Kevin Rose has resigned from Digg. The founder and former CEO who helped put in place the debacle of Digg V4 is founding a new startup with a $1mil+ round of funding according to Techcrunch.
This comes as no surprise. His involvement at the site that put him on the cover of Business Week has been non-existent of late. I tweeted him back in December about his site and his response was, well, disengaged even back then:
It sounded to me back then that he wasn’t really engaged with the future of Digg.
What will his legacy be? Will he be tagged as the person who tanked Digg if it fails? Will he be considered the reason it grew but also the reason that if almost failed if Digg is able to come back from this? Will tech-insiders take his startup seriously when he has yet to demonstrate an ability to make a startup profitable?
Or has the sun set on the tech legend?
One thing is clear – the guy has vision when it comes to ideas. Digg, WeFollow, Pounce – all exceptional concepts. Pownce was plagued by being #2 in an area that only needed 1, Twitter. WeFollow still does well for its niche. He invested in a little company back in 2009 that you may have heard of: Zynga.
He knows tech. He knows people. Can this all translate into business success?
It appears we will find out very soon.
Update: This apparently wasn’t news to the staff and you can sense a hint of “he hasn’t been helping much lately, anyway.”
~ cduruk said, “Not to sound dramatic but this news means pretty much nothing to people working on the site. Nothing is changing, we are working on bringing you guys more cool stuff.”
Update 2: Confirmed.
About JD Rucker
Digg declined when they started their layout changed followed by crappy management. All you get now is crappy content manipulated by bots