Michael and Xochi Birch
Husband-and-wife team behind Bebo, The Battery, and Monkey Inferno
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Michael Birch OBE (born July 7, 1970) and Xochi Birch OBE (born Xochiltzin De La Luz Torres) are a British-American husband-and-wife team of computer programmers and entrepreneurs.110 They have co-founded more than half a dozen companies together, including BirthdayAlarm.com, Ringo.com, Bebo, Monkey Inferno, and The Battery.4 Their most lucrative venture was Bebo, a social networking site they launched in January 2005 and sold to AOL in March 2008 for $850 million, netting approximately $595 million from their combined 70 percent stake.117 Five years later, they bought the company back for $1 million.7 Both were appointed Officers of the Order of the British Empire in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to technology and online services.109
Meeting and early life
Michael Birch was born in Sawston, Cambridgeshire, and raised in Hertfordshire.1 His grandmother was born in Woolfardisworthy (known locally as Woolsery), a village in North Devon, and he spent many childhood summers there.1 He attended Imperial College London from 1988 to 1991, graduating with a bachelor of science degree in physics, though he later admitted he "wasn't very good" at the subject.2
Xochi Torres grew up in California as the eldest of six children.6 She studied through the University of London on an exchange program and later transferred to St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, to complete her degree.6
The two met in the summer of 1990 at the Southside Bar, a student pub near Imperial College in London.5 Xochi approached Michael to escape another man's unwanted advances and asked him to dance.5 They married in 1994.2 After university, both worked as computer programmers at large London-based companies.4 Michael spent roughly a decade in the insurance industry, which he later called "a complete waste of 10 years" that made him "hungry" to do something else.2
Quitting and the early failures
In 1999, Michael came home and told Xochi: "I want to quit my job and let's do an internet start-up."4 Xochi recalled that she had "no idea what that meant at the time" but continued working to support the household while Michael tried to build web businesses from home.4 The decision was partly inspired by sibling rivalry: Michael's older brother Paul was already running a startup.3 The couple remortgaged their home twice to fund the venture.4
Michael described the early period as "a comedy of errors, just trying things out."4 He told Xochi to give him three months, and if he was not making money he would get a job.3 Three years later, he still had not made a penny.3 Among the failed ideas was an online babysitting network modeled on the babysitting circle Michael's parents had run, which attracted only "hundreds, maybe" of matches.3 A self-updating address book also failed to gain traction.3
BirthdayAlarm and Ringo
The Birches' first commercial success was BirthdayAlarm.com, an online birthday reminder and greeting card service co-founded with Michael's brother Paul in 2001.14 By 2002, the site had 2 million members and was generating $10,000 per month.4 A key turning point came when they began charging users to send e-cards: revenue jumped from $10,000 a month to $10,000 a day overnight.43 The site later reached $300,000 in a single month.3
"We went from earning $10,000 a month to $10,000 a day. Overnight, by flipping a switch," Xochi said.4
Around the same time, the Birches co-founded Ringo.com with Morgan Sowden, a social networking site that attracted 400,000 users.31 They sold Ringo to Tickle.com in 2003.1 The couple moved from London to San Francisco in 2002, drawn to California where Xochi had grown up.24
Bebo
After selling Ringo, Michael returned to the self-updating address book concept and began applying everything he had learned.3 "Eventually, we turned it into a social network, Bebo, and then it became a success," he said.3 The couple launched Bebo from their San Francisco home in January 2005.20 The name was a purchased domain for which they invented the backronym "Blog Early, Blog Often."2
Bebo grew rapidly among teenagers in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand.20 Michael saw room for the platform as "a very good version of MySpace... but with the product quality of Facebook," which at the time was still limited to university students.4 The site's only outside funding was a $15 million round from Balderton Capital in May 2006.11
By July 2007, Comscore data showed Bebo had overtaken MySpace to become the most-visited social networking site in the UK, with 10.6 million unique visitors and a 34 percent reach of the total UK online population.12 MySpace had 10.1 million unique visitors that month, while Facebook had 7.6 million.12 At its peak, Bebo had more than 40 million registered users worldwide and was the sixth most-visited website in the UK, ahead of AOL, Amazon, and the BBC.1
The $850 million sale
AOL announced its acquisition of Bebo on March 13, 2008, for $850 million in cash.1113 The Birches held a combined 70 percent stake and personally netted approximately $595 million.7 Multiple companies, including News Corp., Microsoft, and Google, had been approached by investment bank Allen & Co. but passed.11
Michael described the moment of sale as anticlimactic. "There was a complete lack of elation," he said. "It's like when you've finished your exams and you've been studying for ages and then when you've finished you think you're going to be ecstatic but after all that build up there's nothing."3 The couple left Bebo shortly after the deal closed in May 2008.11
Bebo declined rapidly under AOL. Facebook was growing at 366 percent year-over-year in the UK, and by 2010 Bebo's global unique visitors had dropped 45 percent from the previous year.21 On April 7, 2010, AOL announced it would sell or shut down Bebo.21 The BBC called the acquisition "one of the worst deals ever made in the dotcom era."14
"When I sold it I wanted it to be successful, I didn't want it to fail, but it did, and far faster than I ever thought it would," Michael said.3
The $1 million buyback
AOL sold Bebo's assets in June 2010 to Criterion Capital Partners for a price reported between $2.5 million and $10 million.7 Criterion attempted a redesign but the site continued to lose users, and Bebo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2013.20
