Kevin Rose is presenting at Ryan Carson’s Future of Web Apps in San Francisco. He spent quite a bit of time covering the functionality of Digg, and briefly shared a few interesting data points:
- Starting in October 2004, Kevin funded the initial build of Digg by himself, paying co-founder Owen Byrne (who he found through eLance), $10/hour for his development work. Then, and still now, Kevin acted as the product architect of the service.
- After launching via Kevin’s blog, the growth of the service led to increased capital requirements to build a scalable back-end. One of Textamerica’s founders, and friend of Kevin, provided angel funding to the tune of $50K.
- The rapid growth continued and required some “serious” funding – matetializing as a $2.8M investment led by Greylock’s David Sze.
Digg hit scalability issues upon the launch of version 2.0. Throwing in a bunch of servers did not have any effect, it was necessary to re-architecture Digg’s database layer to optimize it.- Digg has 15 employees, of which 3 PHP developers and 4 guys in charge of operations and scalability. There is a cool picture of the whole crew on the Digg site.
More: As usual, Wikipedia has quite a complete coverage of Digg, and Richard McManus recently published an interesting interview of Kevin (part 1, part 2).
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