| Back Story |
I had covered high-tech for a decade, and thought I knew the “start-up story” pretty well. It usually went like this: A couple of genius Bill Gates-types drop out of Harvard or Stanford and start a company based on a high-tech breakthrough.
So when I covered the sale of MySpace to News Corp. for The Wall Street Journal in 2005, I assumed the story would be the same: Super-smart founders and tech-savvy venture capitalists with a high-tech secret sauce.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
In the fall of 2005, I was having drinks at the Hudson Hotel with one of the venture capital backers of MySpace, David Carlick. He had helped engineer the sale of MySpace's parent company, Intermix to News Corp. for a reported price of $580 million.
Over a few glasses of wine with Carlick at the hotel bar, a very different story emerged: No genius engineers, no Silicon Valley. Carlick’s story about MySpace was based in Santa Monica, seemed to include many rounds of lawsuits with some guy named Brad Greenspan, burgeoning online sales of wrinkle cream, and a genius marketer named Richard Rosenblatt.
I was intrigued and started to investigate, and so began a reporting journey that would stretch on for another three years. What I found was a great business story about life on the fringes of the Internet economy.
After years of hype about the convergence of Internet and media, I discovered that MySpace was one of the first examples of a real-life convergence. MySpace's Hollywood sensibilities were its secret sauce – not the computers in the company's back rooms. That was a story I wanted to tell.