Kevin Rose
Kevin Rose is an influential entrepreneur and technology figure best known for co-founding the social news platform Digg and the web television network Revision3. Born on February 21, 1977, in Redding, California, he grew up in Las Vegas and developed an early passion for technology, eventually dropping out of college to work in broadcasting at TechTV. Rose became widely recognized as the host of "The Screen Savers," where he gained valuable experience before launching his own ventures.
In 2004, he co-founded Digg, which allowed users to share and vote on news stories, rapidly becoming a popular platform in the early social media space. He also started Pownce, a short-lived social networking site, and later worked with Google Ventures and various tech startups, including Milk and Oak. Throughout his career, Rose has focused on innovative technology applications and community-driven platforms. He is also a rock climber and an advocate for various causes, including serving on the board of the Tony Hawk Foundation. In his personal life, he married Darya Pino in 2013, and the couple shares interests in health and wellness.
Subject Terms
Kevin Rose
Cofounder of Digg
- Born: February 21, 1977
- Place of Birth: Redding, California
Primary Company/Organization: Digg
Introduction
Kevin Rose left a career in broadcasting at TechTV to cofound Digg and Revision3, a social news site and web TV developer, respectively. He oversaw Digg's most successful period, founded the short-lived but financially successful Pownce social network, and was eventually hired by Google Ventures.
Early Life
Robert Kevin Rose was born on February 21, 1977, in Redding, California, but spent most of his childhood in Las Vegas, Nevada. As a teenager, he was a computer aficionado, running a Wildcat bulletin board system (BBS) with two nodes, door games, and shareware available for downloads. He was a member of the Boy Scouts of America, achieving the Eagle Scout rank (an experience he later talked about on his television show Diggnation), and he attended a Montessori school and then a vocational-technical high school in Las Vegas. He majored in computer science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) but dropped out in 1988 to take a job with the Department of Energy at the Nevada Test Site. He then moved to San Francisco to work as a production assistant on the computer-centric news program The Screen Savers at ZDTV (later TechTV) .
Life's Work
The Screen Savers launched on May 11, 1998, the first broadcast day for ZDTV, the twenty-four-hour cable network founded by the publishing company Ziff Davis, which had begun as a publisher of magazines for hobbyists (and the fiction magazine Amazing Stories) but since the personal computing revolution of the late 1970s had focused mainly on computer and technology magazines. The original incarnation of The Screen Savers was hosted by creator Leo Laporte, who had previously hosted a show about the Internet on PBS, and television personality Kate Botello. ZDTV was acquired by CNET and renamed TechTV in 2000, and for the next few years TechTV struggled as cable provider Comcast dropped it from some of its regions to keep it from competing with the Comcast-owned G4, a cable news and entertainment network with a similar niche.
When Laporte left The Screen Savers in 2004 to host the new show Call for Help, Rose replaced him as main host. TechTV was bought out by Comcast and merged with G4, resulting in widespread layoffs and a relocation of the studios to Los Angeles. Alex Albrecht became Rose's cohost. In late 2004, an informal announcement was made that The Screen Savers would change its focus to pop culture for the technology community, as opposed to technology alone. The show continued under the name The Screen Savers until March 2005, at which point it was renamed Attack of the Show. Rose continued to host briefly, but on May 22, 2005, he reached an agreement with G4 to release him from his contract.
In the months before leaving G4, Rose had founded two start-ups: Digg in February and Revision3 in March. Both were collaborations with Jay Adelson, chief executive officer (CEO) of data center and Internet services company Equinix, whom Rose had met while interviewing him for The Screen Savers. Adelson became the CEO of both Digg and Revision3, as well as chairman of Revision3's board, and acted as business mentor to the other founders while raising venture capital. Rose contributed $6,000 of start-up funds for Digg. Digg was founded as a social news website, beginning as an experiment in late 2004 by Rose, Adelson, Owen Byrne, and Ron Gorodetzky, before the company was officially formed. The site allows registered users to submit interesting links from the web—with an intended focus on recent news—at which point other users may vote for (“digg”) or against (“bury”) the link, resulting in constantly changing lists of links to content, with the most popular stories becoming the most visible. Digg became popular quickly, and an early version was featured on The Screen Savers before Rose left the show to pursue his start-ups full time. The site was changed several times in the first two years, including a revamped interface, categories for stories, and the ability for users to maintain lists of friends. Later innovations included iPhone and Android apps and integration with Facebook through Facebook Connect.
