Tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose has a long history of creating products that people love. Rose helped create media and tech companies like Revision3, Digg, Pownce and Milk. However, after failing to make any money with Milk, Rose announced that he would become a senior product manager at Google. His work as a manager eventually turned into a position as a venture partner at Google's capital venture firm, Google Ventures.
However, it looks like this might be the end of that as well. Rose told Forbes that he was leaving Google Ventures and entering the startup industry again. For the last few months, Rose has been working both as a venture partner as well as working as a part-time founder at his new app company, North Technologies, Recode.net reported. According to Rose, it was quite difficult. "You forget about the pain of startups when enough time passes....You forget how much time and effort it really takes to do something properly," he told Forbes. The required time commitment is what convinced Rose to quit his position at Google and pursue North Technologies full-time.
Rose left Google to join North Technologies with a more than $5 million investment behind him. "The coalition of investors speculating on Rose are trusting that his track record will strike gold this time-not with a time-killer vanity project, but with a home-run success like Rose hasn't quite realized since Digg," Forbes wrote.
North recently had some success with their Tiiny app, which used an Instagram-rescue social network to share postage-stamp sized photos. The app quickly attracted attention because of Rose's star status but eventually faded out.
North's current project is Watchville, an app that collects information and news for watch collectors and afficionados.
Rose hopes that North Technologies can take a different approach to the startup culture. He says that the team will stay small and be picky about what ideas it pursues. But Rose's goal is to create original ideas and products. Rose also hopes to maintain a number of different projects over time.
