(2018-10-22) Schachter Did I Make A Mistake Selling My Social Media Darling To Yahoo

Joshua Schachter: Did I Make a Mistake Selling (SellOut) My Social-Media Darling to Yahoo? Joshua Schachter’s groundbreaking social-bookmarking site Del.icio.us.

In the late ’90s, I started a site called Memepool

I turned that text file into a site called Muxway.org, which was for single users, and then turned that into Del.icio.us, which was for multiple users to use at the same time

I was working a day job at Morgan Stanley

I went to Union Square Ventures in the beginning of 2005 to raise money. The site was coming apart at the seams.

We started to try to raise money again toward the end of the year, but it didn’t go well.

We went with Yahoo partially because it was the first company to make a real offer, but also because it had already started a major push into Web 2.0. It had already acquired Flickr; it had acquired Upcoming — it felt like it was trying to make a big change in what it did.

Once we were acquired, Yahoo helped us on the tech side, but not as much as it said it would

Any decision was an endless discussion.

It took a year for reality to set in. If you wanted to get hardware, you went to the “hardware request committee” with your proposal

On top of that, leadership had no vision or mission, so they couldn’t evaluate any decision.