Back in November I mentioned a great video of MySpace founder Tom Anderson. I wanted to continue the MySpace profile today by sharing a some of Tom and Chris DeWolfe’s (co-founder) advice for entrepreneurs.

Together, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson have over 200 million “friends” and chances are you might be one of them. The two buddies are the brains behind MySpace.com, the online networking site that has taken the world by storm. The second venture for the pair, DeWolfe and Anderson’s first company was sold for several million dollars. Now, MySpace.com, which allows members to create interactive profiles, blogs, and post just about anything they want, is the sixth most popular website in the world, and the third most popular in the U.S. But it was a business that almost never got started.

“It’s certainly nice to make money off of it and become financially successful,” says DeWolfe, “but really the fun of it was to build the site and that continues to be the fun of it.” Anderson echoes the sentiment: “I’d like to do this as long as it’s fun, and that could be a long, long time.” They started off as two men who shared nothing but a love of indie music, a distaste for authority, and a simple idea for a website. So, how did these fast friends find themselves not only in the pages of Fortune magazine but also at the forefront of an Internet revolution?

“It sounds crazy, but even in the first plan that I wrote up, I mentioned AOL, Yahoo! and Hotmail, knowing we would be big. And it’s crazy to think that it happened. We met about seven or eight years ago during the beginning of that Internet boom. Tom has a million ideas, and some of them are pretty good. Some of them are a little wacky. But oh, this one was just a phenomenal idea.

We started the company around the time that a lot of other social networking companies were starting up. But we saw that a lot of those companies had a very niche focus. We set out to create this next generation portal where we looked at the best social features around. 

We looked at how people live their lives. We didn’t get bogged down in creating the next new technology podcasting RSS thingamajiggy. We had classifieds, events, blogs, music. It definitely has its own voice. It’s a little bit edgy, it seems cool, it doesn’t seem overly produced. We’re not deciding what’s cool. Our users are. MySpace is all about letting people be what they want to be.

My vision for social networks is participatory, visual, based on dialogue. They can be as edgy as they want or as square as they want – it’s up to them. As a TV manager, the best thing to happen is your show gets really hot. But you always know that it’s going to lose popularity and become uncool at some point when you run out of ideas or people just get tired. We don’t have to deal with that because we are not creating the program – our users are. They can continually reinvent what’s new and what’s cool, based on changing their profiles, or new bands coming in.

There are 140 million different channels to watch on our site. They’re defining the experience, not us. We’re just letting it rip. What I’m basically trying to say is that as long as we don’t screw it up, we’ll be fine. 

We’re never arrogant, we’re always looking at the competition. But they have not been successful for a couple of reasons. The intent to socialize on a site like Yahoo! isn’t really there because the brand doesn’t necessarily stand for anything and there’s no real voice to it.

In the early days, there were a lot of bands signing up. They told us that they’d like to post their lyrics and tour dates. Users told us what they wanted to see, and we just built it. It gives those artists a longer period of time to develop themselves before they get signed, or make a living without getting signed at all.

For the most part everyone doubted we were a real company and a real site because we weren’t in the Silicon Valley. And we didn’t do things like everyone else. We had ten different features on our site. They considered that to be unfocused. The user interface wasn’t pretty. We weren’t using Linux operating system but off-the-shelf Microsoft products, which was unheard of.

Others try to do too many things at one given time. At any one time, we focus our developers on the top three to four initiatives and don’t get distracted with what others tell us we ought to do. That was the antithesis of what we aimed to do. Most of the sites that did that became boring after awhile. Once you choose your product road map, then it becomes very important to focus on the top three to four initiatives and get those things done.

So we are not doing what everyone else is doing. When we were getting popular, people were saying, ‘Why aren’t you doing this or that?’ I thought they were ridiculous, and they thought I was ridiculous.

I’d like to do this as long as it’s fun, and that could be a long, long time. A lot of the early growth had to do with the features and what our competitors were not allowing people to do. As long as it’s still fun to be here we are going to continue our work. For me it feels like the opportunity has just begun; it’s definitely not ending.”