Finally a Decision: Digg Isn't Selling (for Now)

I'm totally removed from the Valley and its water cooler gossip having been on the road for what feels like 25 years. The good thing about that is I'm getting a crash course on national entrepreneurship, ie life outside the echo-chamber. The bad news is I'm totally outside the Valley loop. But I wanted to give a shout out for Digg's new $28.7 million funding round.

I don't have tons of special insight here. I've mostly given the Digg guys some space after the book, because there were some mixed feelings on how they were portrayed. But my sense from knowing them well and seeing the flood of speculation over rumored acquisitions, was that they've spent much of 2008 staring at a fork in the road. As I've said before, they were the only company in my book that didn't raise a "recession round" late 2007/early 2008 which was to me a sign that they frankly were assessing their options and if a much rumored and talked about sale was going to happen.

People dismiss Digg all the time, but I think it's always been a site with great assets-- among them one of the most loyal communities I've seen anywhere on the web. And, it's one of the most powerful sites for routing traffic-- read dollars-- around online media. I think they've had a greater vision too; it's just taken a while to play out and they haven't always gotten credit for how well they have executed and continued to grow amid everyone saying they were over. And as my book discusses, a lot of those acquisition talks were killed by Digg not the other way around.

But they've struggled to really dive in fully to their Digg journey. To take off the floaties and cannonball into the deep end, to extend the lame metaphor. To raise big money; to build out a real business. And that's what's kept them in limbo: more of a web 2.0 force than Reddit and other like-companies, but less of one than Slide, Ning, Facebook etc. This announcement isn't so much about the cash, it's about the statement that Digg is -- finally-- really going for it. Hopefully, it's not too late.

From the release, Digg plans on:

• Hiring the staff needed to accelerate Digg product and feature      rollouts, including more ways to consume the over 16,000 stories and other      content submitted to Digg everyday, deeper category and topic content      views, and additional ways to discover and customize content;
• More than doubling the Digg staff within the next 12 months –      from 75 today to over 150 by December 2009;
• Kicking off Digg’s international growth strategy and plans to      expand Digg into other languages;
• Moving to a new larger corporate headquarters in San Francisco in early 2009 that more      than triples the existing Digg headquarters space;
• Investing in brand and market development programs;
• Investing in publisher analytics and more sophisticated tools for      publishers;

I care about both Kevin and Jay a great deal, and will always be grateful for the access and time and support they gave me as I was writing my book. I wish them continued luck. For what it's worth-- I think not selling may wind up being the best thing to happen to them and Digg. It's going to force them to become something greater, and I think both of them have it in them. I look forward to watching.