 |
| (image by Joi Ito) |
Back in the late 1990s, when blogs were still hand-coded and almost exclusively run by techies, Joshua Schachter maintained one of his own, named Memepool. His blog consisted mainly of daily links and information about interesting Web sites he stumbled upon while surfing the Internet. Schachter also took in suggested links from other users. At times when he had no time to post in his blog, he copied the links to a single file. This file grew to contain more than 20,000 links after a couple of years. During this time, the financial analyst felt he had to do something about it.
In 2001, he wrote a single-user tool to track the suggested links. Muxway, as the tool was called, was written during his free time as he was working full time in finance. But four years later, Schachter quit his job to focus on Muxway, which became the multiuser del.icio.us service. Del.icio.us allowed users to save and share bookmarks, which they can describe with keywords or tags. This made the whole experience of using bookmarks easier.
During its peak, del.icio.us had 300,000 users – quite an impressive feat for a project made by an accidental tech entrepreneur. Schachter later on sold his business to Yahoo! to become an angel investor.
Schachter has made angel investments in about 45 companies since then, including Foursquare, SimpleGEO, Square, DailyBooth and Bump Technologies. He also worked at Yahoo! as an executive until 2008, then joined Google as engineer. However, he left the search giant early last year to start a new project which the tech world has yet to see.
Although it has been quite a while since Schachter managed his own business, his contributions to the tech industry are still at large. Whether as an angel investor, corporate executive, or entrepreneur, his participation in the modern trade is highly regarded by many.
No comments:
Post a Comment