History of Famous Startups. del.icio.us

works. He says

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

works. He says they never call you back to say no—they don’t want to close the
door in case they want to open it again, but they don’t want to actually give you
a response. Very few VCs actually said, “Sorry, we’re not interested.”
Livingston: How did the process of starting your own company and then selling
it change you?
Schachter: It pushes you far. You learn a lot. I did a round of funding, I was
writing code, I was hiring people, chief architect designer, negotiator, you name
it. I did all of it, for the most part.
When…

is come up

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

is come up with ideas, how do you know if they are any good? You don’t really
know if it’s a good idea until you’ve executed it. You need to understand the cost
of execution and so on.
Also, where I worked at Morgan, they were not hyper-trustful of MBAs. All
my coworkers were PhDs in computer science, mathematics, or physics.
Livingston: New York City doesn’t seem to be a place where too many startups
flourish.
Schachter: There’s a great deal of technology going on in New York City. In
financial places, there is lots of high-end, high-speed transactional technology....

that was a

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

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…

to my wife

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

to my wife though.
Livingston: Did you find you were better at some things than you thought?
Schachter: I could focus on it more and do slightly larger stuff. I’ve always had
a short attention span, so that’s probably the actual limiting factor. The amount
of coffee I can consume to mitigate that and that’s about it.
Livingston: Were there things about del.icio.us that users misunderstood?
Schachter:We named things differently. I wouldn’t say that we had awesome
execution. It was very techy. It bred a strong priesthood, which was helpful in
getting the message out initially, but it was harder…

IDs just don’t

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

IDs just don’t fly. There’s a stack of about 15 things that I have, a big
list of pitfalls.
Livingston: Can you remember any features from del.icio.us that the users
wanted or really loved that surprised you?
Schachter: There’s always stuff. I tend to be careful about that. I think people
ask for features—they want to do something, but they don’t say, “I want to do
that something.” They translate it into some feature that typically they’ve seen
somewhere else and ask for that instead. I want a feature that does this. “Why
do you want to do that?” Then…

think we didn’t

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

think we didn’t even go far enough. Whatever it is, question every single aspect
of conventional wisdom. “Is that the right way to do it or can we break that and
make it better?”
That’s also dangerous, because, if you are doing a lot of paradigm innovation,
call it—which is not a good word—but if you are breaking boundaries
elsewhere, maybe you need to be very within boundaries on other fronts.
Livingston: Do you remember a time when you were worried about something?
Schachter: Site’s down. Site’s slow. Table crash—MySQL corrupted a table.
That happened all the time. A great…

capital.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

capital.
Livingston: And that’s because you didn’t want to take a huge amount of
capital?
Schachter: Well, there was a lot of risk. It was sort of hard to justify a large
valuation and so on, so we sold a small chunk for enough money to work for a
while and see if it turned into something. That was the plan: see where this
goes.
Livingston: Did you hire anyone?
Schachter:We did. There were eight employees total at the end.
Livingston: Were most of them shareholders?
Schachter:We gave shares to everybody.
Livingston: Did you have vesting?
Schachter: Yes. Even I…

to VCs if

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

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…

bookmarks. There were

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

bookmarks. There were some 10,000 daily readers looking at my stuff. That was
interesting.
I did several other projects along the way. I did GeoURL. Something called
Reversible, that is long gone. Reversible was also like del.icio.us in many ways,
but different in a few key ways that made it fail.
In late 2003, I started working on del.icio.us, which is a multiplayer version.
I was actually trying to come up with a better Memepool—something between
Muxway and Memepool which was more vital somehow, and we ended up with
del.icio.us. I had it partially done for the first Foo Camp....

Joshua Schachter started

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:05:44 -0700

Joshua Schachter started the collaborative bookmarking
site del.icio.us in 2003. As often happens with startups,
del.icio.us began as something Schachter built for
himself. He needed a way of organizing his collection of
20,000 bookmarks, and he hit on the idea of “tagging”
them with brief text phrases to help him find links later.
He put del.icio.us on a server and opened it up to other
people, and it began to spread by word of mouth.
For the first several years, Schachter worked on
del.icio.us and other projects, like Memepool and
GeoURL, while working as a quantitative analyst
at Morgan Stanley....