Mr. Modernizer
He changed your life. He changed everyone’s lives.
Andrew Weinreich had a dream for the future, and though it may have been far before its time, his dream did become a reality.
It was the year 1995 and the Internet was just beginning to blossom. Andrew Weinreich was a University of Pennsylvania graduate, with a B.A. in American history, and a Fordham University School of Law graduate with a J.D..
Despite his degrees, Weinreich aspired to work towards building the future. To do so, he met weekly with a group of people eager to start a business together and change the future.
“I met once a week with a group of people, including a back-end programmer for the purpose of starting a business together. At the time, I didn’t even know what a back-end programmer was.”
Weeks progressed, but they did not. Constantly bouncing ideas off of each other, but nothing seemed to spark anyone’s interest, until one day. The idea finally hit Weinreich; social networking!
Networking is the ability to connect with people you do not know through people that you do. It was apparent to Weinreich that the essence of a social network was a contact list, where one captured all of their relationships in a single place. So convinced that this was the winner, Weinreich urged everyone to quit their jobs and join him.
His fellow innovators were far from enthused.
Nevertheless, their lack of faith in the idea and refusal to quit their jobs did not stop 27-year old Weinreich:
“I was thinking ‘How can no one be willing to quit their jobs? This is it!’ So I said I’m going to quit this group and the next day I quit my job.”
Back at the bottom, yet more determined than ever, he assembled a pitiful working space and a few loyal pioneers to begin his journey to the top.
Money was tight but morale was high. Weinreich and his crew were overworked, underpaid, and fading fast. He never lost hope, though, Weinreich:
“There are times when I doubt whether or not I will be successful at something.… most of the things that I have worked on, I haven’t lacked the conviction in the vision.”
They called it “Sixdegrees”, based upon the Six Degrees of Separation Theory by Stanley Milgram: the theory is that any person on the planet can be connected to any other person through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. Sixdegrees was the first online company of its kind that allowed users to identify relationships with people they know, and build networks with those they did not through previously established connections. Weinreich and his team launched Sixdegrees is 1997 and sat by awaiting the world’s response.
“When we launched Sixdegrees in 1997, there was a period when we didn’t know if it would go viral … After a month, we started to see exponential growth,” he recalled.
Furthermore, he explained how the company went on to raise $13 million from James Murdoch and News Corporation, $2.5 million from high net worth individuals, and $10 million from a hedge fund; approximately $25 million, all within two years. Sixdegrees had an estimated 3.5 million subscribers and 100 employees at its peak.
“While the site had millions of registered users,” according to CBS News, “due to the lack of people connected to the Internet, networks were limited. It would be a few years before the Internet’s infrastructure could catch up with the concept of social networks”.
The company sold for $125 million to YouthStream Media Networks in December of 2000. Although it may seem as though this was the sad, yet prosperous death of his dream, it truly was just the beginning.
Young Weinreich knew what the future held, and he was yearning to see it unfold.
“When the web started taking off and startups were hot in the nineties, I thought it was inevitable that we would index people we knew in a single database. I thought that was inevitable,” he explained.
During the time, the sole obstacles standing in the way of the takeoff of social networking across the world were simple technological advances that had yet to be developed. Andrew Weinreich shed light to this predicament in a later, 2003 telephone interview stating how the concept of Sixdegrees was ahead of its time, coming as it did prior to when the digital cameras became ubiquitous, so it could not offer an essential part of online dating; photographs.
In a 2014 interview with Weinreich, he discussed the impact that digital cameras had on the world,
“…people didn’t have digital cameras in the 90’s and as a result, they didn’t have enough digital photographs. And then one day we wake up in 2002 and miraculously this macro change occurs where everyone has a digital camera and everyone has digital photographs. Sure, it changed the social networking forever.”
The digital camera was the golden ticket over the obstacle, and every innovator like Weinreich grabbed that ticket and ran with it.
Sixdegrees may not be the most recognized form of social networking of its kind, but it was the first. Clearly, the world was not ready for the revolutionary concept of Sixdegrees, but Andrew Weinreich’s determination to bring social networking to the Web inevitably built a foundation for the future.
He changed your life; he changed the world. Now, the question that remains is whether or not that change was for the better.
