Tag Sale. Millions from Yahoo transformed the life of Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter–and set him up to find the next big thing.

Right before Joshua Schachter announced in mid-December that Yahoo was acquiring his social-bookmarking startup, Del.icio.us, I’d spoken with Schachter more than once about the future of the company, and never had he remotely hinted that a sale was in the works. Quite the contrary, actually. So when we met for lunch the following week, I asked if getting bought had been in the cards all along. "Of course, it was always a possibility," Schachter said between bites of a monster cheeseburger. "But I didn’t take it seriously until there was a tangible opportunity on the table. I tend not to fantasize about this stuff–that’s just magical thinking."

The unwitting allusion to Joan Didion’s best-selling memoir was apt. For the first words and overriding theme of The Year of Magical Thinking are "Life changes fast." On Dec. 8, Schachter was a 31-year-old bone-deep New Yorker, the CEO of a rapidly growing but revenueless social software outfit, and a hard-core geek with a reputation as a pioneer of "tagging"–a system for letting users label webpages with searchable keywords of their choice. Twenty-four hours later, he was a multimillionaire, a Yahoo employee, and a soon-to-be Californian. Life changes fast, indeed.

Fortune Magazine
By John Heilemann

Full Story: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/01/01/8368130/index.htm