The Bebo Billions

Summary

The Times Tech Podcast

Episode: The Bebo Billions

Date: September 24, 2024

Host: Danny Fortson (San Francisco), Katie Prescott (London)
Guests: Michael and Xochi Birch, Jim Sheinman (Friendster founding team)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the origins and astonishing success—and ultimate downfall—of Bebo, one of the pioneering social networks from the early 2000s. Host Danny Fortson interviews Michael and Xochi Birch in their lavish San Francisco home to chronicle how they rode Silicon Valley’s first social media wave and sold Bebo for $850 million in cash to AOL at just the right moment. It’s a story about timing, viral growth, and the tectonic shifts of the social media world—told with warmth, candor, and a heavy dose of nostalgia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Origin Story: From Humble Beginnings to Viral Success

• Early Careers and Life Struggles:

  • Michael and Xochi Birch lived ordinary lives in the UK, working IT jobs, before relocating to California in the dot-com downturn (02:55–09:14).
  • “Three years later, hadn't made a penny. Still didn't.” — Michael Birch on early startup failures (08:41).
  • Relocated to Michael’s in-laws’ Pittsburgh home with young children, scraping by on freelance gigs.

• Friendster Sparks an Idea:

  • Michael Birch is directly inspired by Friendster’s viral nature and patents, experimenting with Ringo.com—a lookalike with a few tweaks (10:38–12:42).
  • “It was exactly a Friendster, called me on.” — Michael Birch on Ringo.com (11:31).
  • Early viral growth, but they failed to retain users, and operational costs quickly outpaced revenue.

Startup Exits, Big Breaks, and Viral Growth

• Selling Ringo.com and Building Birthday Alarm:

  • Turned down MySpace’s mixed offer, eventually sold Ringo.com to Tickle for about $2 million (15:30–16:06).
  • Birthday Alarm is launched as a viral reminder service, explodes with the addition of an address book importer.
  • “It does what it says on the tin, right?” — Michael Birch on the simplicity of Birthday Alarm (17:11).
  • Viral loop: Users imported email contacts (willingly entering their passwords), leading to exponential growth.
  • “24 hours later, we'd added 100,000 new members in one day... and then we were adding 150,000 a day.” — Michael Birch (18:05)
  • Quickly became profitable by charging for digital greeting cards, eventually reaching $4.5 million annually (20:12).

• Self-Funding and Risk:

  • “We took a reverse mortgage on our flat in Richmond. And we were basically living off of our flat.” — Xochi Birch highlighting the risks they took (20:28).

• The Valley's Viral Wizard:

  • Jim Sheinman (Friendster founding team) credits Michael Birch as a viral marketing pioneer before the concept even had a name (21:51).
  • “He was like the wizard of viral marketing. He understood that better than anybody else before... that needs to happen.” — Jim Sheinman (21:51).

The Bebo Meteor: Timing Is Everything

• From Bedroom Startup to World-Beater:

  • Inspired by Friendster’s struggles, the Birches launch Bebo, combining technical knowhow and viral marketing wizardry.
  • Bebo’s true innovation was rapid, viral growth—especially outside the US in markets like UK, Ireland, and New Zealand (04:23–05:43).
  • “Bebo...briefly held the title as the biggest website in Britain—bigger than Google.” — Danny Fortson (04:23).

• The Legendary Exit:

  • Sold Bebo to AOL in 2008 for $850 million; the Birches owned 70%, walking away with $600 million in cash (05:36).
  • “[AOL] sold Bebo...the price, I think it might be a dollar.” — Michael Birch on Bebo’s quick collapse under AOL (06:45).

• Life after Bebo:

  • The Birches transformed an old brick building into San Francisco’s first British-style tech elite members’ club and became prolific angel investors (notably Pinterest) (05:43).

Social Wealth and Transformation

• Sudden Billionaires:

  • Xochi reflects candidly on how wealth changed social dynamics:
    • “People treat me differently and I think to myself, what is going on? And then I'm like, oh, now I remember. I made a lot of money in a short period of time.” (07:03)
  • Michael jokes about Bebo's notorious side:
    • “Arguably the single biggest repository of illustrated cock and balls ever recorded.” (07:11)

• Looking Back at Social Media’s First Acts:

  • Friendster’s meteoric rise and fall created space for MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo, as well as legions of copycats (“Hundreds. And some of them literally just copied our code...you'd see, like, copyright Friendster on their website.” — Jim Sheinman (11:01)).

