Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose is a serial technology entrepreneur and investor, best known as the founder of Digg. Besides Digg, he also co-founded internet startups Revision3, Pownce, and Milk. He lives in New York, and is currently the CEO of HODINKEE, an online magazine that features in-depth reviews, and reports on luxury watches.

Kevin Rose was born on 21 February 1977 in Redding, California. His family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he grew up and spent most of his childhood. He was an Eagle Scout with the Boy Scouts of America.

Rose attended Southeast Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas. He went to study computer science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, but dropped out in 1998, following which, he worked for dot-com startups.

After dropping out of the university, Rose worked startups through ModusLink Global Solutions in the dot-com boom period. ModusLink at the time was known as CMGI, and was involved in several high-profile technology ventures like AltaVista, 1stUp.com, AdForce, iCast, NaviSite, and Yesmail. On December 5, 2004, Rose with Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson launched Digg, a social news website. Digg raised around $45 million in funding from Marc Andreessen, Greylock Partners, Reid Hoffman and other Silicon Valley investors. The site was acquired by Betaworks, LinkedIn, and Washingtop Post in 2012 for an undisclosed amount. Betaworks is the company behind startups like bit.ly and Chartbeat. After the acquisition, Betaworks' founder John Borthwick became the new CEO of Digg.

• In 2007, MIT Technology Review TR35 named Rose as one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35 in the world.
• In 2007, Rose founded another startup Pownce, a micro-blogging site. Pownce was acquired by Six Apart in 2008.
• In 2011, he founded Milk, a startup on creating mobile applications.
• In March 2012, Rose, along with his Milk team, joined Google as a Senior Product Manager. He later became a partner at Google Ventures. He left Google Ventures in 2005.
• As a venture capitalist, Rose invested in several high-profile startups such as Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Dailybooth, OMGPOP, Square, Facebook, Chomp, Zynga, Blue Bottle Coffee, and Watchville/Hodinkee. He currently serves as the CEO of Hodinkee.
• Earlier, he also served as production assistant and co-host at TechTV's The Screen Savers.
• In December 2016, Rose launched "Zero," a health and fitness app for tracking fasting. It supports intermittent fasting, 5:2, and circadian rhythm fasting protocols. It lets users export their data to a spreadsheet.

Rose is married to Darya Pino, who is best-known as the founder of the blog, Summer Tomato. She is also a contributor to The Huffington Post and other publications.

• "Top 25 Angel Investors", Bloomberg
• "Top 25 Web Celebrities", Forbes
• "Top 25 Most Influential People on the Web", Time
• "Most Influential People on the Web", Businessweek
• "Top 35 Innovators under 35", MIT
• Five-time Webby Award winner