Interview: Adam Levin, CEO of Bebo
Bebo has been one of those social networks that keeps on ticking. After being snatched up by AOL for $850 million only to get dumped by the Internet pioneer, the company recently made some strong management moves to position themselves for growth.
Recently, I had the chance to interview Adam Levin, CEO of Bebo, about the company's future and the very competitive social media landscape.
TR: Tell me a little about the new hires and how they will help drive your business.
Levin: We couldn’t be more excited about Akash [Garg] and Aren [Sandersen] joining this team. They are both certifiable geniuses. Important to Bebo, each has an incredible skill set that combines deep technical knowledge, understanding of social behaviors - and the social networking landscape, operational acumen and business savvy. It’s not easy to find one person with all those attributes. We were lucky enough to find two who have the enthusiasm, integrity and ability to help Bebo grow.
As for each’s role...
Obviously Akash has a great track record as the co-founder of hi5 will lead a group of engineers to work out product roadmaps, implement features, spearhead technical partnerships and be the go-to guy for taking an idea and turning it into a product Bebo users will enjoy. Since he started just a couple of weeks ago, he has already amassed a huge volume of user input, identified dozens of new exciting opportunities for users to engage with each other and put some exciting things into place for Bebo going forward.
Aren brings tremendous skill and acumen as a lead engineer of successful platforms such as Oodle, where he was the first employee. But he also brings a genius type logic to operations. While he will certainly contribute his engineering prowess, in the first few weeks he has been at Bebo, he has been optimizing everything about Bebo’s operations. Not only has he created enormous cost savings starting on day one, he has worked to make Bebo’s infrastructure more efficient and highly scalable.
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