Viral Growth Techniques of the Early Internet

• Viral Loops Before Social Media:
  • “Any social media app worth its salt these days requests access to your contacts. But back then, importing someone’s entire address book was pretty new. And an astounding number of people simply agreed, handing over not just the contents...but their email passwords.” — Danny Fortson (17:17–18:56).
  • The Birches’ implementation of viral growth prefigures growth hacking and referral marketing that would become standard in tech.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Silicon Valley’s Hit-and-Miss Nature:

  • “[We] were the last train to leave the station. All hell brokers.” — Jim Sheinman (05:36)

• On Social Status and Sudden Wealth:

  • “People treat me differently and I think to myself, what is going on? And then I'm like, oh, now I remember. I made a lot of money in a short period of time.” — Xochi Birch (07:03)

• On The Absurdity of Early Social Media Growth:

  • “We were much bigger than MySpace at the time.” — Michael Birch, on turning down MySpace's acquisition (16:06)

• On Handing Over Data:

  • “People would give you their passwords. They would. Yeah, we were a little bit surprised. We didn't store them. We were nice. We didn’t do anything wrong, you know, bad with them. But we certainly could have if we wanted to.” — Michael Birch (18:21)

• On the Wizardry of Viral Marketing:

  • “He was like the wizard of viral marketing. He understood that better than anybody else before…” — Jim Sheinman, on Michael Birch (21:51)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:24]: Danny Fortson introduces the Birches and their story
• [03:40]: Entering the Birch home on Billionaires’ Row
• [05:36]: The Bebo sale: “They left with a GDP of a small nation.”
• [07:03]: Xochi Birch on sudden wealth and its social effects
• [11:01]: Friendster inspires viral copycats; Michael on Ringo.com
• [16:06]: Michael turns down MySpace, sells to Tickle
• [18:05]: Birthday Alarm’s viral explosion
• [20:12]: Transition from hobby site to high-profit business
• [21:51]: Jim Sheinman praises Michael as viral marketing pioneer
• [22:26]: Teaser for next episode—Bebo’s global ascent and AOL’s disastrous acquisition

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Tone and Style

Danny’s narration is warm and candid, with a British dry wit and a humility that keeps the interviewee at the center. The Birches are relaxed, open, and occasionally self-deprecating. The conversations blend nostalgia for the early web with sharp insights into how viral growth, timing, and simple tech made (and unmade) fortunes overnight.

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Conclusion

The episode offers a rich and evocative rundown of the earliest days of social media, highlighting how Bebo’s meteoric rise and sale encapsulated the Silicon Valley dream: a mix of risk, quick pivots, viral growth, and extraordinary timing. For anyone interested in the roots of today’s tech giants—and the people who got out just before the world changed—this episode is packed with fascinating detail, telling quotes, and lessons in both ambition and humility.

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Next Episode Teaser:
Bebo starts from the Birches’ bedroom and goes global—before it all comes crashing down as the social media industry explodes and the Birches escape in the nick of time.

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(Ads, intros, and podcast recommendations were omitted for clarity and focus.)

Transcript

[Brooke Devard]

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[Danny Fortson]

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[ServiceNow Sponsor]

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[Danny Fortson]

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[Danny Fortson]

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Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for [e-mail] My first job out of

[Danny Fortson]

uni was for a company called Sparks.com, a startup boasting of being the world's largest online paper greeting card store. The average sale size was one card, which was worth a couple bucks. Once you found a card, we'd then ship it out to you, so postage alone eliminated any profit. But back then I didn't know any better. Like so many other 20 somethings, I was entranced by this thing called the Internet which appeared to be minting overnight billionaires and changing just about how everything worked. I showed up to work in cargo shorts. Yes, cargo shorts. My desk was a painted door set on a pair of sawhorses. I played a lot of table football. It was great until I was laid off along with about a third of the company. As the stock market imploded, Sparks.com's venture capital backers turned off the money spigot. And as chance would have it, it was around then that Michael and Xochist living across the bay from my dingy two bedroom apartment, we're working on a website that may very well have hastened the demise of my first employer and put me out of a job. It was called Birthday Alarm. An astoundingly simple idea. It was a birthday reminder service. Turns out it was wildly profitable. Perched on one of those impossibly steep. Only in San Francisco hills is a stretch of a few blocks of lavish, spectacular homes. It's called, rather unimaginatively, Billionaires row. Birch Castle, an imposing five story stone walled estate the color of milk chocolate. Definitely belongs. It is the home of Michael and Xochi Burch. A few months ago, I showed up at their door to talk to the Birches about the early days of social networking and what will definitely go down as one of the most extraordinary chapters in the story of an industry that has changed, well, just about everything.

