Two great reads about the experience of Digg founder Kevin Rose

If you are involved in an IT startup, or thinking about launching one, take some time to read these two articles about Digg founder Kevin Rose. The stories and interviews lists some of the experiences of the Digg team from launch to recent sale.

What I like about the post mortems on Digg is that it becomes abundantly clear that even successful startups make mistakes, are exposed to competition and can very well fail at any moment. While this should be obvious, these lessons can be easy to forget when looking at Google, Facebook and other incredibly successful startups, especially at the time you, yourself has just raised first round financing and the sky is the limit.

Remember that Google and Facebook didn't just get to where they are today through inevitability alone. A lot of hard work, but more importantly, a lot of mistakes were made and lessons learned without necessarily killing the business.

Improvise, adapt and overcome.