Delicious founder: 'Since when is Yahoo cool?'
Joshua Schachter, founder of social bookmarking site Delicious, said in a forum posting yesterday that he regrets selling Delicious to Yahoo.
The discussion centered around Apache Hadoop creator Doug Cutting, who announced this week that he's leaving Yahoo to join Cloudera, an enterprise support service for Hadoop users.
One user said, "Its pretty clear to many people that Cloudera is a rocket ship heading skyward, both in terms of innovation and valuation...As cool as Yahoo is, its not hard to see why Cloudera could lure Cutting away."
This was where Schachter joined the conversation, saying "Since when is Yahoo cool? [They] killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers' time...Perhaps I spent too much time inside that particular sausage factory."
Later, he says, "The problem is that the number of cool projects is pretty minimal. They're in duck and cover mode. They'll get pushed to trim employees further and further to stretch the revenues out. I wish I had not sold it to them. The cash and freedom do not even come close; I would rather work on a big, popular product."
Schachter created del.icio.us in 2003 as a platform for users to save and share Web sites they visited. In 2005, he sold Delicious to Yahoo for an undisclosed sum. He retained his position at Delicious until late 2008, when he resigned just weeks before a major redesign went live.
Schechter was part of a massive Yahoo "brain drain" that took place between 2007-2008, when more than 130 executives resigned.