You feel like you have a better business? I think that leads to a bigger problem of what is happening in Silicon Valley. Over the past two years, every venture capitalist threw money into companies and said, “Don’t worry about making money, just get as many eyeballs as you can, get as many applications installed as you can.” And then all of a sudden, two months ago, they said, “You gotta make money.” It’s not the kind of thing where you can just flip a switch and start monetizing your traffic. It took us four or five years to build the infrastructure we have now.

There’s a perception that Facebook is the hot site and MySpace isn’t. You can’t pay too much attention to that. I try to do as much press as I can, and it gets tiring after a while.

I understand that MySpace came out of work you did while you were here at business school. Is that true? In one class, I did a paper—a business plan, actually—for a company I called SiteGeist. The whole idea was to have internet communities in every city, where people could connect around shared interests—whether nightlife or shopping or entertainment—and to have all the communication tools that went along with that, including email and instant messaging.

You and MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson started one company, sold that, and then did MySpace? Yes. Before 2003, there was sort of a stigma about socializing online. It was kind of creepy, almost desperate. It’s like if you met someone on a dating site, it would’ve been really weird.

When did you realize MySpace was going to change that? I was at a dinner with five people, and two of them went, “Oh yeah, I’m on MySpace.” That was a pretty big deal for me.

Why did you decide to sell to News Corp.? I really thought that we would fit well with a media company. We’d have access to content, we’d have access to unlimited capital, and we’d have access to international markets. There were a few doubts in the beginning, because you hear all these really negative stories about Rupert Murdoch and how he runs an evil empire.

All true, I’m sure. [Laughs.] But when you dig into it and look at his life history—you know, he started at a community newspaper in Adelaide, Australia, and he was, I think, 22 years old and had about three or four days left of cash in the bank. So he goes in there and makes all the headlines ­really sensationalistic, and ends up tripling the circulation.

It was really the entrepreneurial spirit of News Corp. that made that a perfect home for us. At the time, we had 23 million unique users. Now we have, I think, 135 million. So they allowed us to stay in our own silo and grow and find synergy—or whatever word you want to use—within the other groups in News Corp.

The record of synergies in these kinds of deals is really dismal. Yahoo has made, I don’t know, probably 100 acquisitions at least. Viacom has made 20 or 30. And almost every time they take on one of these companies, they kick out the founders, and a lot of times they get rid of the brand within literally months. The promise that we would be able to develop the brand and maintain creative control was really the deciding factor.

So you never thought of MySpace as a company that was going to live on as an independent entity?
Obviously, you don’t do a startup just for the money. It’s really trying to start a company, and grow it, and build a team, and build camaraderie, and all those amazing things. But you also do it for some kind of financial payoff. And I didn’t want to be like those other people in the first dotcom boom who were worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper and then worth nothing.

What’s an example of something that News Corp. has done for MySpace that you wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise? Right after we sold, we were beginning to expand internationally. And I was really excited, because we had set up an office in London, and there were, like, three people, and I told Rupert that we were going to have another three offices open in the next year. And he goes, “How about 13?” We ended up opening 15 offices that year.

How much do you actually work with Rupert Murdoch?
You know, he’s been spending a lot of time with the Wall Street Journal lately. But he takes a keen interest in everything we’re doing.

Does he really get what MySpace is? Yes, he’s very engaged, yeah.

Does he have a MySpace page? He does, but I don’t think he probably uses it.

You seem to have crossed into being a celebrity yourself, to the point of popping up in tabloid rumors. Why do you think you get so much attention, and how do you deal with it? Well, that’s very flattering, but honestly I don’t pay a lot of attention to it—so much of it is completely fabricated, which makes it hard to take it seriously.