Frenzy As Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Raises Round For New Startup | Hacker News Reader

Frenzy As Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter Raises Round For New Startup

techcrunch.com

71 pointspetercooper30 comments

Wow the pressure and attention on at such an early stage makes it that much more riskier. Bit hard to stay small and make mistakes early on when you're in the glare of so much public opinion. Not saying he can't deal with it, but I wouldn't want the attention!

I wish him luck I love delicious to bits!

Completely agree. Square is the last such hyped venture.

What I don't like is the willingness of investors to quickly fund regardless of the idea. If you're looking for contributing partners for your venture, that's the last philosophy you want your investors to have.

Generally, in an angel deal, the investors get relatively oversight; that doesn't come until an equity financing or series A where an investor takes a board seat.

I'd take the attention and start as an invite-only service. Schachter is getting a lot of free PR. (As far as I can tell, free PR is a big advantage of getting in to Y Combinator as well.)

Steve Blank has a great series on a much hyped game studio he was a cofounder on. They had the whole gamit of media coverage inc wired before they had anything resembling a prototype. He learnt some hard lessons from that one.

http://steveblank.com/category/rocket-science-games/

I think I bought one of those games. Something with hoverbikes and grappling hooks?

Hopefully there will be time for the buzz to die down before I actually release anything.

"Even if the company fails, someone will buy it just to get Schachter. There’s no way we lose our money."

Ah, the greater fool theory.

Pretty sound logic in this case.

I love the way he answered the "why raise money Josh when you obviously can self-finance this venture?"

From the comments (which with the exception of one very stupid 'blind leading blind' reference is actually quite good so far):

An angel round is a good way to get a lot of people who are a great deal smarter than myself on my side and involved.

I’m a pretty junior angel. I don’t invest big dollars, nor do I lead deals. I think I bring product sense and ideas, and being an angel is a fun way to be a part of the story.

The guy is indeed very inspiring. I wish him luck. These type of people are the type that move an entire economy and country forward. Always looking for ways to create more new wealth.

Thanks. I don't look at it as "ways to create new wealth," though. It's more "I must get this idea out of my head"

Yes, freeing ideas frees ourselves and our users in the process. I think that's a much more motivating justification for launching projects than any amount of wealth potentially being created. I can't wait to see what you're creating this time and wish you all the best.

It's nice to hear you say that because that's my own approach to things - you get an idea that you must act on.

I just wish I'd get one that would make me lots of money:-)

del.icio.us was very inspirational to me. It was the lean startup before there were lean startups, when everyone was still swirling around in Aeron chairs: http://www.petefreitag.com/images/blog/delicious_office.jpg

We replaced the lawn chairs with aerons pretty quickly...

Looking forward to seeing the pet food review site. It's definitely an unserved niche.

I think the hard part is going to be getting the pets to contribute the reviews. Perhaps an iPad app for dogs?

I think you have it all wrong. Food for pets has been done too many times, there is no opportunity there.

The market is in food MADE OF pets, or perhaps home conversion kits to turn pets into food. Basically, a modified flobee.

(Although I actually think open source UAV tools, especially for commercial use like monitoring farm fields, traffic, etc., would be a good opportunity.)

I immediately thought of Know-Nothing Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog from THHGTTG.

http://tinyurl.com/33n6wy6 (Wikipedia page, URL too long and HN truncates it so it doesn't work)

This can only end one way: http://i.imgur.com/62kbb.jpg

If you have the gaming mechanics down right, I'm pretty sure the dogs will submit reviews. You could also throw parties like Yelp! did for the "top dogs". You should probably trademark that term right now- top dogs.

An iPad app might make sense too, but why not just do it HTML5 based? Gartner did a random report a few weeks ago that showed a magic quadrant where dogs use the browser more than native apps.

Add in a couple amazon and pets.com affiliate links for monetization, run two super-bowl commercials complete with slightly-used sock puppet, and why not, throw in a clickbank e-book on how to test dog food before your dog eats it that was dictated (not read) by a young girl from Guinea Bissau who has never learned to read and has never even seen a dog let alone bought food for it. Run it all through an A/B tester and host via ec2 + mongrel2 + HOC (haskell-to-objective-c binding). Spokesperson: Olivia Munn.

The venture capital world would implode on itself from the awesome.

As amazing as it would be to have investors pitching to you, I think resource scarcity can be healthy. That being said, best of luck goes to him and I hope he puts the money to good use and makes something truly great.

In the comments he talks about how he wanted to find investors to work with that were smarter than him. Good move if done properly and at the right time. As the parent said resource scarcity can be good, see Duke Nukem Forever for what happens when money is no object.

Who knows how far along this idea is, given that he could have funded a fair bit of proof of concept work (or done it himself if he can hack).

I can't help but be interested given what a simple and great product delicious is.

Not very far. I also want to hire employees who are smarter than me, which thankfully is not very difficult.

I can hack but it gets harder and harder with the distractions as I get older.

I wouldn't mind his first (fake) idea - creating operating systems for unmanned aerial vehicles is probably very lucrative given the right contracts/connections, plus it just sounds like it would be a very interesting project. Potential customers could include the DoD, North Korea or even the guys at Makani Power.

If there was a frenzy when delicious started previously would it have succeeded? Sometimes it hurts when people start expecting wonders from you

> I’m either going to launch an open source operating system for unmanned aerial vehicles, or build a first person shooter to teach non-violent solutions based on buddhist principles. Or a pet food review site. Which one do you like best?

I lol'ed.

the key is to get the actual pets to review the food. you'd unlock an entirely new part of the internet.

An open source OS for UAVs? If he can do it just like that by throwing in some money I would be surprised. I think his venture is something else.

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