2008
Bebo's founder decided to sell the social network and sold it to AOL for $850 million.
“decides to sell, sells the company for $850 million to AOL,”
Topic
Bebo
10 facts from 1 episode, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
2008
The guest said Michael and Xochi Birch owned 70% of Bebo at the time of the AOL sale.
“they own 70% of the company at the exit because of, and I'll go into why they were able to own that.”
Undated
Bebo was popular in particular markets including Europe, New Zealand and Ireland, according to the guest.
“Bebo was big in certain markets, like Europe, New Zealand, you know, if you're in Ireland”
Undated
The guest said AOL wrote off Bebo about a year and a half after buying it, treating it as worth almost nothing.
“AOL basically writes off Bebo kind of like a year and a half later as like a tax write off of like, it's worth nothing to us now.”
Undated
The Bebo founders bought the company back for $1 million at a bankruptcy auction.
“We go buy it back for a million dollars. And so we go to this crazy ass auction I can talk about”
Undated
The buyback included an email list of about 80 million addresses.
“we got like a 80 million person email list, which is one of the assets.”
Undated
In the same auction the buyers acquired the right to sue Bebo's previous owner for an amount the guest recalled as roughly $50,000, and the suit later won millions.
“we bought the sort of legal rights to sue the previous owner for, I don't know, 50,000”
Undated
The team aimed to cut Bebo's running costs about a hundred-fold while keeping user profile pages indexable by search engines.
“how do we lower the cost by a hundred X while keeping the SEO, the everybody's profile page alive?”
Undated
A tongue-in-cheek relaunch video helped draw about one million new signups to Bebo.
“we got a million new people to sign up to see what's the new Bebo.”
Undated
The team ran a roughly 45-day sale process and closed a deal after approaching YouTube, Facebook and Twitch among others.
“ran a process, a pretty tight process over like 45 days and closed a deal and ended up selling the company.”
Episodes