Bebo Co-Founder: How to Build an $850 Million Social Network
Sep 3, 2026 · 1:08:08
Bebo co-founder Michael Birch explains how he built Bebo into the UK's biggest website—briefly overtaking Google in traffic—and sold it to AOL for $850 million in 2008. He traces the path from Ringo.com, sold to Tickle, to Bebo's viral mechanics: an address-book importer that added a million users in nine days and quizzes that drove hundreds of thousands of signups a day. He explains selling while growth flattened against Facebook, and never meeting anyone from AOL Time Warner before the deal closed. After open-heart surgery, he and his wife opened The Battery, a San Francisco members club, and built Sonato hospitality software. Now he argues social drifted from friends to broadcast feeds, and that AI let him build Bluebell, his new messaging app, without writing code.