[Brooke Devard]

Hello?

[Danny Fortson]

Hi, it's Danny. Hi there.

[Brooke Devard]

Just go ahead and push the door.

[Michael Burch]

Okay.

[Danny Fortson]

Hey, how's it going?

[Xochi Burch]

It's going well. We're leaving tomorrow to Chile. Yeah, I know.

[Michael Burch]

Hello.

[Danny Fortson]

Hey. Oh. So cozy in here. The front door of their house sits at the bottom of the hill, so when you walk in, you have to trudge up a winding staircase with banisters the girth of a boa constrictor. Your reward for making it to the top, Sweeping views of the golden gate bridge. And if you're thirsty from the climb, you can stop at the Birch Castle pub, which they've assembled from two pubs that they bought in Britain, dismantled, shipped 3,000 miles, and then mashed together to create a proper British boozer right in the comfort of their own home.

[Michael Burch]

Yeah, so it's sort of British without being overly.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah, it's not too over the top.

[Michael Burch]

Yeah.

[Danny Fortson]

Although that bar does look original. What have you got on tap here of London Pride?

[Michael Burch]

London pride.

[Brooke Devard]

Yeah.

[Michael Burch]

Keep it real.

[Danny Fortson]

This was not my first time at the Birches. They liked to entertain, to throw parties, and not long after I arrived to San Francisco, they had one at their house for all the British tech refugees who had washed up in San Francisco. It was a great day. But as my wife and I left, we marveled not only at the grandiosity of it all, but the source of it. Bebo, chances are you may not have heard of the company. That's because it was most popular outside of America way back in 2008. Though it was the number one social network in Ireland and New Zealand in its heyday, it briefly held the title as the biggest website and Britain bigger than Google. And the Birches, through a combination of luck, cunning and timing, sold Beebo at the perfect time in 2008 to AOL. The price, $850 million in cash. The Burches, who owned 70% of the company walked away with $600 million. And this bears repeating, that was cash, obviously. The Bebo sale transformed the Birch's life.

[Friendster/Jim Sheinman]

We were the last train to leave the station. All hell brokers.

[Michael Burch]

They left with a GDP of a small nation.

[Danny Fortson]

They transformed an old brick building on the edge of the financial district into San Francisco's first British style members club whose membership is a who's who of the tech elite. They have also invested in more than 120 startups. Their biggest hit, Pinterest. The Birches were amongst its first investors way back when it was worth just 5 million. I'm going to tell you the Bebo story because it perfectly encapsulates Silicon Valley, a place where timing is everything. In this case, it was the foundational moment of the social media revolution. And that is what is so crazy about the Bebo story. It wasn't the next big thing. In fact, it was the exact opposite for AOL. It was a disaster. In June 2010, just two years after the takeover that was meant to lead AOL's charge into the social media melee, it quietly sold Bevo to a small investment company in Los Angeles.

[Michael Burch]

The price, I think it might be a dollar.

[Danny Fortson]

I'm Danny Fortson, west coast correspondent for the Sunday Times, and this is Tales of Silicon Valley.

[Michael Burch]

Who knew that was gonna happen? Who knew that we were gonna be this thing that was that big?

[Danny Fortson]

Episode 2 the Bebo Billions People treat

[Xochi Burch]

me differently and I think to myself, what is going on? And then I'm like, oh, now I remember. I made a lot of money in a short period of time, making it

[Michael Burch]

arguably the single biggest repository of illustrated cock and balls ever recorded.

[Danny Fortson]

Sochi Burch grew up in Pittsburgh, an unlovely industrial suburb about 40 miles east of San Francisco.

[Xochi Burch]

It's a very small town, I think it was called Pittsburgh because there's a steel mill there as well as a Dow Chemical plant. So there's a lot of jobs there.

[Danny Fortson]

After her first year at university, she was selected to spend a four month semester in London. One evening she ended up at a

[Xochi Burch]

student pub and it was the cheapest place to buy beer.

[Danny Fortson]

She met a funny, impossibly skinny Englishman.

[Xochi Burch]

He offered to buy me a drink and he knew what I was drinking. I should have thought that was creepy, but I, I was really happy.

[Danny Fortson]

You. How do you know what she was drinking?

