Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg, and not a co-founder, a Digg PR rep recently informed us, when we mistakenly described Rose as a "co-founder" in a blog post.
It didn't strike us as weird or unusual until we heard from a guy who claims he is Digg's co-founder, and he wants a little credit for it.
Owen Byrne, a Canadian developer (and self-described Digg co-founder), wrote in to clarify that he's not some hard-up engineer in a developing nation -- he's got an MBA and owns equity in Digg.
The issue came up when Rose, while speaking at a conference last week, advised aspiring entrepreneurs to outsource development to help cut costs. Rose said he considered hiring a developer in India or a developer in Nova Scotia, and ultimately went with the guy in Canada, which saved him buckets of money.
"As the guy Kevin outsourced [web development] to, it's great to see
Kevin bring it up over and over, but never bother to mention my name," wrote Byrne, in response to a recent Epicenter story.
By some accounts, Byrne is widely acknowledged as a co-founder. Thomas Hawk, a blogger and photographer, says Kevin Rose personally notified him that he'd made a mistake when he neglected to describe Owen Byrne as co-founder in a blog post he wrote a couple years ago. But most media mentions -- including the famous BusinessWeek cover story on Rose -- refer to Rose as the founder of Digg.
A Digg spokesperson wasn't available to comment.
Digg's paternity case isn't all that unique in Silicon Valley, where budding entrepreneurs trample over each other to take credit for the newest, greatest thing. Hubert Chang, an unknown computer scientist, recently claimed he was the third co-founder of Google, and that he helped design the search engine in 1997 with Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
"It was an intensive and interesting collaboration," said Chang on a bizarre YouTube video.
Although Chang claims he was introduced to Brin and Page through a Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani, the professor said it wasn't true.
"To the best of my knowledge, his claims about being a founder of Google, coming up with the name and/or the business plan etc, are completely unfounded in reality. I am sure I would have noticed a third founder, if one existed, since I was working closely with Larry and Sergey at Stanford the time," Motwani told InformationWeek.
And after YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.7 billion, a third YouTube co-founder popped up out of nowhere. Jawed Karim, the third founder, said he didn't begrudge YouTube poster boys Chad Hurley and Steven Chen their fame and fortune, but he wanted a little credit.
"It took the three of us," Karim told USA Today.
That may be true, but Karim doesn't get a mention on the official company bio.
Photo: Flickr/Thomas Hawk
