Several years ago, I talked to Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg (a popular news rating service). We discussed the keys to successful ventures and the importance of building an enduring platform. I liked when he said that it is critical to have an "unfair advantage."
Well, so far, things seem to be working nicely. In fact, Digg has raised $28.7 million from a group of investors including Greylock Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, Highland Capital Partners and the Omidyar Network. In all, the firm has raised about $40 million.
The capital is meant to reinforce the Digg platform. This means doubling the staff, which now stands at 75 people, adding new features like publishing analytics, and moving into foreign markets.
Of course, there have been many rumors that Digg has been exploring sellout talks with biggies like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG). But with the current uncertainty in the financial markets, it probably makes sense to wait things out. Besides, Digg has a highly loyal user base who may not want to see a deal get done.
More importantly, the good news is that Digg is still showing lots of traction, with monthly unique visitors doubling over the past year to 30 million. Basically, it's a sign that Digg is moving out of its tech roots and into the mainstream.
According to Jay's blog this morning:
You've given us some great feedback on how we can make Digg better. As you've heard us say many times before, we feel that we've only implemented a fraction of the vision for what we believe Digg can achieve. The new features that will be a part of this program will incorporate much of your feedback, including personalizing the Digg experience, enhancing the recommendation system across other areas of the site, creating deeper category and topic content views and more ways to discover and organize content.
Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook
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