# Kevin Rose Kevin Rose (born 1977) is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor, best known as a co-founder of Digg, Revision3, and Milk, and as a former venture partner at GV. Kevin Rose (born 1977) is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded the social news website Digg, the web television network Revision3, the microblogging service Pownce, and the mobile app company Milk. He also served as a production assistant and co-host on TechTV's The Screen Savers. From 2012 to 2015, he was a venture partner at [GV](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/gv) (formerly Google Ventures). In 2025, Rose re-purchased Digg with [Alexis Ohanian](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/alexis-ohanian) and re-launched it as a news aggregator. ## Early life and education Rose was born in California and lived in Oregon before his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he spent most of his childhood. He became an Eagle Scout with the Boy Scouts of America. In 1992, he transferred to Southeast Career Technical Academy (formerly Vo-Tech High School) in Las Vegas for high school. He then attended the University of Nevada Las Vegas, majored in computer science, but dropped out in 1998. ## Career Rose worked for two dot-com startups through CMGI. He later became a prominent figure in the early social web and venture investing. ### Digg Rose, along with Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson, formed Digg, a technology link website, which publicly launched on December 5, 2004. In 2007, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2006, Fox Interactive Media offered $60 million (equivalent to $95.8 million in 2025) for Digg, but the board turned it down given the brand's rapid growth. Over the next four years, CEO Rose lost interest in helping the site grow, focusing on outside projects; the board replaced him as CEO on September 1, 2010. Rose resigned from all operational activities on March 18, 2011, remaining on the board of directors. Digg was acquired by Betaworks in 2012 for $0.5 million (equivalent to $0.7 million in 2025). In 2025, more than a decade after selling Digg, Rose re-purchased it with Reddit co-founder [Alexis Ohanian](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/alexis-ohanian) and re-launched it as a rebooted news aggregator with digging and burying features restored, using the tagline "The front page of the internet, now with superpowers." During its closed beta, it offered 21 generalized communities such as gaming, technology, and entertainment, and was open to 67,000 users on an invite-only basis. Its open beta launched to the public on January 14, 2026. ### Television Rose was hired as a production assistant for The Screen Savers. He began appearing on-air in the "Dark Tip" segments and on Unscrewed with Martin Sargent, where he provided information on developing computing activities. He became a regular co-host when Leo Laporte left TechTV on March 31, 2004. On March 25, 2004, Comcast's G4 gaming channel announced a merger with TechTV, leading to layoffs. Rose moved to Los Angeles to stay with G4. On May 22, 2005, he reached an agreement with G4 that released him from his contract, and he went on to create Systm and later Revision3, where he co-hosted Diggnation alongside Alex Albrecht for six years. ### Guest appearances Rose appeared on the first episode of R&D TV with Alex Albrecht. On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show at Gigaom's NewTeeVee Live. On March 11, 2009, April 16, 2010, and November 28, 2011, he was a guest on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, along with Albrecht. ### Podcasting Rose began his career in web video (or IPTV) on July 24, 2003, with the release of the first episode of thebroken while still working on The Screen Savers at TechTV. He founded Revision3 in Los Angeles, California, with Jay Adelson and David Prager in April 2005. On July 1, 2005, Rose and Alex Albrecht started the weekly podcast Diggnation, which summarized top stories submitted by Digg users. On October 3, 2011, they announced they would retire the show at the end of the year; the final show was taped on December 30, 2011, at The Music Box in Los Angeles. Starting in 2009, Rose began an intermittent podcast called The Random Show with friend Tim Ferriss. In 2024, Rose and Albrecht rebooted Diggnation on the YouTube channel @diggnation. ### Other startups Around 1998-1999, Rose started SimpleSearch.com in Las Vegas with his sister and brother-in-law, Kurt Arobogast. On June 27, 2007, he launched the micro-blogging site Pownce, which was acquired on December 1, 2008, and shut down on December 15, 2008, by blogging company Six Apart. In April 2011, TechCrunch reported on the founding of Milk, a company focused on mobile applications. Its first app was Oink, a tool for ranking real-world items. In March 2012, Milk announced it would shut down Oink. ### Google On March 16, 2012, Rose announced that he, along with four others from the Milk team (Daniel Burka, Chris Hutchins, and Joshua Lane), had been hired by Google after shutting down Milk. He started as a senior product manager for Google on March 19, 2012. On May 30, AllThingsD reported that Rose had moved off the Google+ team to become a venture partner at [GV](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/gv). In January 2015, he announced he would leave GV to focus on his new app development lab, North. ### Venture capitalist Rose invested in Gowalla, Twitter, Foursquare, Dailybooth, ngmoco, SimpleGeo, 3crowd, OMGPOP, Square, Facebook, Chomp, and Formspring. ### Watchville/Hodinkee After leaving Google, Rose started Watchville, a news aggregation app focused on wristwatches. In July 2015, after Watchville merged with Hodinkee, Rose moved to New York City to become its chief executive. In April 2017, he stepped down as CEO to become a partner at [True Ventures](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/true-ventures). ### Proof Collective Rose co-founded the Proof Collective, a group of NFT collectors, alongside Justin Mezzell. Members include artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) and investor Gary Vaynerchuk. The collective released Moonbirds, a collection of 10,000 pixelated-bird non-fungible tokens that had $281 million in sales as of April 2022. Rose said Proof would use the proceeds to "build a new media company." ### Other appearances Rose has a chapter giving advice in Tim Ferriss' 2016 book, Tools of Titans. ## Personal life In 2013, he married Darya Pino. ## References (References omitted per instructions) ## External links - Official website - Kevin Rose at IMDb --- Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/kevin-rose License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) Last updated: 2026-09-12T22:25:16.780165+00:00