Chris De Wolfe Tom Anderson Articles

The Men Behind MySpace: How Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson First Met - Click To Read Article
“It sounds crazy,” says Chris DeWolfe, “but even in the first plan that I wrote up, I mentioned AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail, knowing we would be big. And it’s crazy to think that it happened.”

Making Space For MySpace: The Internet Gets A New Leader - Click To Read Article
Neither DeWolfe nor Anderson particularly liked authority, but in each other they found not only a friend, but somebody they also respected and with whom they could work well. After Xdrive, the company they had both been working for, ended up in bankruptcy in the dot-com bubble burst, DeWolfe and Anderson decided to go into business with each other.

Lesson #1: Be Clear About Who Your Company Caters To - Click To Read Article
“We started the company around the time that a lot of other social networking companies were starting up,” recalls DeWolfe. “But we saw that a lot of those companies had a very niche focus. We set out to create this next generation portal where we looked at the best social features around.”

Lesson #2: Let The Customers Tell You What They Want - Click To Read Article
Before MySpace came to be, there was Friendster, a somewhat similar social networking site. But what distinguished the two from each other were their philosophies towards their users. “They had no room for fakesters,” says Anderson. “If a dog or a city or an idea had a page, they would delete it. Could anything better have happened to us? People said, ‘I’m going to go to MySpace because I can do what I want there.’”

Lesson #3: Localize Your Content For The Global Market - Click To Read Article
“We’re never arrogant, we're always looking at the competition,” says DeWolfe. “But they have not been successful for a couple of reasons. The intent to socialize on a site like Yahoo! isn't really there because the brand doesn't necessarily stand for anything and there's no real voice to it.”

Lesson #4: Explore The Unexplored In Your Promotions - Click To Read Article
People often ask DeWolfe and Anderson how they managed to get millions of people to find out about their product without ever buying a single piece of advertising. Their answer? Exploring new creative avenues in which they could promote themselves, and that meant not relying on conventional marketing.

Lesson #5: Discipline Yourself and Learn To Say No - Click To Read Article
“We were resolute to do what our users wanted,” says DeWolfe. “Having discipline and saying no is why we ended up being so successful.”

MySpace Mavericks: How Two Friends Found Their Fortune - Click To Read Article
“It's certainly nice to make money off of it and become financially successful,” says DeWolfe, “but really the fun of it was to build the site and that continues to be the fun of it.” Anderson echoes the sentiment: “I’d like to do this as long as it’s fun, and that could be a long, long time.” They started off as two men who shared nothing but a love of indie music, a distaste for authority, and a simple idea for a website. So, how did these fast friends find themselves not only in the pages of Fortune magazine but also at the forefront of an Internet revolution?

Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson Quotes - Click To Read Article
Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson Quotes


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