YouTube Founders Revive Delicious; Flip Guy Goes Grilled Cheese

The duo that founded YouTube bought Delicious from Yahoo. Okay. Fair point. As far as serial entrepreneurial ventures go, this is not as intriguing as Flip Cam (Pure Digital) founder Jonathan Kaplan going into the melted cheese business. (See video).

But this one’s a bit more fascinating to me because I got to meet Chad Hurley a few times, and was impressed that he remembered my obscure video pizza prank. I was an avid Delicious user, but I can’t seem to find my old account.

To predict the future for Chad/Steve, let’s look no farther than the past. Google bought YouTube after significant ethnographic research (see video), and here’s the video where the duo announced Google acquiring their startup. I was amazed that YouTube’s value was so high (see my “sell it Chad!” video). While I initially was not keen on Google as the owner… I tried to address the increasing community paranoia that followed. And the ending is quite happy… Google been berry berry good to me.

So can Delicious be revived and mainstreamed? Can Chad and Steve get it over the tipping point? Yeah I think so, and I think they’ll sell it for hundreds of millions and maybe a billion. After all, the power of Delicious is the organization of popular links… which is a clean way to find out what matters (versus reading zillions of Tweets and Facebook posts). I’d certainly expect Delicious to be more profitable and scaleable than a grilled-cheese franchise.