The Bebo Tree
How one social network spawned a network of founders and companies
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Bebo was a social network that launched in January 2005, peaked at 40 million registered users, sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008, and collapsed within two years.2 What survived the wreckage was not the product but the people. Over the following decade, Bebo's employees and founders dispersed across Silicon Valley and built or co-founded at least half a dozen companies -- including AppLovin, thirdweb, Founders, Inc., The Battery, and Milk Road -- collectively worth tens of billions of dollars.1019 The through-line connecting Furqan Rydhan, Jake Loo, Shaan Puri, Joanna Shields, and Steven Bartlett runs through a single company that most people assume died in 2010.
The trunk: Michael and Xochi Birch
Michael Birch was born on July 7, 1970, in Sawston, Cambridgeshire, graduated from Imperial College London with a physics degree in 1991, and spent roughly a decade in the insurance industry before turning to internet businesses.6 He and his wife Xochi co-founded BirthdayAlarm.com and Ringo.com (sold to Tickle.com in 2003) before launching Bebo from their San Francisco home in January 2005.5 The name was a purchased domain for which the couple invented the backronym "Blog Early, Blog Often."1
Bebo grew rapidly among teenagers in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and New Zealand.1 Comscore data from July 2007 showed it had overtaken MySpace as the most-visited social network in the UK, with 10.6 million unique visitors -- ahead of both MySpace at 10.1 million and Facebook at 7.6 million.7 The only outside funding was a $15 million round from Balderton Capital in May 2006.2
AOL bought Bebo in March 2008 for $850 million in cash.2 The Birches held 70 percent and netted approximately $595 million.3 They left the company shortly after the deal closed.2 Within two years, Bebo's global unique visitors had dropped 45 percent, and AOL announced it would sell or shut the platform down.39 The BBC called the acquisition "one of the worst deals ever made in the dotcom era."40
But the Birches were not finished. In July 2013, they purchased Bebo back from Criterion Capital Partners in a post-bankruptcy auction for $1 million, beating two rival bids.3 Birch announced the buyback on Twitter: "We just bought back Bebo for $1m. Can we actually re-invent it? Who knows, but will be fun trying."3 They placed Bebo under Monkey Inferno, the self-funded startup studio and incubator they had established in San Francisco.8
The Birches' trajectory after Bebo extended well beyond tech. In 2013, they opened The Battery, a members-only social club in San Francisco's Jackson Square neighborhood at 717 Battery Street.26 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."26 Membership costs approximately $2,500 per year.5 They donated over $20 million to charity:water.6 Birch received an OBE in the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to technology and online services.6 In 2016, he began buying properties in the North Devon village of Woolsery, including the village pub, to revitalize the place where his family has lived since the 1700s.5
Branch one: Furqan Rydhan -- Bebo to AppLovin to thirdweb to Founders, Inc.
Furqan Rydhan got his first tech job at a dot-com at age 15 and founded his own e-commerce company, Case-Mod.com, at 17.3736 By the time he reached his twenties, he had already cycled through founding LiveRSVP (2007-2009) and working as a senior software engineer at ReputationDefender (2009-2010).9
In 2010, Rydhan joined AppLovin as founding CTO, a mobile advertising and app-monetization platform co-founded by Adam Foroughi.1110 He held the CTO role from 2010 to 2013, building the technical infrastructure during the company's earliest years.9 AppLovin went public on the Nasdaq on April 15, 2021, raising $2 billion at a valuation exceeding $28 billion.13 As of 2026, the company's market capitalization exceeds $100 billion.41
After leaving AppLovin in 2013, Rydhan joined Monkey Inferno as CTO (2013-2015), then became CTO and co-founder of the reconstituted Bebo from 2015 to 2019.9 At Bebo, he worked alongside Shaan Puri, who was running the company as CEO.12 The two collaborated through the Blab experiment, the pivot to esports tournament software, and the eventual sale to Twitch in June 2019.4
When Twitch absorbed the Bebo team, Rydhan's next move connected two more branches of the tree. In 2020, he co-founded thirdweb with Jake Loo -- another Bebo alumnus -- and Steven Bartlett.16 That same year, he founded Founders, Inc., establishing the venture studio at Fort Mason in San Francisco.35 Rydhan's career path from dot-com teenager to AppLovin founding CTO to Bebo CTO to founder of two companies and a venture studio traces directly through the Bebo organization chart.
