Delicious has 40 engineers?!
40 engineers?!?!?!
"Hurley notes that his company’s 40 developers are currently spread across three places, China (Beijing), New Zealand and San Mateo."
One of the things they're doing is a Mandarin version of Delicious.
Hurley said: ”We are going to restart innovation on the Delicious brand.” So the idea is to use an existing one, rather than “creating a new brand from scratch” to push through new ideas — lots of little ones. “I know how hard it is to build a brand, so this is an interesting experiment.”
Is it really that hard to build a brand if you have a great product?
Here is Chad's vision for Delicious:
2012 is about continuing to improve the service, innovating and take Delicious to the next level. We’re doing that in two ways. One is to continue to build out the team – we’re focused on bringing in the most talented individuals that we can and we continue to bring on more. It’s a competitive market but we truly believe in surrounding yourself with great people. The second thing is the product itself. We’re in the middle of a transition from ‘personal utility’ to ‘daily destination’.
I'm sorry, did he just say that the #1 way they're taking Delicious to the next level is by hiring a lot of people?!?!?!?
Their #2 strategy, "Daily Destination", is audacious, unlikely, and not actually a strategy. Is pinterest a personal utility or a daily destination? Neither, it's a place to discover delightful and interesting things on the web. The "daily destination" aspect is an outcome, not a vision. The "personal utility" part is a design objective, not a vision. Nothing inspired here, I'm afraid.
Perhaps there's some wisdom in the words of the other Delicious co-founder Steve Chen:
"Having worked with YouTube, there were already about 40 hours of video being uploaded every minute. That's doubled. There are now 60 to 80 hours of new video content being uploaded every minute -- on one web site. There's new content on Twitter, it comes from RSS feeds, from blogs, from Facebook, from social networks.... There are lots of new products and new services making adding content easier. But there's not many people on the other side, helping users digest that content."
So they're going to help users digest content.
And they took a whole lotta investment from Google Ventures, NEA, Madrone Partners, Gideon Yu, and Kai-Fu Lee.
