alarm:clock

Social Networking - Thursday, July 15, 2004

Friendster - Profile

friendster logo.bmp

HQ: Mountain View, CA

Founded: 2003

Management: Company has replaced founder/CEO Jonathan Abrams with Scott Sassa, former NBC President. John Doerr, Bob Kagle, and Tim Koogle are on the board.

Investors: The company has raised a total of $13M at a $50M valuation from Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, Battery and individual investors. Seed round came from Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linked-in and Roger Lee a VC with Battery Investors. Company passed on Google's $30M offer. Gulp.

Business Model: Friendster is currently the largest of the social networks with upwards of 8M members, however, the company has seen a drop-off in members and a leveling of traffic. It's also unclear how many of the 8M are active users. At fund raising time, Friendster had 1.7M unique visitors and traffic has fallen to about a million in the summer of 2004. The dip could be attributed to: slow site, excessive censorship, competition, or a passing trend.

Competitors: Match.com, Orkut, AOL ICQ Universe, Microsoft Wallop, Yahoo Groups and soon to be launched Yahoo products.

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