We just got confirmation from Joshua Schachter, the founder of delicious, that he has decided to resign from Yahoo!. Mike Arrington just spoke to him and he said that the recent news coming out of Yahoo! pressed his decision to leave now. Joshua also said that the decision was made today, and that he has no future plans but will instead join the “gloriously unemployed.”
The development of the new version of delicious seems to have almost stalled within Yahoo, and Joshua cited recent frustrations with the process as playing a part in his resignation. We said a few weeks ago that Joshua’s time at the company may be running out, and we had all been waiting a long time for the new release of delicious.
Yahoo acquired delicious in December of 2005 and we broke the news here on TechCrunch. delicious is certainly one of my favorite web applications, and I have been a frequent user since its very early days. It was also one of the first companies profiled on TechCrunch, so Joshua leaving Yahoo (and delicious) brings an end to a very long era.
Yesterday we published a list of all those who had resigned recently from Yahoo, and since then we have been busy trying to keep it up to date as the news of further resignations continues to roll out. It has been a very bad time for Yahoo! recently, and things are only getting worse.
Photo credit: Javier Pedreira
Update: Schachter speaks up in the comments:
I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense. It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart [Butterfield] in terms of pushing my point of view.
How does the saying go when small companies are acquired by large ones “We look forward to have the founders on board, they’ll be a great source of inspiration to our entire company….”
Sounds like they become more of a source of desperation (to leave) for Yahoo!
Sad, will we ever see delicious 2.0?
Aww, super sad. =[
I really do feel bad for Yahoo, despite never having used their services.
I think this is the best time for me join Yahoo …..
With so many exits …. I just might be lucky to get a good position in the Yahoo board….and I am sure of doing a pretty good job at that …..
This just might be the blessing in disguise, with new brains bringing new ideas to the board.
…..
Rashmi Ranjan Padhy
http://www.rash...ranjanpadhy.com
The bleeding from Yahoo seems to be happening on a daily basis now. What will happen in 6 months? What if Microsoft did still want to buy them? What will they be worth when so much of the intelligence is gone.
Lets fast forward 3 months…Half of Yahoo is gone and Google is still owning the market and Microsoft has nothing left to buy. Yahoo will be old news, what will Microsoft go for then?
Yahoo = Alta Vista
The evolution of the Internet continues.
Dude, I’ll work at Yahoo. You hear that Jerry? I know 16 bit assembly language and YUI to boot plus I sued Microsoft. high 5 figures??? I’ll have to quit my new programming job, but I don’t care. My only requirement is a terse layoff proof clause.
Is this a sign or yahoos demise or the publics realization that they aren’t the entrepreneurial leader it once was?
Just as Bill Gates says Google is no longer in its honeymoon period, I’d say the same about 37Signals as well as Yahoo.
The impact of that single statement is far reaching.
The founders of these great companies most likely flourished in the earlier stages of start-ups, so it’s no surprise that they look to come back to that when they are in a company that’s growing up.
Not a good look for Yahoo. The part I don’t like is that he was “frustrated”. Did they give and stop working? Yahoo is falling apart from the inside out…
That’s it, the fat lady and all. The old guard of top level execs, and now the imagineers from the Web20 startups that might have been the saving angels of Yahoo.
Schachter’s leaving may be, in some ways, more significant then any of the other high profile 23-skidoos.
Jerry, I know you read these things. If you hire me with a security clause, I’ll throw in my pending patent for grammar search results. Where you can search for grammar errors with site:example.com and have it spit out all the spelling errors on the target site. Otherwise if Y! implemented that and I found out I would totally enforce on your butt. I can assign it for Y! status and a clean desk.
So what. Delicious hasn’t done a thing except tread water for two years. It’s even still ridiculously slow. Bye. bye buddy. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.
Resignation based pleasure and getting better or caused under pressure..?
yahoo is the next lycos.com !!!
yahoo really does suck
i search for a”blonde” image and i get porn instead
The news keeps getting worse for Yahoo….my buddy Chris Simpson also resigned today. He doesn’t know he will do next. Yahoo will find it hard to replace him.
I never really wanted to work at Yahoo until they started doing all this crazy sh*t to be honest.
Most of these jobs at large companies I interviewed with were all about, “and that sort algorithm is N order of” until your brain explodes. This for a position doing landing page optimization at Amazon. I want to work for a crazy fun company that brushes off hostile takeovers and gives the press and investors the finger.
@silicon valley dropout – and that sucks how?
joshua while a smart dude did little for the past few years other then sit around and complain and answer media/press questions. on the other hand, the flickr guys fought hard to push product — while they were not always successful they always pushed and focused on the product.
because i am not looking for porn
blonde chicks arent my thing
@ 10 Alan
I agree with you. Joshua is truly a visionary. I can already start smelling private equity firms in the air. Silver Lake will lead the buy out.
However, this could present itself as a great opportunity for many VC’s who lack operational experience to seek employment at Yahoo. But, they do run the risk of being fired when the big dog private equity guys come in to clean house.
@michael_s: I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense. It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart in terms of pushing my point of view.
honestly, who cares. I’m a founder and have sold companies. I’m good early, but I am useless in transition once the payday is in the bank. Starting a company is billion times more fun than making incremental progress.
For Yahoo!, how could this even be a loss? With 100 top VPs leaving, that’s a lot of savings. And what good were they anyway. Look where Yahoo! is…isn’t it their team that has them in this position. So what if all the top people leave. No impact on traffic. No impact on revenues. Good riddance.
Lot less meetings. They can get rid of a full layer of management, save money, get leaner.
