Business Week’s cover story on the Silicon Valley 2.0 ‘brat pack’ has got the blogosphere abuzz: here and here.
One needs to discount the sensational journalism comments in the article, particularly how Digg founder Kevin Rose is worth $60 million and look for the nuggets in the article.
Consider that back in December ‘99 we at First Tuesday had a valuation of $150 million placed on our heads and that with a community of only 20,000 members. We continued to grow exponentially through 40,000, past 100,000 and peaked at 500,000 members.
In similar vein, Business Week reports that Digg users have been doubling every 3 months. Remember how Skype users grew by thousands a day – this is a key take out from the article. It’s all about growing community – we used to call it mindshare, or increasing your eyeballs, but it all amounts to the same thing: getting and keeping attention and doing so in a big, big way.
The article sure got attention up for Business Week too!
