Founders at Work.pdf

224 Founders at Work
with 20,000 links. I couldn’t find anything in that file anymore, so I started putting
in notes. I’d put the URL, a space, a hash mark, and then a word or two
describing it. I think the first one was “math,” so I could grep out all the things
that were #math and get all my items marked as math. In some sense, these
were the first tags.
After a while, I couldn’t really do this, so I built a sort of next generation of
that text file, which was called Muxway, in 2001. It was a lot like del.icio.us.
There was a bookmarklet; you saved things; you could describe and tag them. It
was single-player—no one else could use it—but the actual website was visible
to other people. I discovered over time that people were subscribing to my
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. I’d been invited to
Foo Camp for GeoURL, and I had stuff to show for del.icio.us, but I didn’t
show anyone. I chickened out because I was embarrassed at the state of the
thing. So people were using it then, but it was more generally released later—I
think toward December of 2003.
Through 2004, I kept working on it and started to get press and lots of users.
By the end of 2004, I had 30,000 users.
Livingston: How were the users finding out about it?
Schachter: People were telling each other about it.
Livingston: You were at Morgan Stanley this whole time, right? What were you
doing there?
Schachter: I was doing data mining and proprietary trading algorithms.
Livingston: Why did you choose not to focus full-time on del.icio.us and what
finally tipped the scale?
Schachter: The economics didn’t make sense. It still made sense to keep the
day job. But in late 2004/early 2005, my group at Morgan Stanley began to
come apart. There were a bunch of people leaving, so it was a natural time
to leave. It was a “Should I find a new job elsewhere?” kind of thing.
Livingston: When you were doing this in your spare time, did you ever say,
“Ugh. This is too much work”?
Schachter: Not really. I was always very careful (not anymore, because the guys
that I work with are better programmers) to structure the code—each chunk of
code wasn’t larger than the screen—such that I could come in and look at it, figure
out what I’m doing, do it, and be done for the day in 15 minutes. So if I
could get one thing done a day, I was happy. A lot of stuff, if I could spend more