On July 1, 2013, Michael and Xochi purchased Bebo back from Criterion in a post-bankruptcy auction for $1 million, beating two rival bids.7 The purchase included all hardware, software, and intellectual property.7 At the time, the site had only 420,000 unique UK visitors per month, compared to roughly 40 million registered users globally at its peak.7
Michael announced the buyback in a tweet: "We just bought back Bebo for $1m. Can we actually re-invent it? Who knows, but will be fun trying."7 He later told BBC Newsnight that the traffic was "about one thousandth of what it was at the time we sold it" and acknowledged that AOL had "massively overpaid."2 "There was some sentimentality in the decision," he added. "It was too hard to resist."3
The Birches placed Bebo under Monkey Inferno, the self-funded startup studio they had established in San Francisco in 2011.22 Under CEO Shaan Puri and CTO Furqan Rydhan, the Monkey Inferno team rebuilt Bebo through several iterations -- messaging service, live-streaming platform Blab, Twitch streaming software -- before narrowing focus in October 2018 to esports tournament organization.15 In June 2019, Amazon's Twitch acquired Bebo for up to $25 million, outbidding Discord and Facebook.15
Monkey Inferno
Monkey Inferno was the Birches' self-funded startup studio and incubator, founded in 2011 in San Francisco with a team of roughly 20 engineers, designers, and product people, all paid from the couple's personal wealth.22 Michael described it as "a personal incubator... a place where we dream up cool internet projects, develop them, then nurture them into successful businesses."22
The studio's approach was to invest in people rather than ideas, running several projects in parallel to find winners faster.3 "All the great internet success stories have one thing in common, and that's they all have a really strong team -- great engineers and designers," Michael said.3 In a 2017 interview, he identified talent as the biggest challenge of entrepreneurship: "It's really hard to find exceptional people, and even harder to convince them that they should bet on you."16
The studio produced Beer Hunt (a social beer-discovery app that won a Demo God award), Blab (a live-streaming video chat platform that reached 3.9 million users before shutting down in 2016), and the rebuilt Bebo that Twitch ultimately acquired.1523 Puri and Rydhan, the two key employees who ran day-to-day operations, both went on to build their own companies after the Twitch acquisition. Their trajectories, along with those of other Bebo alumni, are traced in The Bebo Tree.
The Battery
In 2009, the Birches purchased the building at 717 Battery Street in San Francisco's Jackson Square neighborhood for $13.5 million.23 They initially considered converting it into a tech incubator, but changed course and decided to build a private members club modeled on the English village pubs Michael had grown up with.5
"We're fans of the village pub, where everyone knows everyone," Michael told the San Francisco Chronicle. "A private club can be the city's replacement for the village pub, where you do, over time, get to know everyone and have a sense of emotional belonging."5 They also drew inspiration from London's private club scene, particularly the Soho House.5
The Battery opened in October 2013 with approximately 700 founding members.18 The five-level, 58,000-square-foot club occupies the 1907 Musto Building, a former marble factory, and contains a restaurant, four bars, a 3,000-bottle wine cellar, a library, a gym and spa, an outdoor garden, and 14 hotel suites.5 Interior designer Ken Fulk, who had designed the Birches' homes in San Francisco and London, served as creative director.5 By 2017, membership had grown to 4,605 with a 91 percent renewal rate.18 The New York Times described it as "a new members-only social club in San Francisco that seeks to bring a dash of British exclusivity and decorum to the land of billionaire geeks."17 The Battery's philanthropic arm, Battery Powered, had raised more than $31 million for over 240 nonprofits by its tenth anniversary in 2023.19
"From the very beginning, we strove to activate generosity among our members," Xochi said. "Battery Powered is an opportunity to help break down some of the barriers people feel when getting involved with philanthropy."19
Woolsery
Michael's family has lived in the North Devon village of Woolfardisworthy, known locally as Woolsery, since the 1700s.2 His grandmother was born there, and he spent most childhood summers in the village.1 In October 2014, the Birches began purchasing properties in Woolsery through a hospitality group called The Collective.1 Their acquisitions included the Farmers Arms, the village's only pub, which had closed in December 2012 and reopened in September 2018 after the Birches' renovation.1268 They also purchased the Grade II-listed Manor House, which was being restored for use as a hotel.1
"I love living in America and I love coming here... it's a great escape," Michael said. "I like bringing my children here and sharing that with them."2 The couple's $35 million Pacific Heights home in San Francisco, listed for sale in 2022, included a British pub built into the property -- an extension of the same village-pub concept that inspired The Battery.25
Philanthropy and recognition
The Birches have donated more than $20 million to charity:water, the clean-water nonprofit founded by Scott Harrison.124 Michael wired $1 million to the organization shortly after meeting Harrison in 2008.5 In October 2011, Monkey Inferno partnered with charity:water to launch WaterForward, a social media fundraising project.1
In July 2009, Michael co-founded PROfounders Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm, alongside Brent Hoberman, Peter Dubens, and others.1
In the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours, both Michael and Xochi were appointed Officers of the Order of the British Empire.9 Michael was listed as "Michael Joseph Birch, Entrepreneur, for services to technology and online services," while Xochi was listed under her full name, "Xochiltzin De La Luz Birch, Entrepreneur, for services to technology and online services."10 Michael received his OBE at Buckingham Palace on February 11, 2016.1
The couple have three children: Joseph, Devon, and Isabella.6