@Joshua
This is way too sad. Both for you and Yahoo!
In any case, whats done is done, and I am sure you will recover and do the next exciting thing. Are you coming back to New York?
Alex
Josh
er….Josh – what are you going to do during your glorious unemployment? (ps jerry don’t hire beerco chris!)
silicon valley dropout: Mosey over to Google image search. Make sure your safe searching preference is set to ‘off’ over there too. Search for ‘blonde’ and then come back and tell us what you see. If you don’t want any adult-ness in your search, head over to Microsoft’s Live image Search- even unfiltered, they spare your precious eyes from the pain.
gREat!!! yahoo is making a move
http://www.newsendorser.com
please support this site, sign up, and upload videos!!!
thanks!!!
@Joshua: thanks for all the fish (and tags)
everybody complained they had too many people. now they complain because they are leaving.
high school 2.0 tech writers
yahoo will be better for all this
Joshua,
Congrats. Life is better outside the sausage factory. Thanks for delicious. I look forward to your next work.
Cheers,
JP
Well at least Yahoo keeps on hitting the headlines
Its a bit as if they were burning up their car for fuel (but there again gas is real expensive!).
My contribution for this post…
http://www.jogt...php?trackId=131
@joshua there needs to be a post acquisition hacks class to give founders tools for navigating big company processes. So many startups are driven by passionate people like yourself, it makes no sense that the “reward” is two years of indentured servitude and stagnation. It’s not just a Yahoo problem either, as some may recall the picture the dodgeball founders posted while leaving Google.
Tagging is an amazing concept, and Joshua showed us the potential.
I don’t think del.icio.us has kept pace with the rest of the web 2.0 world; Yahoo obviously wasn’t the best environment to foster continued innovation in the social bookmarking sphere (they do have multiple social bookmarking products within Yahoo, I’m sure that must have been a nightmare to deal with the internal politics).
This year has been a big wake-up call for Yahoo – hopefully they learn from their mistakes and emerge a stronger company.
when will the bleeding for yahoo stop? yahoo was such a great company but jerry yang’s lack of leadership is destroying it. who is next to leave?
Hmm… Tagging is about to take off with Firefox 3.0+. The new browser bookmark/tagging interface is fast and slick…
Delicious was nothing breakthrough, I met a guy who had the same idea back in 2003. Cool idea but flawed from the beginning, which is why I never used it: Why trust somebody to host your bookmarks when domains cost $10???
Host your own bookmarks! Blog ‘em, monetize ‘em, whatever, at least you know where they will be 10 years from now. Take charge of your own content!
Wordpress(.org) will outlast 99% of these Web 2.0 companies because it’s free and open and the plugins will do anything and everything a Web 2.0 genius can dream up.
yahoo employees have given up. i haven’t seen the sense of resignation hanging so heavily in the air even during 2001-2002 when the stock bottomed. people are just running out the clock, and why not? the company is so aggresively retareded that you can literally walk into the office with a paperback book or get golf lessons outside the gym and no one really cares anymore. when the dust has settled, they will still have a big audience in mail, IM, news, finance and sports, but everything else will likely go at some point.
@30: Amen! Get rid of all of these do-nothing VPs! The delicious integration was a joke. They couldn’t even integrate Yahoo IDs into their tagging system. (Really, I must use/create a delicious ID to use delicious? I can’t store things under my Yahoo ID?) How hard could that have possibly been? I guess Joshua is not as smart as everyone would think.
Most Web 2.0 CEOs are nothing but hacks. They create these startups that look impressive, but are technologically weak and can’t scale. If you think your company is so great, take the Yahoo challenge and have them put a link to your site on their front page. Unless you are someone like Google or Amazon, most likely turning the Yahoo fire hose onto your site will bring your service and your servers to their knees and cause them to crash and burn. But don’t let reality get in the way of your egos… just go on pretending you’re better than Yahoo.
what on earth are these entrepreneurs staying around so long for? create, sell out and get the f out!
Somebody needs to be held accountable for the fact that del.icio.us 2.0 has yet to ship. While Joshua likes to call out Yahoo! management issues (the popular and easy thing to do these days) ultimately shipping version two of the social bookmarking tool is his responsibility and he should own up to it.
Yeah, I do agree with Rashmi. This is a blessing in disguise. Never mind Yahoo!. I’ll keep using your email. It is great you know. Keep your good work. Don’t lose your faith.
@41 – completely agree.
Uninformed opinions don’t help. I’d bet that its actually a good thing that a lot of these senior management folks have left. I think the company is clearly sitting on a goldmine of great products and it is going to take a good level of management shakeup and cleaning up of house to turn things around.
I’d want to bet an interesting amount of money that in the long term they’ll still be an internet icon and a flourishing business.
That said i definitely think acquisitions like foxy tunes and zimbra are huge mistakes. Paying in the millions for arguable justifications like “traffic acquisition costs” is scary.
Every day, articles about Yahoo! and how they are failing. I think Tech Crunch has a grudge or something, and wants Yahoo! to fail out of spite.
its probably better to not have the bloated management that yahoo currently does. Its good for the company
Joshua does deserve to be in a better place.
Best of luck to him!
As said over here (http://vpx.cc/2...oos-holy-grail/) i feel like yahoo is underestimating the power of delicious. same goes to upcoming,org / flickr et al. they just bought small and hot shops, helped them a bit only to let them fall again. this might be no problem for delicious and flickr cause both services have a big and loyal fanbase, but it clearly lacks any deeper sense.
all the best Joshua!
Good luck Joshua!
Hope to see some wonderful products from you.