that was a fully distributed social network—no central server whatsoever. It
used email as a carrier and could tell people you talked to about other people
you corresponded with in an encrypted and compressed way. If I emailed you,
it would attach a Loaf file. You couldn’t open the Loaf file and read the contents
of it; it just didn’t work that way. It used Bloom filter, so it was sort of a statistical
object. But you could take another email address and see if it was in there.
With 99 percent accuracy, you could tell if someone was inside that file. So if
you got email, you could say, “I think Joshua Schachter corresponds with this
person.” Without me exposing my address book to you, you could tell who in
your address book you talked to. It was a pretty neat idea, but it was complicated
to install.
Joshua Schachter 229
The other problem was that it didn’t work without Loaf. So that didn’t do
very well, but we got press for it. It was sufficiently innovative. Maybe I’ll
return to that idea someday.
Livingston: So press helped you get the word out about your projects?
Schachter: I was in USA Today in the late ’90s for Memepool, so it was always
from there I got a great deal of press and sort of had early training. My father
was the consumer advocate for the Long Island Railroad and was in the newspaper
all the time, so I got training sort of that way. When this stuff started happening,
I knew that you have x messages and when you talk to the press, any
question they ask is answered with one of the messages.
I understand talking to the press as an essential part of marketing. At the
same time, I understand that the consumers are the best marketers. If they love
your product and you give them the tools to market it, they will.
Livingston: What do you think about technical founders versus businesspeople
founders?
Schachter: I have never had a great deal of trust for people who don’t execute
on core ideas. I understand the value of needing someone to deal with that kind
of stuff—someone’s got to do the VC pitch and there’s got to be a CFO, etc. But
the guy who says, “I have a great idea and I’m looking for other people to implement
it,” I’m wary of—frequently because I think the process of idea-making
relies on executing and failing or succeeding at the ideas, so that you can actually
become better at coming up with ideas. It’s something you can learn. It’s a
skill, like weightlifting. That failed; that worked; continue. You begin to learn
how to make ideas. So if you are someone who can’t execute and all you can do