You remember Friendster, right? No? It is a social media cautionary tale about hubris and taking the money while it's good. Friendster was one of the original social media networks, long before Facebook, and in 2003 they were offered $30 million in pre-IPO Google stock and in 2008, a year before it sold for under $30 million, Friendster turned down a $150 million buyout. The Google stock would have been worth $200-800 million. Basically, it was run stupidly. When you get acquired by Kuala Lumpur-based MOL, a payment systems seller heard of nowhere outside Asia, you have fallen far.
But Facebook came calling with some real money and bought up a lot of their patents - making it very difficult for any competitor in the future to claim infringement because Facebook now owns patents on things like photo tagging and 17 other things, says VentureBeat. If the $40 million pricetag is legit, it means the patents were worth more than the site - and that just because a guy was at Google in the early days does not mean he can run a successful company.
MOL seems to have a real CEO and not some goofball claiming he built Google's marketshare and parleying that hype into a CEO spot - he already made more on Friendster than anyone else did.
