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Our latest podcast guest is one incredible founder: Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo, who shares how he started and scaled the social network into one of the most popular sites of its time before selling it to AOL for $850 million in 2008, how he reinvented himself after Bebo, and what he’s building now that Bebo is closed for good after 21 years.
Watch now - Bebo Co-Founder: How to Build an $850 Million Social Network
During the episode, we learn about Michael’s first entrepreneurial attempt, Ringo.com (another social network), which landed 400,000 members in three months on a $6,000 database server; how Bebo grew to a million users in nine days before going quiet for six months, until a basic quiz feature cracked engagement; and how The Battery, a members’ club in San Francisco, became his next act after the acquisition.
We also explore an interesting question: what happens to a founder’s sense of identity when the company he and his wife, Xochi, spent years building is no longer theirs to run? Michael also shared that, although he’s technical at heart, he hasn’t written a line of code since January, building his latest venture almost entirely with AI, a glimpse of what building without a team could look like for the next generation of founders.
Watch or listen now across YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X
Download the transcript 👇
Timestamps
(0:00) Meet Michael Birch
(2:58) The Founding Story of Bebo
(8:55) Why Bebo Went Viral
(11:19) Bebo's First 12 Months
(21:40) How Much Has Social Actually Changed?
(23:58) Selling to AOL for $850M
(29:50) Reinventing Your Identity Post-Acquisition
(31:12) Starting The Battery
(38:47) Technology or Hospitality?
(39:54) Michael's Take on AI's Future
(45:00) Is IRL Being Affected by AI?
(47:55) Michael's Latest Venture: Bluebell
(1:02:08) Building With Your Spouse
Our notes from this episode with Michael
1. Virality gets people in, engagement keeps them.
Bebo stalled after launch despite a working social graph. A single “how well do you know me” quiz, which required non-members to create an account to see their results, fixed that and pushed growth to hundreds of thousands of users a day.
2. ‘‘We killed virality on purpose outside English-speaking markets.’’
Bebo blocked non-English IP addresses from viral features so it wouldn’t blow up in markets he couldn’t support, staying deliberately focused on the UK, US, and other English-language countries.
3. A password scraper added 40 million users a year.
Michael built a tool that logged into people’s Hotmail and Yahoo using their own passwords, pulled their address books, and mass-invited every contact. One overnight run alone added 100,000 members.
4. The $850M sale.
Although a life changing amount of money to retire on, Michael never actually met anyone from AOL until the sale was officially closed.
5. The day the sale closed, he was unemployed.
Michael and his wife were the only two people at the company not offered a job when AOL took over, despite three and a half years of building it together.
6. He thinks the technical moat he’s built his career on is gone by next year.
He hasn’t written a line of code since January 1st, building his new app Bluebell entirely by directing AI, and expects deep technical understanding to stop mattering for shipping real products within the year.
Links
Follow Ollie on X: https://x.com/ollieforsyth
Follow Michael on X: https://x.com/mickbirch
Sign-up to Michael’s Newsletter - The Long Way Back to Friends:
Sign-up to Bluebell - Michael’s latest venture: https://bluebell.social
About Bluebell
Bluebell is the social and messaging app Michael and Xochi Birch built as Bebo’s successor. It fuses DMs, group chats, and a feed into shared spaces called “pods,” with no public timeline, no follower count, and no feed of strangers to perform for.
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