Branch two: Jake Loo -- founding engineer to thirdweb CTO
Jake Loo joined Bebo as a founding engineer, where he worked on the platform during its final incarnation.14 When Amazon's Twitch acquired Bebo in June 2019, Loo was among the approximately ten employees absorbed into the streaming company.38 At Twitch, he worked on mobile live broadcasting -- live ingest, audio-video sync, and low-latency playback.14
After Twitch, Loo began building side projects with blockchain technology and connected with Rydhan and Bartlett.18 The three co-founded thirdweb in 2021, with Loo serving as CTO.16 Under his leadership, thirdweb grew to more than 50 employees and its developer platform reached 50,000 monthly active developers and 200,000 deployed smart contracts across eight blockchains by March 2023.1815 The company raised $29 million across two rounds -- a $5 million seed from Mark Cuban and Gary Vaynerchuk, and a $24 million Series A led by Haun Ventures at a $160 million valuation.1617
Loo stepped down as CTO in early 2026 after more than four years.15 His path from Bebo founding engineer to Twitch to building one of the most widely used Web3 developer platforms is one of the quieter but most technically consequential branches of the tree.
Branch three: Shaan Puri -- CEO of Bebo to My First Million
Shaan Puri attended Duke University from 2006 to 2010, graduating with a biology degree, then skipped medical school to start a fast-casual sushi restaurant with two friends.19 After the restaurant failed, he turned to Silicon Valley.19 Rather than applying for jobs conventionally, Puri cold-emailed Monkey Inferno with ideas and improvements for their portfolio companies.19 By the time a position opened, founder Michael Birch already knew his name.19
Puri became CEO of Monkey Inferno around 2012, when he was in his early twenties.32 The studio ran a 20-person team tasked with generating and building startup ideas using the Birches' capital.19 One of the first major products was Blab, a live-streaming group video chat app launched in 2015 that amassed 3.9 million users in its first year but struggled with retention and shut down in August 2016.211
After Blab, Puri's team pivoted Bebo to esports tournament organization, building tools for scheduling, brackets, and community management for gaming leagues.4 In June 2019, Amazon's Twitch acquired Bebo for up to $25 million in a bidding war that included Facebook and Discord.434 The deal included roughly ten employees and all intellectual property.38
At Twitch, Puri served as Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming and Emerging Markets from 2019 to 2021.20 He left in 2021 and co-founded Milk Road, a daily crypto newsletter, with Ben Levy.31 The newsletter reached 250,000 subscribers in under ten months and was sold to Bitfo in January 2023 for a reported eight-figure sum.31 In 2019, he also co-launched My First Million, a business-ideas podcast with Sam Parr, which grew into a top-ranked entrepreneurship podcast.19 During a 2021 episode, Puri brought on Rydhan -- his former CTO at Bebo -- to discuss what it was like co-founding a $20 billion company.12
Puri's AMA on Reddit in October 2013, during the early Monkey Inferno days, reached the site's front page when he described the $850 million-to-$1 million arc of Bebo's ownership history.822
Branch four: Joanna Shields -- Bebo to Google to Facebook to the House of Lords
Joanna Shields joined Bebo as president in January 2007, recruited from a managing director role at Google where she had overseen strategic partnerships for Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Africa.28 At Bebo, she led the commercial strategy, including the launch of an Open Media Platform in November 2007 that allowed the BBC and CBS to distribute content on the site.1
After AOL acquired Bebo in 2008, Shields headed AOL's new "People Networks" division combining Bebo, AIM, and ICQ.1 She left AOL and in 2010 was hired by Facebook as Managing Director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.29 Shields later served as CEO of Tech City UK, was appointed a life peer as Baroness Shields of Brooklands in 2014, and served as the UK's Minister for Internet Safety and Security from 2015 to 2017.30 Her path from Google executive to Bebo president to Facebook to the House of Lords represents the highest-profile career trajectory of any Bebo alumnus outside the founders themselves.
