Um he had an idea, paid someone to build it (ojbyrne on HN). Promoted it on air in his role at TechTV and had it take off.

Its not like he toiled in his basement for years slaving over it. (Though he did seem to spend a lot of time on it once it became his day job, I don't want to discredit that)

You can also say that the Digg 4.0 was his "idea" and its what effectively buried Digg and started the mass exodus to Reddit (which is now very true to the original digg).

Right, so he made it a success.

I just find it disheartening sometimes that developers (and I am one) seem to think that good code is all that matters. It isn't. You can have the most functional, highly-tuned web site in the world and have no-one use it.

Even if Kevin Rose is nothing but a giant hype machine then he deserves credit for being a giant hype machine. Digg would have failed if he wasn't.

Right, but what's he going to do for Google? Make me want to use that +1 button?

most developers hate successful people who don't have technical skills (Steve Jobs, MBAs, managers, non-technical founders, etc.) because they make the developers look a lot less important.

As a developer who also has an MBA (and who's originally from India), I never understand why most MBA students at my school undermined developers so much ("Just hire ten people from India"). On the other hand, I also don't understand why many developers undermine domain experts and businessmen as "MBA types" or "ideas people".

It should be very easy to understand (for anybody who is smart enough to be a developer or to get an MBA) that the level of expertise you need from a software developer or a sales person or a finance person or a product person depends on your specific case. Not every business can be built by outsourcing all development to India. And not every business can be built (or be successful) without the help of a great domain expert / sales person / product person.

You can outsource to a lot of cheap, technically talented developers (you can also very easily end up with awful developers, though). But they won't think on their feet or be able to make independent decisions- they are contractors, and they will make exactly what you tell them to.

If you're technically minded yourself that might be fine- you can give very specific, down to the pixel instructions. But if you're an "ideas guy" you're not going to have any answer when feature X is not technically possible, and the contractors aren't going to help you.

execution is not limited to personal skills. if the "ideas guy" doesn't have the skills to implement his ideas, he can hire/partner with someone who can.

Right. A developer.

One of them had come up with oink aka foursquare aka yelp aka gowolla ...

Sad really.

Beatle, I think the problem is with defining what "great idea" is. looking back today at "ideas" from couple years ago websites like youtube or even myspace would look like "illegal, won't touch it" and "oh, who would have time to build groups of friends and post stupid status updates". as we both know, both were/are worth alot in a terms of $.

Take example of Pinterest and read recent article with the founder -- even he wasn't sure about his idea at first. First 8 months there was no growth so you can easily say it was a "poor idea". I am pretty sure today he knows it was a great idea, but just because stats behind it that proves it.

There was a plenty of "good ideas" that didn't take off -- not because there were not great, but either market wasn't ready or internet userbase not mature enough or investors fighting over money, who knows? The bottom line, as much as your comment sounds smart, I think you are 100% wrong.

GREAT ideas? rare.

Great ideas + execution? rarer.

Also in my experience ideas and idea people are a dime a dozen. I have notebooks full of hundred ideas I don't have the time, energy or money to execute on. Talent (and availability and interest, etc) is hard to find. That's the bottleneck.

I agree that the proposition is naive. That said, the global market for programmers' salaries (or contractor's rates) is most definitely not efficient.

While it's true that you don't need to re-implement MongoDB in Clojure to create a successful product, it's not like product quality doesn't matter. Unreliable performance could certainly cost you clients - especially in the enterprise world. Why risk it just to save a few $k?

I have a relatively who consults for a big publisher on these offshored educational software products. None of them sell.

Wordpress and nearly every PHP app you can find.

The reason those educational software products aren't selling has nothing to do with the fact that they were offshored and everything to do with poor market fit or marketing, I guarantee you.

I don't think anyone has argued against this. He does deserve credit for this.

The problem is that he has been given too much credit. I.E. that there were far more ideas of the same caliber. I am sure this must have been tough on him, to fail at producing again like the early digg iteration.

I see the evolution of the social content site to be:

Slashdot --> Digg --> Reddit.

Each a stepping stone for the next. And I do not think this is about THE CONTENT -- I think this is about the UX you provide the users, and the control over that UX you leave to the users.

Digg evolved /.'s model. Reddit evolved Digg's.

Reddit has provided a UX which allows for a VERY fluid and quick experience with the content, given FULL control to the users on what content they see, how it is categorized, modded etc.

Kevin took money from ivestors for his own little think tank - that money was largely given to him by charismatic reputation alone.

Now, after a very short period, he isn't even pivoting, or "shooting this idea in the head to work on others" -- he is abandoning the whole freaking endeavor and taking (unknown) position in struggling social company, Google.

This doesn't leave a good taste in anyone's mouth (Sour Milk? (Sorry)) because being given $1.7MM which he gets to walk away from is a slap in the face to the people who work their asses off on good ideas and don't get any of the valley coddling as Kevin.

They started around the same timeframe and it was as much Mac/PC in terms of fanboyishness. Reddit won because of the power of subreddits and capturing the long tail for content and communities.

What's out of touch with your story is that Digg users thought Reddit's UX was horrifying and avoided it like the plague. Even to this day without enhancement suites I wouldn't crown Reddit to be the pinnacle of UX. It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac.

Finally, this jaded bitterness that Kevin Rose got $1.7MM to piss away...

If you were worth getting $1.7MM to piss away you would have had $1.7MM to piss away.

I am saying the IDEA of social content sites evolved from one, to the next, to the next.

As I mentioned, it is not about UI, or content, it was about UX!

The UX that digg had, especially in V4 wrapped too much UI around the content resulting in a poor UX!

Reddit, while seemingly ugly - allowed for far faster and more fluid consumption of the content. It also left more control over what content users wanted.

>It's very much Linux terminally compared to Digg's Mac

I think you're putting too much weight on the shiny.

I think anyone would agree that the speed and agility one gets on a CLI (linux) vs any GUI when you're a savvy user is incomparable.

Finally, I am not jaded/bitter because Kevin Rose got 1.7MM -- I am jaded bitter that anyone would get 1.7MM and so nonchalantly walk away from it AFTER making the types of comments he did.

I think I just have a different perspective than you, I also think you believe I am focusing on things which I am not. :)

So you are implying that a luck and contacts and more other things such as your experience, geolocation, etc. don't matter as long as you are worth getting $X, you will have $X to piss away.

uhm, is there any website to sign up? I want to try my skills against it -- perhaps I am "worth it".

If you were the inventors of the facebook, you would've invented the facebook.

For some reason, I really like this type of argument. There's really no comeback to it. It's so, matter-of-fact.

"If you were [x], then you'd be [x]"

A LOT of ideas can succeed when you get to skip the whole network effect hurdle.

I think he has some insightful thoughts once in a while (like predictions he makes on Diggnation), and he did a great job parlaying Digg into Rev3.

I'm also pretty jealous he'll get a paycheck to say "Hey this feature would be cool" or use his celebrity to push Google+.