they said you are like friendster, but for business. like, well, that's not the way i would describe it. i cannot tell you the number of times that i've had conversations with people who are smart and close to me say it will not work and i said, i think it will. so. emily: when did you come closest to giving up? reid: oh, never. emily: never? reid: nope. emily: it took five years to turn a profit and you made hard some really decisions along the way, including stepping down as ceo and becoming executive chairman. reid: the question really wasn't like, oh, was it a difficult thing for ego, stepping down as ceo, but what gives us the best possible chance to realize something? and part of what i had come to realize is that i'm passionate about scale impact in the world. i am passionate about solving product and business problems. i am passionate about entrepreneurship and innovation. but i'm not passionate about running an organization. i don't wake up going, how do i run my exec staff better? and how do i -- when we are onboarding the nex

friendster. david: facebook making it really easy to share. twitter making it easy to publish. my frustration through all of this though was as much as the technology was marching forward, the actual services people were building were more and more restrictive. facebook was giving you a lot more publishing capability but always on that same vanilla white profile page everybody else had. you were forced to use this diaspora of tools. you put your photos on flickr. put your short updates and links on twitter, put your articles on wordpress or movable type. your videos over here on youtube. you ended up with all these different channels and your expression sort of broken up across all these disparate networks. emily: how did you decide to turn it into a business? david: it sort of decided for itself. we had a couple of weeks between contracts, at my little consulting company. we were sitting on our hands, waiting for the next gig to get started. i said, let's just go for it. i feel like we can hack together the basic features pretty quickly. the basic features, by the way, were th