Jay Adelson

CEO, Digg

A Conversation with Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose
21 minutes, 9.7mb, recorded 2009-11-17
Jay Adelson

Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose are both under 40, and can already be called 'serial entrepreneurs' by Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media Inc., who sits down with the two men for this Web 2.0 conversation. Kevin Rose is the founder and Jay Adelson the CEO of Digg.com, a social media website that enables users to submit content and then vote on, or 'Digg' each other's uploaded news, videos and images to determine which stories are the best. Today, the site has over 30 million visitors a month.

Plans for Digg.com's future aim to make the site even more compelling and accessible to its users, as well as attempting to narrow down niche interest groups and promote lesser known stories into trending topics. From 5,000 subjects to 500,000 subjects, from 40 million users to 100 million users, Jay Adelson has big visions for his company, and recently made the move from New York to San Francisco to further his efforts toward this cause.

The two men gladly share their advice and experience when it comes to launching one's own business, as both have started several Internet companies, including Pownce, Revision3, WeFollow, and Equinix, Inc. and Rose is an investor in companies such as Twitter, Foursquare, Thread and DailyBooth.  


Jay Adelson, Chief Exectuive of Digg.com, was suckered out of the world of film and broadcasting into helping kick-start the Internet industry in 1993. Since then, he helped engineer Netcom, the first ISP in the United States, worked at DEC research lab in Palo Alto to build the secret back-end of the Internet (PAIX), and founded the billion-dollar Equinix [EQIX] which, if shut off, would screw up the Internet. Jay has testified before Congress and advised the government and other groups with his knowledge of the Internet's workings, and habitually speaks at industry events and conferences. His passions are dis-intermediation and toppling ancient and corrupt monopolies. As Chief Executive, Jay is responsible for leading the company to execute on the vision of democratizing the media and using humans to make sense of an ever-increasing overload of information. His primary tools to achieve this are an amazingly great staff, a cell phone and video chat.   

Kevin Rose is the founder and chief architect of Digg. He oversees all aspects of the management and development of the Web site. Under his leadership, Digg has grown to more than 30 million unique visitors per month and has been included in TIME Magazine’s “50 Best Websites” list every year since 2006. Kevin started Digg in September 2004 as a personal project. His initial idea was to conduct a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote news and other content on the Web, without external editorial control. After a very short time, he realized the power of his idea, as Digg was becoming a resource for breaking news stories and developed a strong user following. A well-recognized expert on technology and the Internet, Kevin has spoken at a variety of industry events including the Web 2.0 Summit, Le Web 3, The Next Web Conference, and Ad:Tech. In 2007, Kevin was included in BusinessWeek’s “25 Most Influential People,” and in 2008, Details magazine’s “Mavericks 2008,” and the MIT Technology Review’s “TR 35.”

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This free podcast is from our Web 2.0 Conference series.

For The Conversations Network:

  • Post-production audio engineer: Jamie Rinehart
  • Website editor: Rebekah Brandes
  • Series producer: George Hawthorne