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Comment by joshu | Hacker News Reader

the system was actually quite a bit larger than they ever talked about. millions of users, etc.

Now that they're shutting it down, I would love to hear your thoughts as founder on why delicious didn't live up to its potential.

Delicious lived up to its founders' potential when it was acquired for millions.

that's ridiculous. potential of the company is not about who owns the stock or how much cash changed hands in the process.

having been part of one particular exit I know all too well that startup founders and ex-employees have deep emotional connection to their former company, no matter how much they got for it.

I've gotten the impression it was pretty badly mismanaged by Yahoo after acquisition. Any failure is squarely on Yahoo's shoulders AFAIK.

Andy Baio was recently on Dan Benjamin's show The Pipeline and he spoke a bit about upcoming.org's acquisition. I believe he described the support he got as underwhelming. Basically you go in, meet with a bunch of groups and then are left by yourself wondering what you're supposed to do.

http://5by5.tv/pipeline/31

Just because Yahoo's expectation$ weren't met doesn't mean delicious didn't live up to its potential. Many people got accustomed to use it as a search engine and it fulfilled its purpose quite nicely. Imagine if facebook couldn't figure out a way to make money, would it then be considered a failure even though millions of people find it useful?

> Imagine if facebook couldn't figure out a way to make money, would it then be considered a failure even though millions of people find it useful?

Depends on who you are. To the investors, that would be a failure. To the people that find it useful, it wouldn't be a failure until it disappeared or otherwise ceased to be of use.

By the time that Chris Yeh http://twitter.com/cbyeh ran Delicious into the ground (and convinced management to nuke it rather than take any blame) the site had far fewer than 1,000,000 active users. Many more had registered but far few had logged in within the past year.

If Yahoo is actually shutting it down, would you want to buy it back from them?

He wouldn't want to buy it for a price they acquired it at or more.

He can't offer them a price that is lower than that.

It wouldn't take that much more effort to build the whole thing all over again, anyway.

Yahoo is shutting it down, ergo their perceived value is significantly lower to justify that decision..

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