Schachter Leaves Google, Plans Unknown
Posted by on June 5th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Miscellaneous |
Joshua Schachter sent this message out on his Twitter announcing his resignation from search-engine giant Google (copied verbatim, grammar flaws and all): “today is my last day at Google. sad about leaving but excited about the future.”
Schachter is the creator of the popular social bookmarking site Delicious. Then in 2005, he sold Delicious to Yahoo and worked there for several years before transferring to Google. He stayed about a year and a half on his job and on June 1 announced, direct to the point, his resignation from the company.
Schachter is also the creator of geoURL and co-creator of Memepool among others. He was a BS Electrical and Computer Engineering and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
It was in 2003 when he first released the intial version of Delicious. It was then called del.icio.us and continues to be popular by that name today. The release of Delicious gave birth to a new online term that is social bookmarking. Delicious also featured tagging which is a system Schachter invented to organize the links suggested to Memepool while also publishing some of these links on his personal blog, Muxway.
In March 2005, Schachter announced that he would be working full time on his company. But in that very same year, Schachter sold Delicious to Yahoo. The amount paid, though undisclosed by both sides, was believed to be worth around $30 million. Schachter was said to have taken half of the sum as his share. In 2007, he legally changed del.icio.us’ name to Delicious.
In June of 2008, Schachter left Yahoo. His decision was largely influenced by the news of senior staffers resigning en masse from the company. It was in January of 2009 when he joined the team of Google.
Schachter has publicly declared his regret of selling Delicious to Yahoo in recent years. His reason is the stagnation that his former company experiences in Yahoo. Though he has made no clear announcements yet of his next step forward, rumor has it that venture capitalist Jeff Clavier has already expressed his interest in hiring Schachter. The name and reputation his built over the years of working for Delicious has already made him a prized target for other technology companies in the market.
