“Marissa Mayer admits Yahoo should have ruined Netflix instead of Tumblr.”
Here in the Valley, Yahoo became known in the ‘00s for ruining acquisitions. In particular, what they did to Flickr was an abomination; it should have become Instagram, but instead Yahoo ran two other photo-sharing services at the same time and let Flickr fester and not really progress.
Yahoo was idiotic and passed on buying both Google and Facebook also. Zero business sense.
Great internal infrastructure however. Didn’t realize how great it was until I went elsewhere.
Meanwhile, they also got ripped off on dumb shit like broadcast.com.
One billion dollars for what exactly? So dumb.
You tell me. I have never understood that transaction. The tech was mostly vapor, and IIRC there weren’t really any paying customers.
Jason Scott compared “We’ve been acquired by Yahoo!” with hearing “We found a lump.”
Pretty sure that was from the talk The House Is On Fire, The Fire Trucks Are On Fire, The Fire Is On Fire. Definitely a talk that referenced Our Incredible Journey, a blog about company announcements going ‘exciting news, your data is part of the big family at-- nevermind it’s all gone now.’
Maybe. But they probably would have fucked it up.
Have you been to Yahoo? Imagine a netflix run by them!
Yahoo fucks up everything it touches. 🤨
It’s the business equivalent of “You have cancer”; “You’ve been bought by Yahoo.”
I would be happier in the timeline where Netflix was half-dead and these bastards weren’t responsible for destroying a decade of internet culture “for the children.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In an interview with Tech Brew, Mayer reiterated that one of her regrets was hiring the wrong chief operating officer, Henrique De Castro, whom she fired after 15 months on the job.
Under her leadership, Yahoo acquired the social blogging platform Tumblr in May 2013 in a $1.1 billion all-cash deal.
A source at the time told Insider Mayer was “very personally engaged in this deal,” working late into numerous evenings.
Mayer’s biggest regret, however, was not making “the tax-free Alibaba spinoff to separate the assets of the company,” she told Tech Brew.
Mayer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.
Disclosure: Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer, is a Netflix board member.
The original article contains 398 words, the summary contains 124 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
