Meeting MySpace's Chris DeMarco
Posted Sunday March 5, 2006 in Entrepreneurship
If you’ve joined MySpace, as something like one out of five Americans have, then your first new friend there was MySpace co-founder Tom. Less prominent is MySpace’s CEO, Chris DeMarco; but he’s still the guy with the big title, and, even better, he’s a Marshall alum. Best of all, I got to meet him on Saturday, when he came to speak at the Greif Center Networking Day.
In case you haven’t figured it out from the small collection of articles here, I’m a big believer in poking around and finding out exactly what it is the customer really wants. Turns out Chris is too. Two years ago, MySpace was just another social networking site, in a world filled with Friendster and Tribe.net and LinkedIn and the Google-owned (and bizarrely Brazilian-infested) Orkut; today, MySpace is sold for $500 million while the VCs can’t even unload Friendster for $5 million, and Tribe.net is trying to be either Craigslist or Flickr. Clearly, MySpace is doing something right.
Chris was clear that MySpace’s entire strategy, from the beginning, was to listen to what features users wanted, not what features engineers wanted to implement (don’t worry, Chris isn’t down on engineers; when asked what he would’ve done differently, he answered “hire more engineers earlier”). MySpace’s feature set reflects this; while lacking many of the bells and whistles of a LinkedIn or Orkut, or even a Flickr or Garageband.com, MySpace has just enough of everything that everyone’s there and everyone’s using it.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen tells how many of the most disruptive innovations of the past 30 years have come not from people figuring out how to provide more and more services using more and more technology, but from companies that used less technology and fewer resources to provide consumers who were overserved by existing offerings with the less-complex, less-featureful products that these consumers really wanted to buy. Granted, MySpace is horribly complex and a user interface designer’s worst nightmare; it still seems to have just enough photo sharing, and just enough blogging, and just enough of everything to suck users in and keep them there. Contrast this with the complex friend-management tools of a LinkedIn or the photostream and tagging of Flickr; many consumer segments are clearly overserved by the power of these tools.
Christensen suggests that companies that launch disruptive innovations that target overserved customers do so using a mix of bold leadership and close contact with a new and unappreciated niche within — or beyond — the existing customer base. Chris showed us a MySpace that did both, by moving with resolve into social networking when others didn’t believe in the technology, and by staying close to customers, listening carefully to feedback and building features based on that feedback. It’s a marketing-, vision, leadership-, and engineering-powered success story.
After his presentation, I walked up to the front of the room and waited my turn/fought through the crowd to speak to Chris. (Everybody likes being the center of attention. Don’t be shy about trying to meet a speaker.) I asked him how, immediately pre-start, the six members of the MySpace founding team ensured they shared a vision and then split up their ownership pie — a topic which particularly interests me, given that I’m in the midst of that phase for a new company and also that I very painfully survived doing both of those exactly wrong in a previous company. Chris spoke, with conviction, of how he simply trusted his partners because of their long association, and how that long association had lead to a commonality of vision. Of course, I think those are exactly the wrong things to count on when starting a company — and I’ll probably write more on that later — but Chris is the one with a $500 million company. Or maybe it was just that Chris understood the market for his idea, before it became a site, and delivered the product — the business plan — that his partners needed to buy in.
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