[Michael Burch]

Because I saw her the night before.

[Danny Fortson]

Oh, so you were probably like surveilling. After uni, they got married and so she moved to Britain. It was 1994. She got a job at the same company where Michael worked, where they had a graduate intake program and she learned to code on the job. They worked there for the next four years and lived a fairly ordinary British life. They had their first kid in 1999, the height of the dot com boom. And when Xochi went off from maternity leave, Michael decided he'd quit too, and threw himself full time into creating websites for companies. That and messing around with his own startup ideas. How hard could it be? He promised that if in three months he wasn't making money, he'd go get another job.

[Michael Burch]

Three years later, hadn't made a penny. Still didn't.

[Danny Fortson]

Frustrated, and with the four of them just squeaking by on Michael's freelancer gigs, they decided to move to California, which at the time was dramatically cheaper than London. Even so, they had no money.

[Xochi Burch]

We had to move in with my parents in the same house where I grew up in. So Michael and I, with our two young kids, they were less than one and three at the time. My parents were very happy to have us come back and move into their house. They actually vacated their master bedroom so that Michael and I and our two kids could stay there.

[Danny Fortson]

It was not the most auspicious time to move to the heart of the global tech industry. It was 2002, and the great Internet revolution appeared to be over. Hundreds of billions of dollars had evaporated overnight as the dot com bubble burst. No one was starting companies. It was around then that a little website called Friendster launched. It was about to change everything. And the Birches were watching.

[Friendster/Jim Sheinman]

And each person on Friendster has a personal network, which are all the people you're connected to through your friends and their friends and their friends.

[Danny Fortson]

Jonathan Abrams, the Canadian coder behind Friendster, was frustrated by online dating sites. He set out to build a place that would not only make it easier to find a mate, but but to connect with other people. He launched it on March 22, 2002. It was the first social network. So new, in fact, that he patented the concept. One of the first people he asked to play around with it was a marketing guy he knew called Jim Sheinman.

[Friendster/Jim Sheinman]

I was married with a couple of kids, but this woman who was working with me was single. And I asked her to check out Friendster for a weekend. And I asked her, so how was it? And she said, changed my life. I was like, you know, back in 2003, you never said that about a website in a weekend. So I asked her what happened? She said, well, I met a long Lost friend I hadn't talked to in 10 years. And we're gonna have coffee next week. And I got a date for the two weeks from now. I was like, okay, this is a big idea.

[Danny Fortson]

Shymon was about to take a job at another startup, Google, but was sucked in by Friendster. He was one of its first employees. The site quickly hit 1 million, then 4 million, then 10 million users. Next to Facebook's 2.7 billion users of today, that sounds laughably small. But back then, a few million people using this new thing was nothing short of phenomenal.

[Friendster/Jim Sheinman]

We were growing like you'd never seen before. There was maybe one or two other companies, a contact sharing site that was doing something, but nothing like this. And then there were hundreds of copycats, right? Hundreds. And some of them literally just copied our code. We would look at these competitors and they would forget to not take off the code. And you'd see, like, copyright Friendster on their website.

[Danny Fortson]

One of those copycats was Michael Birch. He called his lookalike Ringo.com.

[Michael Burch]

it was exactly a Friendster called me on.

[Danny Fortson]

So was that literally you saw Friendster go up and then you immediately put up Ringo or how did it work?

[Michael Burch]

Yeah, friend. A good friend of mine, still a good friend, Morgan Southern, had sent me an email and said, oh, check out this website, Friendsler. And we were, at the time, we were just doing Birthday Alarm.

[Danny Fortson]

And this is new. This is when it was new.

[Michael Burch]

Yeah, it was relatively new. I mean, it kind of grew quite quickly. And so I looked at it and I was like, wow, this is great. This is like the coolest new thing I've ever seen. And so I was like, we should build one. And so he actually owned the domain name ringo.com. so I did it with him and of Sochi, and my brother at the time was involved as well. So less than two weeks later, after seeing it, we launched Ringo.com. so, yes, it was a copy of Friendster, but I didn't want to just, like, copy it entirely. And so I looked at Friendster for like, a couple of hours, and they said, oh, I'm not gonna look at it again, but I'm gonna build something

[Danny Fortson]

inspired by it, right?

