Founders at Work.pdf

228 Founders at Work
completely different way to do it. Do you have a central server that hands out
number sets, or do you come up with something that’s not numbers? Do you
use random numbers and hope they never collide? Whatever it is, autoassigned
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 it turns out there’s some better way to do that.
So, stuff that people ask for, I tend to try and dig to the root cause, before
reducing to practice.
People frequently aren’t quite sure what they want. Then there’s a whole
bunch of stuff that’s like, “Feature 1 and feature 2 suggest feature 3; ask for feature
3.” And I just know that people are never going to use feature 3 and the
implementation thereof would be quite expensive. So leave it out.
Livingston: How did your user base evolve over the years?
Schachter: I think it’s still a very technical, early adopter audience. It’s broadening
over time, but we’re sticking with that for now.
Livingston: Can you tell me about some of the major turning points in
del.icio.us?
Schachter: Nothing really comes to mind. It was like a roller coaster always
going up, so it’s always increasingly bigger, faster, more and more people.
I had a bunch of conceptual revelations on how to build stuff. For a long
time, it would go slow and I’d figure out some clever thing to do—“I know
we’re doing extra work here.” Figuring out caching. My own education was
kind of interesting. But that was ongoing; there was always something new that
I learned every couple weeks. So I never really broke it up into large milestones.
Getting the funding, working on it full-time, selling it—these were all
big parts of it.
Livingston: How was working on it full-time different than when you were at
Morgan Stanley?
Schachter: Constraints breed creativity. So now, instead of only having 15 minutes
two or three times a week, it would be more like, “I have the entire day to
work on it, every day.” I don’t work in bursts like that. I do a little bit of work
and then go wander around the city and come back. Then work all night. Once
everyone has gone to sleep and it’s quiet, I can get a lot of work done. I didn’t
really get to stay up late when I was at Morgan; I don’t really do it now. But during
that I did, and I think it was incredibly productive. Probably very alienating
to my wife though.
Livingston: Did you find you were better at some things than you thought?