A Delicious Eight Months
On April 14th, we closed an investment in Delicious. We wrote about our initial investment here.
Eight months later, Delicious has been sold to Yahoo!. The news is on the Delicious blog.
We are thrilled to see Joshua Schachter, one of the most interesting entrepreneurs we have worked with in a long time, realize a dream. He built Delicious at night and on weekends, left his safe and attractive job to bet everything on it, and came up a winner. Congratulations Joshua.
We have enjoyed working with Joshua. We are pleased to have been part of the team that transformed Delicious from an interesting side project into an important company with strong leadership, a clear vision and a large and growing group of devoted, active users.
We have long felt that, in a world awash in information, navigation and discovery would be increasingly important. Algorithmic search has proven to be invaluable, but it has limits. We invested in Delicious because we believed that its invention of a new form of people powered discovery would address a class of web navigation problems that could not be solved with algorhythmic search.
Many of the users who contribute tags to Delicious do so because they believe they are making the internet more useful for everyone. We believe that Yahoo! understands this. The way they have handled the Flickr acquisition gives us comfort that Yahoo! will pursue Joshua’s vision of an open data architecture which will be the foundation for a whole new ecosystem of innovative web services.
This has been a great ride. Together, we built something of value—for Yahoo! certainly—but hopefully for the web at large. At Union Square Ventures, we will continue to work with talented entrepreneurs to mine the vein of community, peer production, media disaggregation and reaggregation, and discovery to build valuable businesses. We hope to find many more interesting opportunities like this one in the years to come.
December 9, 2005 1:03 PM, By Brad Burnham
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