In the summer of 2006 Kevin Rose was plastered on the cover of Businessweek with the headline: "How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months."
The subtitle read, "Digg.com's Kevin Rose leads a new brat pack of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs."
Sarah Lacy, now of PandoDaily, wrote that Rose was one of a handful of youngsters that made up "the new geek elite."
And it was true. Rose and the new geek elite had achieved rock star status. Their success was a lightening rod for a new wave of Web-based sites -- at the time "Web 2.0" companies. These were new consumer and media sites built with do-it-yourself social media and crowdsourced data.
A lot has changed in the last six years, so we decided to take a look at who was featured in the story and where they ended up.
Kevin Rose is now at Google
Digg faded from the scene. Kevin Rose started a new company, called Milk. Milk didn't gain much traction, and Rose sold it to Google. Google kept Rose on the payroll but shut down Milk's app Oink.
Joshua Schachter bounced from Yahoo to Google and is on his own again
Joshua Schachter sold bookmarking site Del.icio.us to Yahoo for about $31 million, landing him a job at Yahoo. In 2008, he was among a mass exodus of execs from Yahoo. A year later he landed at Google, but that job would only last a year because he "felt like doing something new."
Today he is CEO of a tech incubator Tasty Labs (Get it? The Delicious founder named his incubator Tasty). So far, Tasty has launched two startups: Jig a site where you say what you need and it connects you to people who can help you; skills.to, launched a few days ago. It lets you add tags to peeps in your social network.
Dennis "Thresh" Fong: Still playing around
Gaming whiz kid Dennis Fong is also known by his alias, Thresh. Before 2006, Fong was famous as a retired celebrity pro gamer. He became a "geek elite" when his gaming company, Xfire, sold to Viacom for $102 million. This was just one of a string of startups he and his brother launched. Gamers.com sold to Ziff Davis in 2001. Lithium, run by his bro Lyle Fong, is still around and kicking.
Today Fong is CEO of Raptr, a social network for gamers that he founded in 2007.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider