how two slackers become successful: true story of Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe
Last year, one of the most popular terms used was the 10,000-hour rule. It claims that to gain expertise in any area, 10,000 hours of practice is needed. However, this is not always the case as in the success of MySpace, one of the hottest social networking websites ever existed.
It all started when Tom Anderson entered his boss Chris DeWolfe’s office and said, “Dude, we’ve got to talk. I’ve been thinking about Friendster.” DeWolfe doesn’t always take what Anderson says seriously because he got way too many unrealistic ideas. However, for this one, the timing couldn’t be better. ResponseBase, the company both were working for was in a terrible situation at that moment. Naturally, the company decided to copy Friendster’s design, addming its unique template system - MySpace layouts and create another social networking website. Now it’s time for the slacking and serendipity to do the job.
First, let me explain how the serendipity works. Two new programmers were hired to fill the vacancy of the old guy who quit which he probably would regret for the rest of his life. One of the new guys, Nguyen, made a mistake. He left Web markup language in user submissions unblocked. Slacking then took its turn. Due to Nguyen’s mistake, thousands of teen were free to design their own pages. It might look ugly to software engineers, but it’s irresistibly beautiful to a teen.
A brand new world was born when Web designers are striped their power by the type of people who post home-made films of themselves doing silly things on YouTube. The first thing for DeWolfe and Anderson was to convince their parent company, eUniverse to stand by their side. Then they found the treasure of musical sampling by the admission of indie music community to MySpace. The reason why they did this was because the music community was the sole motivation for a large of their users at that time. The pair made their names in 2005 when eUniverse was purchased by Rupert Murdoch for $580 million.
The question now is whether Facebook is going to do MySpace what MySpace did to Friendster. For DeWolfe and Anderson, this is not even close to a happy ending. They hit the jackpot and became addicted to business. As slackers, they know it better than anyone else, having too much money is even worse than having too little.