to VCs if I didn’t have a great deal of user base and press to show. I think that
would have been a challenge. If I said, “Hey, I’m going to build a bookmarking
service,” I would have never been able to get off the ground.
Livingston: Because the idea was so new?
Schachter: No. There had been plenty of other startups that failed doing this.
Backflip and God knows what else. So it had been tried and failed in the past.
Livingston: Why did del.icio.us succeed?
Schachter: First of all, because it was not a venture to start. I was building a
product and that’s it.
Livingston: Did the others fail because they had too much money?
Schachter: I think in general being overcapitalized is a path to failure. The VCs
want you to spend. There are general ills with being overfunded.
I don’t think they ever really quite thought out the problem. We live in a different
world now where people value the data differently.
Livingston: Was there anything about del.icio.us that was much better than
your competitors?
Schachter: I think the competitors had already disappeared by then. The tagging
thing was probably essential.
Livingston: Can you tell me more about how you came up with tagging?
Schachter: There was no point at which I said, “I’m inventing this wonderful
new thing.” I just sort of realized that I had evolved my own filing system, and
it worked for me. I’d used it for a long time before del.icio.us even showed up.
This was the codification of that practice.
Livingston: But you were one of the first companies to do tagging?
Schachter: Yeah. For example, in Muxway, the internal table that tracked that
stuff was called Tags. The name had come along at some point, but I don’t
remember exactly how it showed up.
Livingston: When you decided to leave Morgan Stanley and focus full-time on
del.icio.us, did you know you had to raise money?
Schachter: I was getting a lot of interest in acquisitions—there were a bunch of
offers/buyouts, and they were increasing in value over time. At the same time, I
wanted to be able to pay the rent, but I didn’t want to chew into life savings. At
the end of the day, my Morgan coworkers were pretty supportive, “You should
go do this. Try it out and let us know how it goes.”
Joshua Schachter 225
Livingston: Union Square Ventures was your VC, right?
Schachter: They were Union Square and Amazon.
Livingston: Did they come to you?
Schachter: I had met Jeff Bezos at Foo Camp, and he was very interested.
Livingston: How much did they put in?
Schachter:We never announced the amount, but it was not a huge amount of