Digg's Kevin Rose can't afford a couch
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The founder of the news Web site Digg reveals more details about the BusinessWeek article, on This Week in Tech (click on the player). The BW piece claimed Rose had made $60M in 18 months, but Rose said BW got it all wrong. He is not a multi-millionaire, nor a millionaire, not even a “thousand-aire,” he said, adding that he can’t even afford a couch. He said BW worked up estimates of his worth, but that “it’s just paper fake money.” The BW article also said his company was breaking even. “Digg isn’t even breaking even, they got that wrong too.” BW photographers had him drinking a beer, among other things, for a shot they told him would be inside the magazine. He had no idea he’d be on the cover.
Working for a big media outfit, we can understand how the different parts of the big machine can get out of whack sometimes; it has happened to us, where deadlines, misunderstandings, and cover design needs really butcher a story at the last minute. This Digg story is a particularly bad example. It is really too bad, because we know the reporting team over there, and we’d been thinking this year what a great job they’ve been doing, and how they really get it.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
