Social central
Thursday, 13 December 2007
Last Updated: Friday, 14 December 2007
By Jacqui Walker
Young entrepreneurs Michael and Xochi Birch, 37 and 35, founded one of the most popular social networking sites in the world, Bebo, in 2005. The site, pitched mainly to 13-to-24 year olds, now has 40 million registered members worldwide. In Australia, there are 2.8 million.
Michael and Xochi talk about how they did it, their new priorities and web trends for 2008.
To listen to the lunch with Michael and Xochi Birch, click here.
To download this mp3 file and listen to it later, right-click this link and "Save target as..." to your computer (Macs; option-click).
Jacqui Walker: Can you tell me how you came to start Bebo and how you met each other?
Xochi Birch: We met each other at a college bar. We were both university students in London and after meeting each other we then got married and we started working for an insurance company. We were both engineers.
What kind of engineers are you?
Michael Birch: Engineering as in software engineering, so we’re both developers, database and insurance systems.
It’s incredibly dull, and insurance just makes computers even more dull, but we actually found the computing side really interesting. And then the internet thing came along and we kind of jumped on that bandwagon in ’99, just before the bubble burst.
That was in England; we started developing websites and we developed about six different websites – Bebo being the most recent one. By the time we started Bebo we’d actually moved from London to San Francisco, where Xochi’s family is from. And so we started Bebo in ’05, which was kind of a late entry into the social networking space.
But by then we had done six different internet start ups, so although it was within a short period it felt like a long time.
And why did you get into social networking?
Because we thought it was really good fun. We first saw social networking in 2003.
I was totally addicted to the concept and we just wanted to build a social network and we actually did one in 2003 called lingo.com, and about 25% of the users at that time were actually Australian, interestingly enough.
It was more popular here than it was in the US and we did that for about six months and then sold it because we ran out of money.
It was growing too quickly for us to sustain, but having sold it we kind of regretted selling it and wanted to get back into social networking. So we went from being a very early entry into social networking to a very late one and we had to start from scratch and then build up this traffic again, which was no simple task to do, so luckily we managed to get back to where we were and well beyond it.
And even when we started social networking in 2003, what intrigued us about the whole concept is the sense of community which the site had and it really had a personality at the time. It was quite interesting how these different social networking sites start to have a personality in its own right, the community.
And how as Bebo changed since you started it?
It’s a lot more complicated than it used to be. Not from a user perspective but from an engineering perspective. It started out with just Xochi and me being the only developers for quite a long time and now to enter into social networking it takes a pretty large engineering team working on it for quite a long time. The entry of what is expected from a social network is far more advanced than it used to be.
So we now have about 25 engineers working full time with us. So it’s not a sort of one man show that it used to be so it’s much richer in functionality. I think we’re now on our fourth visual redesign, which we just finished about two weeks ago.
We’re not planning on redesigning it visually again. At least for a good few years hopefully. So it looks different but it’s just matured as a product and the community is very rich. There’s a huge amount of content. We get about three million photos a day uploaded to the site. That’s 40 million profiles so it’s very rich. It’s a huge amount of traffic, a lot of sustainability issues from a performance perspective.
You would both be very aware of the development issues having that background. How have you been successful in a Web 2.0 start-up. What about marketing skills, sales skills and admin and all the other skills that you need to do a successful start up, where have they come from?
Not from us for all of them.
Well when we started the site there was only five of us and now there’s 90 so we’re quite lucky to have very skilled people that we brought on board early on that helped us build the company to what it is today.
And did you share equity with them to attract them to the business or how did you get good people?
Yes, yes we did. We do have a share option scheme set in place for Bebo and also we look for people who enjoy the start up mentality and I think they enjoy working there as much as we appreciate all the effort they put in.
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