[Michael Burch]

And so I didn't look at it. And then I was about to go live with and I was like, just gonna have one last look at Friendster. Make sure I don't miss anything too important. And then I looked at it and

[Danny Fortson]

it's like, oh, you have to be

[Michael Burch]

able to comment on one another's pages. They were called Testimonials. On Friendster. I was like, I think that one's really important. I'm going to put it live.

[Danny Fortson]

Like Friendster, Ringo took off. But for the Burches, they were still lean times. They had managed to move out of Sochi's parents and were renting an apartment in the bedroom community of Walnut Creek. The Birches shared a tiny office with two lawyers and an accountant, all in their 60s. It was quintessential American suburbia. And to complete the picture, they bought a used minivan to get them and their kids around town.

[Michael Burch]

We thought. We thought we were living the American dream. When we got that, we really did.

[Danny Fortson]

Ringo grew quickly, too quickly, actually. Their servers couldn't handle the traffic. Not long after launching, Ringo notched up more than 400,000 users. Burch would hastily buy new servers, drive over to a building in Fremont and plug them in in a desperate attempt to keep the site from crashing again. Today those numbers sound tiny, but back then, it was something. But while Ringle was very good at attracting users, it was very bad at getting them to stay. People seemed enthused by the idea and then let down by the experience. Meanwhile, their server costs were outstripping their income. Something had to give. Around this time in 2003, while the Birches were toiling away in Walnut Creek, Mark Zuckerberg had just begun attending classes at Harvard University, 3,000 miles away. He would not launch Facebook for another year. Friendster was the biggest social network, but it wasn't going to hold that crown for long. The biggest threat was MySpace.

[Michael Burch]

And I just looked at their website and I was like, it's probably the worst website I've ever seen.

[Danny Fortson]

Really?

[Michael Burch]

Yeah. And I just thought their website was terrible. I thought it looked like geocities.

[Danny Fortson]

MySpace took off like a rocket. But in its early days, Ringo was bigger. The Birches, however, were struggling to pay the bills. They needed help. So they showed up at a conference in Berkeley for startups working on dating and social media websites. All their rivals knew about Ringo, but no one knew who was behind it. And here they were, a quirky Englishman and his American wife, driving up in their Dodge minivan, which was very intimidating.

[Michael Burch]

Yeah.

[Danny Fortson]

Did you have business cards or.

[Michael Burch]

No.

[Danny Fortson]

What I would have paid to be a fly on the wall. All the would be kings of social media, rubbing shoulders and having no idea what they were about to unleash. It was quite a day. The Burches met two people at that event who made offers to buy Ringo. One was from a company called Tickle. The other was Ivillage which back in the day was a very popular site.

[Michael Burch]

They were a big deal. They were more of a women's network I think. And then we were in negotiations to sell to Tickle and then we had a call from MySpace. I remember this weird conversation with Tom Tom from MySpace. The three co founders actually were on the call and they were trying to buy it and I was. But they made a decent offer. I think they offered half a million in MySpace stock and half a million in cash, which again pretty cheap for social network today. But back then when there was two people working in 120 square foot office, it felt decent. But then I just looked, I just remember MySpace. We were much bigger than MySpace at the time.

[Danny Fortson]

So he turned them down and sold instead to Tickle the price, about $2 million in cash and stock. The Ringo sale was, in Silicon Valley parlance, the Birch's first exit. But it rankled them because they felt like they had no choice but to sell. And they had no choice because they had no money. Which is where Birthday Alarm comes in. Their birthday reminder service. For Michael and Xochi, it was the key to pretty much everything that happened thereafter. Really everything. The idea was simple. Most people only know the birthdays of their immediate family and a couple close friends. If you sign up to Birthday Alarm, it would ask you if you wanted to email your friends to ask their birthdays. The site would then send out an automated message asking for their email addresses on your behalf, saying something like, I want to be reminded of your birthday. Can you tell me the date? It was an easy ask. Lots of people said yes.

[Michael Burch]

It does what it says on the tin, right?

[Danny Fortson]

So it just sends out, we don't

[Michael Burch]

actually have a tin, but it does do what it would say on the tin.

[Danny Fortson]

Every friend that said yes would get the same prompt that you had, asking if they too wanted to know their friends birthdays. And on and on it went. In the business, this is called viral growth. An idea or product that spreads through person to person contact like a virus. As opposed to relying on flashy and expensive marketing campaigns, Birthday Alarm was growing. But in 2003 it exploded when Michael came up with an address book importer. Any social media app worth its salt these days requests access to your contacts. But back then, importing someone's entire address book was pretty new. And an astounding number of people simply agreed, handing over not just the contents of their little black books, but their email passwords. Burch coded it over the weekend. I'll let him explain what happened next.