Revision3's name referred to the first two “revisions” of the television content delivery model: broadcast and cable. Revision3, founded by Rose, Adelson, and Screen Savers segment producer David Prager, was established as a developer of television shows for the web, including Diggnation, a show much like Screen Savers that used stories found on Digg as discussion topics. Revision3 makes shows for a niche audience of tech and gaming fans, reflecting the general tendency of television to produce shows for smaller and smaller shares of the overall audience. Rose's Screen Savers cohost Albrecht soon joined Revision3 as well. Most of Revision3's shows are talk or news shows.
Jim Louderback succeeded Rose as CEO of Revision3, bringing media expertise from his stint as editor in chief of PC Magazine. Website redesigns followed, as well as the first shows not produced by Revision3 itself. Revision3 has begun producing shows for the sites affiliated with Gawker Media, including io9's Screen Savers–like show We Come from the Future.
Revision3 also produced Systm, beginning in May 2005, the day after Rose left G4. He hosted the show with Dan Huard for several episodes before it went on a temporary hiatus, returning with new hosts. Each episode of Systm, which varies in length, focuses on a single how-to topic, including building homemade DVRs and making homemade audio-video cable. After the 109th episode in 2009, Systm was folded into the tech news show Tekzilla (another show similar to The Screen Savers) and became a segment of that show.
In 2007, Rose cofounded Pownce, a social networking site, with Leah Culver and Daniel Burka, Digg's creative director. Launched invitation-only at first, Pownce received disproportionate media coverage due to Rose, the rumors that Digg was the subject of high-priced buyout offers (and the speculation that Pownce would be a similar success), and the site's similarity to Twitter, then the major social networking success story. Unlike most social networks, Pownce provided an option to purchase a “pro” account with extra features, which was a major part of its business model; in this it had more in common with LiveJournal and Flickr than Facebook or Twitter. Pownce was bought out by Six Apart, owners of Movable Type and Typepad, at the end of 2008, after less than a year of going public. It was promptly shuttered.
Although several offers were made to buy Digg, Rose and his partners accepted none of them, and a decline in revenue led to the need to lay off 37 percent of the staff in 2010. Adelson left after a disagreement. Rose ascribed Digg's relative failure—it still attracted millions of hits per month—to the popularity of Facebook and Twitter and to problems with its database system at a critical time. The company was eventually sold in several pieces—the brand and site were sold to Betaworks, much of the staff departed for The Washington Post, and $4 million in patents were sold to LinkedIn. Rose had resigned from Digg a year earlier, in March 2011, several months after Amazon's Matt Williams succeeded him as CEO, as he had succeeded Adelson.
Rose's first post-Digg project was Milk, a mobile app developer. In 2012, the Milk team joined Google to work on Google+, and that summer Rose left the Google+ team to work at Google Ventures. He remained a partner with Google Ventures until early 2015. Rose founded Oak, a meditation app, and Zero, a fasting-tracker app, in 2016 and 2017, respectively. In April 2017, he joined True Ventures as a partner. In the 2020s, Rose and several other investors created Proof Collective, a private group of digital art collectors. In 2022, Proof Collective’s digital art collection Moonbirds, raised more than $280 million.
Personal Life
A self-described serial entrepreneur, rock climber, product builder, and tea drinker, Rose sat on the board of the Tony Hawk Foundation. He is also a fan of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. In 2013, Rose married Darya Pino, who earned a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco in 2010 and blogs about food at Summer Tomato.
Bibliography
Hayward, Andrew. “Proof’s Kevin Rose on Building in the NFT Bear Market.” Decrypt, 30 Apr. 2023, decrypt.co/138446/proofs-kevin-rose-building-nft-bear-market-holy-shit-been-tough. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.
Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print.
Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print.
Sarno, David. “Digg Gets $28.7M Boost, Plans to Double Size, Go Global.” Los Angeles Times 23 Sept. 2008. Print.