Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose's career began in traditional media during the late 1990s and early 2000s. After attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), he worked on early internet projects like SimpleSearch.com with family around 1998-1999 and joined TechTV as a production assistant and co-host on The Screen Savers, gaining exposure in technology commentary. This broadcasting experience in San Francisco (later moving to LA after Comcast's acquisition) laid the foundation for his shift to internet entrepreneurship. In 2004, Rose co-founded Digg, a user-driven social news aggregator that became a mid-2000s phenomenon by letting users vote on stories, revolutionizing content discovery. Building on this, he co-founded Revision3 (a video production company), Pownce (a micro-blogging site acquired by Six Apart in 2008), and Milk (a product design studio). Around 2012, after Milk shut down, Rose and his team joined Google, where he served as a senior product manager before becoming a venture partner at GV (Google Ventures), backing companies like Uber, Slack, Nextdoor, Ripple, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Post-Google (leaving in 2015), Rose launched Watchville, a watch news app that merged with Hodinkee in 2015; he became its CEO until 2017, then transitioned to True Ventures as a Partner. He also founded ventures like North (app development lab), Zero, Oak, and PROOF (an NFT project marking his Web3 entry). Currently based in San Francisco, Rose hosts podcasts including The Kevin Rose Show (on AI, wellness, investing) and The Random Show with Tim Ferriss, practices Sanbo Zen meditation, and serves on boards for Hodinkee, Oura, Endel, The Skatepark Project (Tony Hawk), The Way, and Harlan Estate. His patents on social media and voting (e.g., 7,831,928) were acquired by LinkedIn.