tl;dr: built tacky MySpace themes sites, promoted them by paying "MySpace whores" with 10,000s of friends to post bulletins, got in early with Yahoo!'s beta ad program when they were massively overpaying, made at peak $200,000 a month, blew a TON of money on cars, a house etc, redesigned the site (and permanently deleted the old one) without realising that changing his URLs would kill his Google rank, blew $30,000 on SEO experts, none of whom apparently told him he should set up redirects, ended up selling the MySpace site for $75,000, still has the house.
"tl;dr: built tacky MySpace themes sites, ... still has the house."
I'm having trouble reconciling the "dr" part of "tl;dr" with your concise summary of almost the entire interview. :)
"built tacky MySpace themes sites, promoted them by paying "MySpace whores" with 10,000s of friends to post bulletins, got in early with Yahoo!'s beta ad program when they were massively overpaying, ..."
Or, built a service that many people on MySpace were very happy to use, promoted that service very effectively within the web and MySpace community dynamics of the time, had lucky timing and benefited from his status on MySpace and the Web to get in the Yahoo ad beta stage when it was was more lucrative ...
"... made at peak $200,000 a month, blew a TON of money on cars, a house etc, redesigned the site (and permanently deleted the old one) without realizing that changing his URLs would kill his Google rank, ..."
Or, made more money at peak per month than most people will make at peak per year, ever, blew a lot of money, redesigned a site that had grown organically, as did his knowledge of software engineering and business, made a fatal error not just in changing the URLs but all the text on his site (html, css, javascript, etc)...
"... blew $30,000 on SEO experts, none of whom apparently told him he should set up redirects, ..."
When, what he should have done is spent a few hundred or thousand to have an SEO expert tell him what went wrong (or hired such before he finalized his decision to switch everything over in seconds) and how long it might take to fix it (if it could be fixed at all). If anyone had told him about redirects by that time (they probably did), it would have been too late because the mistake was already irrevocably "out there" ...
"... ended up selling the MySpace site for $75,000, still has the house."
Still had a business that could be sold for some amount of money, and, he's already dusted himself off and working his way back with what may be a viable and lucrative service.
The guy is 22 (?), and already he's built and lost/sold a million dollar business (based on nothing but tacky MySpace themes!) without, apparently, knowing much about business, and without benefit of any experienced adviser. He learned some very expensive lessons about spending, source control and how search engines see and judge your site, and about how important it is to learn important things before they're important. He did it in the fashion often advocated here: do it, and learn what you need when you need it. Unfortunately he learned a few things a bit later than when he needed it, but it doesn't seem to have discouraged him permanently.
Most of us make mistakes and learn about managing our life and business in our early twenties, we just don't think of those mistakes as "shocking" because we aren't spinning millions of dollars and our own business around.
I thought it was an interesting and useful story, and I liked the "en vivo, open kimono" format.
tl;dr, when accompanied with any further text, means not "it was too long; I didn't read it," but rather "for the benefit of those who thought it was too long, and thus didn't read it:"
It sounds like whoever bought that site may have made a bundle off of him. Just a few 301 redirects in the old .htaccess file and the new owner was back in business!
