Focus: Social network for gamers
Kieran O’Neill, 21
Company: Playfire
Web: Playfire.com
Founding a social network for gamers and guiding it through seed round backing of $1m (from the likes of Bebo founder Michael Birch and former Sony chairman Chris Deering) would be considered precocious for most 21-year-olds. Playfire, however, is O’Neill’s third business.
Having already sold holylemon.com, the video sharing site he built at the age of 15, for $1.25m, he then co-founded PSU.com, the largest PlayStation community in the world, before setting up his latest venture with Ben Phillips and Seb Hayes. While Playfire, which already has 120,000 members, is still ‘pre-revenue’, O’Neill says lead generation of game sales and targeted advertising will generate millions in revenue in the next few years.
