# Friendster: How They Blew It

An episode of [Great Business Stories](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1728626597), 8 Apr 2026, 30 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/f62e45f4/podcast/play/118024752/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-3-6%2Fd476116e-b55d-3208-10c8-5109394ad60e.mp3

I just love this story - it has everything - Jonathan Abrams, a young, smart coder from Canada, moved to California because he wanted to be at the very heart of the internet boom. And on nothing more than an intuition, a feeling of how things should be online, he comes up with the framework for a social media platform, the very same model that MySpace, Facebook and all the others then learnt from or copied. But Abrams and Friendster were first, and for a brief moment, they were the hottest property in Silicon Valley - Google tried to buy them. VCs were desperate to invest with them - and within just a few months, it all fell apart, leaving the door wide open for MySpace and then Facebook. It’s a fascinating story, enjoy

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