Kevin Rose
Robert Kevin Rose (born February 21, 1977) is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk. He also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV's "The Screen Savers". From 2012 to 2015, he was a venture partner at GV. Career. Television. Rose was hired as a production assistant for "The Screen Savers". He began appearing on-air in the "Dark Tip" segments and on "Unscrewed with Martin Sargent", where he provided information on developing computing activities. He became a regular co-host when Leo Laporte left TechTV on March 31, 2004 . On March 25, 2004, Comcast's G4 gaming channel announced a merger with TechTV, which resulted in a round of layoffs. Rose moved to Los Angeles to stay with G4. On May 22, 2005, Rose reached an agreement with G4 that released him from his contract and went on to create Systm and later, Revision3, where he co-hosted Diggnation alongside Alex Albrecht for 6 years. Guest appearances. Kevin Rose appeared on the first episode of R&D TV alongside "Diggnation" co-host Alex Albrecht. On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show on Gigaom's NewTeeVee  Live. On March 11, 2009, April 16, 2010, and November 28, 2011, Rose was a guest on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", along with fellow "Diggnation" host Alex Albrecht. Podcasting. Rose began podcasting on July 24, 2003, with the release of the first episode of "thebroken" while he was still working on "The Screen Savers" at TechTV. Rose founded Revision3 in Los Angeles, California with Jay Adelson and David Prager in April 2005. On July 1, 2005, Rose and Alex Albrecht started the weekly podcast, "Diggnation", which summarizes top stories submitted by Digg users. On October 3, 2011, Alex and  Kevin announced that they would be retiring the weekly Diggnation show at the end of the year. The final show was taped on December 30, 2011 at The Music Box in Los Angeles, California. Starting in 2009, Rose started an intermittent podcast called The Random Show with friend Tim Ferriss. Startups. In 2004, Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson formed Digg, a technology link website. The website was publicly launched on December 5, 2004. In 2007, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age  of 35. In 2006, Fox InteractiveMedia Group offered $60 million (equivalent to $ million in ) for Digg, which the Digg board turned down given how quickly the brand was continuing to grow. Over the next four years, CEO Rose lost interest in helping the site continue its growth, focusing on a series of non-Digg outside projects; the board eventually replaced him as CEO, on September 1, 2010. Rose continued on at Digg until March 18, 2011, when he resigned from all operational activities, only keeping a presence on the board of directors; Digg was acquired by Betaworks, in  2012, for $0.5 million (equivalent to $ million in ). On June 27, 2007, Rose launched a micro-blogging site called Pownce, which was acquired on December 1, 2008 and shut down on December 15, 2008 by blogging company Six Apart. In April 2011, the technology blog TechCrunch reported on the founding of "Milk". The company is focused on creating mobile applications. The first application to be released was Oink, a tool for ranking real-world items. In March 2012, Milk, Inc. announced that it would be shutting down its only product, Oink. Google. On March 16, 2012, Rose announced  that he, along with the four others of the Milk team (Daniel Burka, Chris Hutchins and Joshua Lane), were hired by Google after shutting down Milk and laying off the remaining members. Kevin Rose started his first day as a senior product manager for Google on March 19, 2012. On May 30, AllThingsD reported that Rose had moved off the Google+ team to become a venture partner at GV. In January 2015, Rose announced he would leave GV to focus on his new app development lab - North. Venture capitalist. Rose invested in Gowalla, Twitter, Foursquare, Dailybooth, ngmoco, SimpleGeo, 3crowd, OMGPOP , Square, Facebook, Chomp and Formspring. Watchville/Hodinkee. After leaving Google, Rose started Watchville, a news aggregation app focused on wristwatches. In July 2015, after Watchville merged with another watch-enthusiast site called Hodinkee, Rose moved to New York City to become the chief executive of Hodinkee. In April 2017, Rose stepped down from his role as Hodinkee CEO to become a partner in a start-up venture firm, True Ventures. Other appearances. Rose has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss' 2016 book, "Tools of Titans". Personal life. Rose was born in Redding, California and lived in Oregon before his  family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he spent most of his childhood. He became an Eagle Scout with the Boy Scouts of America. Rose transferred to Southeast Career Technical Academy for high school (formerly known as Vo-Tech High School) in Las Vegas in 1992. He then attended the University of Nevada Las Vegas, majored in computer science but dropped out in 1998. He worked for two dot-com startups through CMGI. In 2013, he married Darya Pino. Controversies. Protest at Rose's house. On April 6, 2014, protestors demonstrated in front of Rose's home in San Francisco . The protesters held up a banner calling Rose a "parasite" and distributed a pamphlet accusing Rose of directing "the flow of capital from Google into the tech startup bubble that is destroying San Francisco." One banner read "I'ma Snip Snip Yr Ballz," an allusion to Rose's 2008 video podcast on Diggnation in which he joked about cutting off women’s breasts. Portland home demolition controversy. On February 28, 2014, Rose and his wife Darya Pino purchased an 1892 house at 1627 Northwest 32nd Avenue in the Willamette Heights area of Portland, Oregon. They removed the historic designation  of the 122-year-old home and filed plans to demolish it. On June 24, it was reported that the Roses had accepted an offer from long-time neighborhood residents to buy the house, although the deal hadn't been finalized.