Following the post on Michael Birch and Bebo, latest news is the Birch’s wife will not allow him to buy a new car until the sale to AOL completes in a month or so. But he is allowed to invest in new companies and has six under his belt. He might even challenge our old friend Reid “Glug” Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, but needs to put a few naughts in place first.
First step as an entrepreneur was to find a like-minded wife, Xochi who came from The Bay. After two failures they developed Birthday Alarms and made $10,000 a month.
Birch (37) was inspired by his first sight of Friendster and 13 days later he had launched Ringo which was sold for “single digit millions”. This gave him the cash to start Bebo and build it before he raised VC funding. All the time they “listened to the community to see what they liked and were asking for and responded to them”.
Birch confirms that his family (Birchs and brother Paul) own 70% of Bebo so after the VC’s cut of 15%, some 15% is left for the option pool.
Bring Birch back to his roots in Cambridge should be the cry of the Cambridge Cluster and let us build a social network cluster in Cambridge.
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