Branch five: Steven Bartlett -- the indirect connection through thirdweb
Steven Bartlett never worked at Bebo, but his career became entangled with its alumni network through thirdweb. Born in Gaborone, Botswana, on August 26, 1992, and raised in Plymouth, England, Bartlett dropped out of Manchester Metropolitan University after a single lecture.23 In 2014, he co-founded Social Chain, a social media marketing company in Manchester with Dominic McGregor.23 The company merged with German retailer Lumaland in 2019 to form Social Chain AG, listing on the Dusseldorf Stock Exchange at a valuation exceeding $200 million.23
Bartlett connected with Rydhan and Loo -- both Bebo veterans -- and the three co-founded thirdweb in 2021.16 Bartlett told TechCrunch he compared the Web3 developer tooling problem to the early web, when developers had to code everything themselves before platforms like Stripe simplified common features.17 In 2021, Bartlett became the youngest-ever investor on BBC One's Dragons' Den at age 28.2524 His Diary of a CEO podcast had 15.2 million YouTube subscribers and 1.27 billion views by March 2026.23
Through thirdweb, the Bebo alumni network connected to Bartlett's media ecosystem and its audience of millions.
Where the branches reconnect
The defining characteristic of the Bebo tree is not its size but its density. The branches do not simply diverge -- they loop back into each other.
Rydhan worked at AppLovin from 2010 to 2013, then joined Monkey Inferno and Bebo where he worked under Puri as CTO from 2013 to 2019.9 After the Twitch sale, Rydhan reconnected with Loo -- who had been a founding engineer at Bebo alongside him -- to co-found thirdweb, bringing in Bartlett as the third co-founder.1618 Rydhan simultaneously founded Founders, Inc., which invested in thirdweb.35
Puri and Rydhan maintained their connection from the Bebo years. Puri featured Rydhan on My First Million episode 180, where Rydhan described the experience of co-founding a company that reached a $20 billion public valuation.12 Puri's podcast career itself traces to the network he built during the Monkey Inferno and Twitch years.32
Michael Birch's capital funded Monkey Inferno, which employed both Puri and Rydhan, who together built the esports version of Bebo that Twitch acquired.84 That acquisition put both of them inside Amazon's gaming division, which they left to build separate companies that now operate within overlapping corners of the tech ecosystem: Rydhan in Web3 infrastructure and venture, Puri in media and angel investing.2010
The full accounting runs deeper. Monkey Inferno's 20-person team during the 2013-2019 period included engineers and designers who went on to roles at companies across San Francisco's startup scene.33 The Battery, the Birches' members club, became a gathering place for the city's tech community, creating social connections that fed back into deal flow and hiring.2627 Founders, Inc. now operates from a 42,000-square-foot lab at Fort Mason, where buildspace's Farza Majeed previously ran Nights and Weekends before the program wound down in 2024.35
A single company founded by two people in their living room in 2005 produced a founding CTO whose first venture IPO'd at $28 billion, a CEO who built a top-ten business podcast and sold a newsletter for eight figures, a president who entered the British House of Lords, and a co-founding relationship that created a $160 million Web3 platform and a venture studio at Fort Mason.13313017 The Bebo tree is still growing branches.
References
- Bebo — Wikipedia(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- AOL Buys Bebo For $850 Million — TechCrunch(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Bebo founder pays $1m to buy back site sold for $850m — The Guardian(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Amazon's Twitch acquired social networking platform Bebo for up to $25M to bolster its esports efforts — TechCrunch(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- The Incredible Life of Bebo Cofounder Mike Birch — Business Insider