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Comment by clutchski | Hacker News Reader

I heard you built one website a month, hunting for the right idea, until delicious clicked.

Would you ever fund a person you believed in for that kind of exploratory work?

I tried to build something interesting every year. I originally set out to be some sort of expert in social software (I think I succeeded, more or less) way back. In the past I built memepool and geourl and a bunch of other things you've never heard of.

However, I never really had the idea of building businesses, just interesting things. I wanted to get attention (I got myself invited to Foo Camp before I did delicious, for example) from folks outside my industry, as I worked at an investment bank.

I still build some small things here and there. I find it much more difficult to program now, though.

I think delicious picked up more users in a day when I left than in its whole first year of existence. So it took some time to figure out if it clicked... however, I know that I spent a lot of time making Muxway (delicious's predecessor) work right for me and had a good sense for what would work for other people.

I still build some small things here and there. I find it much more difficult to program now, though.

Care to share any links?

The last thing I was tinkering with was http://lensdb.com/ but it still needs a lot of work. I haven't worked on it in months and months.

I'm thinking of building an app to help manage my angel deal flow, of all things.

You have mail regarding that.

> Would you ever fund a person you believed in for that kind of exploratory work?

I've put money into a few things based on people's prior work, but generally the idea itself has to be interesting.

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