LA Times has a rehash on the history of Ryze, Friendster, Tribe.net and LinkedIn.
Friendster founder Abrams signed up with a fledgling Ryze in August 2001 and helped with its first real-world mixer in Palo Alto. Soon he was talking to Scott and others about a site simply for dating that would echo the real-world way people meet — through their friends.
A serial entrepreneur, Abrams did a substantial amount of work on Friendster alone in his apartment. Then he raised money from several individuals.
Among the first investors were Tribe founder Mark Pincus and his friend Reid Hoffman, who later launched LinkedIn. Both put down an initial $7,500 and now own 5% of the company between them. Friendster gets some revenue from advertisers and aims to turn a profit next year, though it won't say how.
"Neither of us thought it was going to be a good investment," Pincus said. But that view changed this spring, when Friendster got him "a really good date," he said. "That made me a believer."
1. And the founders of Ecademy, CraigsList, Spoke, eWomenNetwork, and openBC are all members on Ryze, too. This is news? ;-)
RE: the prediction of consolidation -- I would say not to expect it for several months. LinkedIn, Spoke, and others have fresh money in their pockets. They're not going to do anything in the M&A arena until they prove they can do something with the money (and increase their value by far more than the investment -- the VCs won't LET them sell until then).
And I'm sure Ryze and Ecademy will have some kind of significant announcements in Q1 and Q2 -- no inside information or anything, it's just not hard to predict. For them to do anything before they've hit a few majorly attractive investor milestones (multiple consecutive profitable quarters, sustained growth acceleration, etc.) would just be foolish.
Glad to see more and more mainstream media coverage, but I just wish they had a new story to tell one of these days. Of course, they could call me... :-)
Posted at 8:06PM on Dec 18th 2005 by Scott Allen