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One Burbn, One Scotch, One Beer
A few years ago, I got a frantic email one evening. It was from a young entrepreneur named Kevin Systrom. “Hey MG, I saw you signed up for Burbn…” is how it started. He was freaked out. Someone had told me about the service and the sign up wasn’t locked down. But Kevin did not want me to write about his fledgling idea just yet. We hopped on the phone. Of course I agreed to hold the story. I’d write when he was ready.
We broke a lot of news at TechCrunch over the years. But I was always happy about the way we treated entrepreneurs with their delicate plans. Big companies are different — they can take hits. Outing young companies before they’re ready: not cool. When in doubt, defer to the entrepreneur. Michael taught us well.
Anyway, while I sat on the story of a hot new HTML5-based location app, I got to know Kevin and eventually his co-founder Mike Krieger. Really great guys. Idealists. Just insane enough to potentially change things. So when I saw the news this morning that Facebook was buying them for a billion dollars, I was beyond happy.
We weren’t investors — sadly, we came into existence too late — but screw that. This is just a great story about a great product, great founders, a great team, and great execution. And I feel sincerely happy for these guys because I was there pretty much the entire time watching from a distance.
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