Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, it was pretty big. It was a top 10 web property. It's still pretty big. I would love to have another site that does 38 million monthly uniques. I guess when I say at that time because Facebook now reaches three billion monthly active users, I think, if I have it right, you were out ahead of Facebook. Facebook hadn't really started becoming the juggernaut that it is until the late 2000s. I think that was started in 2004. But at one point, didn't Mark come to visit you when you rolled out the Digg button that was letting you upvote articles on their websites when they were thinking about the like button that is now famous everywhere? Yeah, that's right. We had a common investor, Greylock. David Sze—who was a Greylock, who was on our board, and also on the board of Facebook—was like, hey, you guys should get together and did an email introduction. He's like, there's this company Facebook. It's really taking off. You guys should chat. David had already taken off and gotten a ton of press. Mark hit me up and he's like, hey, let's. I’ll come to the city because he was down in Palo Alto. He's like, I’ll come to SF and love to see your offices. Let's go grab some food. He came to the office and we chatted about just what voting meant. For us, voting on content was helping us service the best stuff, and it was feeding back into our algorithm that would eventually recommend similar content to people. We had this suggested stories portion. It was early AI, machine learning type stuff that we were applying to articles of, if you like this, you might also enjoy these articles. Mark was really interested in that. This is before they had the like button.…

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