MINCHAEL-BIRCH

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Living Place: London

Michael Birch, 35, is an English computer programmer and entrepreneur. He founded the online social networking website Bebo with the help of his wife Xochi Birch in January 2005 with a major launch in July 2005. Now Bebo has over 45 million registered users and has surpassed MySpace in many countries and is currently the sixth most popular site in the UK, bigger than AOL, Amazon.co.uk and bbc.co.uk

“Ultimately, we built something we thought we’d find useful and wanted to use, and hoped enough people shared the same opinion,” Birch insists.

“Starting Bebo was a similar process to starting the other ventures,” Michael says. “The difference was this took off from a very early stage. I think that was because we’d got a lot better at learning how to do things. There wasn’t so much trial and error. After a while you start to get an instinct for what works and what doesn’t.”

“We’ve been laying the ground work for this year and if you look at the marketplace as a whole there’s not really anyone else in the English language market positioned as far down the road as Bebo. A year is a long time, and by the end of this one the landscape may have changed.”

“It was a hard time to be in the industry but luckily at the time it was just Michael and I working in our bedroom so we had very little debt. Because we had to be cheap, it helped us innovate.”