cornucopia of product lines we have, but the nuance is that it’s one thing to launch a myriad of properties under one roof, it’s quite another to run separate companies. It’s also quite different when you don’t have outside financiers to worry about.
The path Rose is taking makes sense for an investment portfolio manager, but not really a Web entrepreneur, in my humble opinion.
Eventually, conflicts arise, jealousy grows and the frustration will spill over. Add to that VC money, and it’s a freaking recipe for disaster.
Subscribe: