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How to Kill a Great Idea!

In his interactions with the rest of the world Abrams was more cryptic--even adversarial. He didn't bother to explain Socializr and gave no press interviews, even as he was attacked by bloggers who questioned whether he was really building a serious company. "Socializr in Private Beta, zzzzzzzz," announced a TechCrunch headline. "Will the new start-up be a lame burnout project or new life for Abrams?" asked ValleyWag.

Slide is located in an expansive basement next to one of San Francisco's biggest nightclubs. The name refers to its entrance: a spiral playground slide that patrons ride down into the bar. It's late in the afternoon when I arrive. The empty space is dark and hazy. Abrams gets up from a meeting with his partners and walks me to the far corner. We sit down in one of the deep oversized booths, which give the place the feel of a 1920s speakeasy. A crew sets up the stage for the night's entertainment, a turntablist called DJ Solomon.

As he leans back, tucking his legs under his knees in a yogalike pose, Abrams cuts the figure of someone far younger than his 37 years. Face fashionably unshaven, he sports a Puma track jacket, a black T-shirt, designer jeans, and a slight paunch. A waitress outfitted in a flapper costume--an evanescent white skirt over black leggings--serves us designer water while bizarre jazz reworkings of pop standards like Michael Jackson's "Beat It" play through the sound system.

Ask Abrams what he's learned and you're confronted with a torrent of mea culpas, disclaimers, and recriminations from a man who is at once bitter and resigned. "I take responsibility," he says. "I was naive. I thought these big-shot guys were going to help Friendster." His biggest regret, he says, was turning the company over to Silicon Valley's best and brightest. As Friendster sputtered, Abrams says, he suppressed his entrepreneurial instincts, keeping quiet when he probably should have been lashing out.

With Socializr, Abrams is doing what he would have done at Friendster if he'd stayed in control. "Friendster was never finished--it was a prototype that I stopped having the ability to develop," he says. Like Evite, Socializr helps concert promoters, bars, and anyone else who likes to host gatherings invite people to their events. Abrams hopes that lay users who receive invitations through Socializr will create profile pages on the service as well, which could develop into a full-fledged social network.

When you sign up--a process that takes a minute or so--Socializr offers to troll the Internet for things like your MySpace profile, your Flickr photos, and your LiveJournal blog, and automatically builds a profile that aggregates all of this information. Because this content is stored on other people's websites, bandwidth, processing, and storage costs are relatively low. "Now that there are 100 people who have copied my ideas with Friendster, being the 101st social networking site is silly," he says. "I'm building a product that can integrate with those sites." The software remains in development but has already earned some good reviews. "This wasn't designed by people eager to get in on the game," wrote a blogger for Wired.com. "It was designed by a crew of people who have been playing the game since the beginning."

But the most important lessons from Friendster have less to do with what Socializr does than with how Abrams plans to run it. Abrams was seduced by the experience of his "all-star team," assuming that talented people would come up with the right solutions. This time, he plans to favor quick and dirty engineering solutions over the elegant but not necessarily practical ideas that were imposed by Friendster's management. Having only two employees helps--as does making do with less than $1 million in angel funding. The idea is to grow slowly, have fun--and, above all, avoid hot-shot venture capitalists. "I'm hoping it'll be like 2002 and 2003, when I didn't have a lot of money and I got a lot done," he says.

But if he's not building a traditional VC-backed start-up, what is he building? Is it a hobby project or an IPO in the making? Here Abrams is less clear. Abrams has put none of his own money into Socializr. He is cagey on his timetables and plans for growth. When I ask him what Socializr might look like in three years, he laughs: "That's a long time for me." Coming as it does from the guy who invented social networking, the statement seems curiously unambitious. And then there's the question of why an active Internet entrepreneur would start a nightclub in the first place. Abrams says that Slide is neither a distraction nor a major financial risk. "As you can tell"--he gestures at the posh lighting, the attractive waitress, the abstract art--"I'm doing fine."

Abrams is alluding to his personal wealth, but his almost perky tone suggests his mental state, a hard-fought detachment that has allowed him to recover from failure. Abrams may be a cynic, but it's easy to forgive his cynicism--even if you blame him for the biggest tech flop since the bubble burst. After all, it's not often you encounter a visionary who has decided it's okay not to be one.

Max Chafkin is a staff writer for the magazine.