VETERAN entrepreneur turned venture capitalist Barry Maloney is at least twice as old as the average Bebo user but this hasn’t deterred the 46-year-old from becoming the latest member of its board. Like most people in Ireland, only four months ago Maloney had barely heard of Bebo, the social networking site that allows teenagers to set up their own home pages to swap gossip and pictures.

Ever aware of the opportunities afforded by technological change, he realised the internet phenomenon was something special when his three teenage children were no longer fighting him for the television remote control. Launched in July 2005, Bebo has 24m users worldwide and some 500,000 of them live in Ireland. It is estimated that Bebo pages are called up 20m times a day by Irish users. The site is hugely popular among schoolchildren and those aged 13 to 24 account for 85% of Bebo’s users. As a partner in investment firm Benchmark Capital, Maloney last week fronted a $15m (€12m) investment in the company founded by British internet guru Michael Birch and his wife Xochi. Birch launched Ringo.com, one of the first social networking sites, which he later sold to Tickle, now part of Monster.

He is now going to be a key figure in the drive to commercialise the phenomenon and pitch Bebo against market leader, MySpace.com. News Corporation purchased MySpace.com last year for $580m. News Corporation, whose subsidiary News International publishes The Sunday Times, is even planning a television network, MyTelevison, based around the social networking concept. “At the time, a lot of people thought the MySpace deal was crazy, now it looks like one of the deals of the century,” said Maloney. In comparison to MySpace, Bebo is little more than a “garage” company, with a handful of employees. Maloney is the only non-executive on the board. “It is a start-up and, like any start-up, it has started small,” said Maloney. “But that is how Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Microsoft started.

“The big job was to convince Michael Birch that he needed us at all,” he added. “He didn’t see the value in venture capital. It helped that Benchmark is an experienced internet investor.” The American company was one of the original investors in online auction site eBay. Maloney is aware of the parental fears surrounding some of the material that is posted on networking sites and the group is currently hiring a safety and security officer to patrol the site. “I allow my kids on it and if they find something that they don’t like, they report it and it is taken off,” he said. Bebo will use the Benchmark funds to open an office in London and to expand operations in America. The company is operated by its management team in San Francisco, California.