Where are they now? How early Myspace founders shaped LA tech

Of all the early tech startups in LA, Myspace remains the company that still lingers on the collective conscious of the city. A precursor to Facebook, the site pioneered the social media scene and had a successful pivot towards becoming a media sharing network. But like other early technology companies, the beginning years of Myspace nurtured entrepreneurs and engineers that went on to play vital roles in the future of LA tech.

 

“Myspace rose and fell, but even its failure helped,” said Professor Lee Schneider in his book, Chronicle of a Startup Town. “When failed ventures exploded like celestial stars, valuable engineering talent was released into the ecosystem, and those people started their own companies.”

 

Launched in 2003, Myspace was primarily founded by Tom Anderson, Chris DeWolfe, and Josh Berman with aid from eUniverse CEO Brad Greenspan. By 2009 all four of these founding members had left the company, but have remained key figures in the tech community:

Everyone remembers Tom as their first friend on Myspace, but what is your blurry, white t-shirt clad friend up to now? After Myspace was sold to News Corp in 2005, there was reportedly friction between Anderson and the News Corp executives. Anderson left in 2009 and reportedly joined RocketFrog Interactive three years later as an adviser, however, he has never publicly confirmed his role with the company. After his departure, the site no longer made him new users' first friend. Instead, they added a new feature called T.O.M. (Today on Myspace.) With a large Twitter following, Tom has found success in his passion for landscape photography.

 

DeWolfe is accredited with the original concept of Myspace and was the leading force in integrating music into the platform. In 2005, he was in talks with Mark Zuckerberg about acquiring Facebook but rejected the young founder’s $75 million asking price. He served as CEO until 2009 when he stepped down from the position while continuing to be a strategic adviser to the company. A year later, he purchased a social gaming company with former Myspace colleagues Aber Whitcomb (pictured right) and Colin Digiaro (now CEO of Woven.) The company made key acquisitions within the industry and became SGN (Social Gaming Network) where DeWolfe and Whitcomb serve as CEO and CTO respectively. DeWolfe is also on the board of directors for the LA County Museum of Art and LA-based Talenthouse.

 

Berman was one of the four key players in the early years of Myspace. He was replaced as COO by Amit Kapur (now president of AOL publisher platforms and CEO of Gravity) in 2008 at which point he became president of Slingshot Labs, a Santa Monica incubator that built and developed startups for News Corporation. In 2010, he founded BeachMint, an e-commerce fashion site, where he also acted as CEO. In September of 2014, he began The Lucky Group which blended BeachMint’s e-commerce platform with Lucky Magazine’s editorial advice on shopping. "LA has an incredible talent pool of content producers, marketers, developers and distribution partners which enable Los Angeles to be an ideal spot to grow a technology company," said Berman. "Also the entrepreneur program at USC was a huge help as we grew talent at Myspace and USC was where most of the founding team attended college.

 

Greenspan had found plenty of success before he got involved with Myspace’s founding in 2003. In 1998, he founded eUniverse which went public in 1999 and helped to create and market the the Myspace website. eUniverse (which later became Intermix Media) provided the young company with all of its programmers and early resources. In 2006, Greenspan launched a class action lawsuit against News Corp after the purchase of MySpace, claiming that they undervalued the site by $19.7 billion dollars, thus defrauding Intermix investors. The case was thrown out by a judge but resurfaced in 2010. Greenspan has remained a polarizing figure in the tech industry, and has been active in angel investing, including a lucrative investment in BigFishGames.