[Michael Burch]

It went Live, I think Sunday night, 24 hours later, we'd added 100,000 new members in one day. We'd gone from 10,000 to 100,000. And then I think over that week it climbed a little bit. And then we were adding 150,000 a day.

[Danny Fortson]

And how did that function work?

[Michael Burch]

You just asked someone at the time, it was Hotmail in Yahoo. This was not before Gmail, but certainly before Gmail was anything big. It would ask for their Hotmail email and Hotmail password and then we would behind the scenes log in as them. Like we'd fake a browser session, effectively log in as them, scrape all their contacts, display all their contacts on our website to them and say, do you want select which people would give you their passwords? They would. Yeah, we were a little bit surprised. We didn't store them. We were nice. We didn't do anything wrong, you know, bad with them. But we certainly could have if we wanted to.

[Danny Fortson]

Yeah.

[Michael Burch]

And then they'd select the friends they wanted to invite. We didn't automatically invite them. The ones we selected, we'd then invite them. And so people, at that point, they were inviting 100 people on average from Hotmail and Yahoo. And we just assumed that Hotmail and Yahoo would work out that this one IP address from our server was hitting them thousands of times a day with different account details and they would just like block the IP address. So we were super excited that we were now growing 150,000 members a day, thinking the next day it would stop. And it never did, ever. So it just carried on. So we added, I think over 40 million members in one year to our website, which was crazy.

[Danny Fortson]

Keep in mind, these were still the very early days of the web. The days of Google and Facebook building empires based on granular personal data were still a distant possibility. Google was still private and Facebook not even a glimmer in a teenage Mark Zuckerberg's eye. Birthday alarm, however, was growing like a weed. But it wasn't making them any money until they started charging people to send electronic greeting cards when they received birthday reminders. The floodgates opened almost overnight. The Birches were bringing in millions.

[Michael Burch]

When we started charging for greeting cards, we went from 10,000amonth to 10,000 a day. So we made 300,000amonth and that continued. So we ended up peaking at around four and a half million a year revenue with just the two of us working from an office.

[Xochi Burch]

And I think what's relevant is that we had been self funded until then. We took a reverse mortgage on Our flat in Richmond. And we were basically living off of our flat.

[Danny Fortson]

And just like that, way back in 2003, the Burch's had come up with not one, but two very profitable viral websites. Suddenly they were living large. They left Walnut Creek and bought a house near Alamo Square, a hilltop park in San Francisco that sits across from the Painted Ladies. The multicolored houses made famous by the sitcom Full House.

[Xochi Burch]

It was actually a very kind of good life. We could have gone on like that for years. But Michael decided not to.

[Danny Fortson]

You see, for all their success, neither birthday alarm nor Ringo held a candle to Friendster. Abrams had raised a bunch of money from Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists. His little website was national news. Social networking was officially a thing. But cracks were already appearing in the Friendster edifice. The site was buggy. Pages would take forever to load. Abrams was shunted aside and replaced by a new CEO, who was replaced by another CEO, who was replaced by another CEOs. Friendster Star was fading, which left an opening, an opening for a new rival called Bebo.

[Friendster/Jim Sheinman]

You know, Michael never got the credit that he should have, but he was like the wizard of viral marketing. He understood that better than anybody else before. Today, like today, we have growth hackers and viral marketing experts, but when it wasn't even a term, a term of art and a career, he was the best at that. I had a vision of Michael wearing. I really, I talked to him about it. Like I said, let's put a wizard hat on you and the wizard robe and you're in the front of Forbes, you know, front of Sunday Times. Like that needs to happen.

[Danny Fortson]

Next week on Tales of Silicon Valley, Bebo starts from the Birch's bedroom and goes global. It becomes the top website in countries all over the English speaking world. Before it all comes crashing down, the social media industry takes off and the Birches, they get out in the nick of time. Tales of Silicon Valley was written and narrated by me, Danny Fortson, with production by Chica Ayers at Rethink Audio. Matt hall is the executive producer for Wireless Studios. It was a Wireless Studios production for Times Newspapers. And one more thing, if you enjoy this series, head over to my other podcasts, Danny in the Valley, where you can hear interviews with everyone from Bill Gates and Marc Andreessen to the anonymous startup founder working on what they hope will be the next big thing. That's Danny in the Valley. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Danny Fortson]

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