A few data points on Digg from Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps

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).