Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose is an internet entrepreneur and founder of the famous news bookmarking website Digg, Pownce, Milk and Revision3. ‘Dr. Bobby’ as he is nicknamed, is an astute investor as he invested in Foursquare, Twitter and even Facebook. Presently he is a venture partner at Google.

Rose was born on 21st February 1977 in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was very keen with computers since childhood. After graduating from Vo-Tech High School, he enrolled in the University of Nevada Las Vegas. At 19, while he was still in university, he took up a job at the Department of Energy’s Nevada Test Site. He dropped out of university in 1998 to begin a career that he was very passionate about. Rose felt that he was better suited for the Silicon Valley. And rightly so, he started making connections with some of the most important people of the Valley. Meanwhile he started hosting in a television show called ‘The Screen Savers’. Through this show he got the opportunity to interact with people like Steve Wozniak the co-founder of Apple computers. It was after he had heard stories of Steve that inspired him to start up something of his own. And that was when the idea of Digg hit him.

In 2004, Kevin Rose initiated ‘Digg’ with a capital of only 1200 dollars. Rose’s goals were not unimaginable. All he desired was to be able to pay his bills and have a nice little office. But luckily for him, success was quick. He was getting more than thousand visitors every month which allowed him ad traction. Rose had no choice but to make this venture his full time job. In a year’s time Digg’s traffic had peaked to 200,000. He was able to get 2.8 million dollars of venture capital. In five years the website had become one of the heavily visited sites in the U.S. Rose made guest appearances on R&D TV’s first episode Diggnation with Alex Albrecht as his co-host. He was also a contestant on a game show on NewTeeVee Live. He appeared on ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon’ in 2009 and again 2011. He also started podcasting in 2003 releasing the first episode that was called ‘thebroken’. As a perceptive investor, he invested in many companies including Twitter, Dailybooth, Gowalla, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, NGMOCO, Facebook, Square, OMGPOP, Formspring and Chomp.

Rose also established a micro-blogging website named ‘Pownce’ in 2007, which was bought by Six Apart, another blogging company. In 2011, he founded ‘Milk’ which concentrated on developing mobile apps. His current gig includes the giant search engine company Google, which he joined along with his team at Milk. He assumed the role of senior product manager for the company in March 2012. In May he transferred to Google Ventures as a venture partner. His profits from ‘Digg’ have done wonders for his bank account. According to business week Rose has earned more than 60 million dollars in just two years and this is just the beginning for him as he is only 36.