David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Actually, people forget that Yahoo was a huge player in web 2.0 and web technologies coming back. I mean, with the Flickr acquisition, Delicious acquisition, they made a stab there – this was almost on a side – they made a stab there at a very important moment in time remaining relevant and providing support for a lot of people that would go on to do things that create the world that we know today. You mentioned Flickr. Even Stewart Butterfield who’s founder and CEO of Slack now, it’s both so sad for Yahoo that they had this talent and these technologies within the company and now they’re part of Verizon. But also, just so great for innovation in the ecosystem that these people passed through there and met one another. I think that’s the magic of Silicon Valley, is these interactions that you can’t foresee between technologies and people and companies lead to this innovation that takes the world to new places. Well, my grade is going to end up being a C and I’ll explain why in a second. It’s partially grading on a curve because the intentionally of the acquisition is to buy the pieces that will allow you to copy the greatest advertising machine as we said several times now in the history of the world. So, if that’s your intention to create, to put the pieces together that will create what we now know to be Google, then absolutely A+, you’ve got to make that acquisition. It’s an F in terms of how it turned out because in the end, they say don’t bring a knife to a gun fight. If you fail to bring engineers to an engineering battle, then you’re never going to have a chance of success. The reason I'm going to give it a C is because of the fact that Yahoo existed as long as it did. Because remember, they’re coming out of the bubble, their entire business model is evaporating overnight. I think their revenues were about a billion dollars around 2001 and then as high as $7 billion by the end of the decade. The fact that Google made billions and billions and billions more than them does not hide the fact that they were able to sputter along even if they weren’t able to successfully copy that model. That acquisition still allowed Google to be a big enough player that Microsoft wants to buy them for, what was it, $35 billion or something and kept them going as a multibillion dollar profitable concern all the way into the second part of this decade; got them to 20 years as an independent company. So I’m going to give it a C because it did do its intention which was save the company, shift to this new way of doing business, survive the dot-com bubble and remain a player. They didn’t become the player the Google became but the acquisition did allow them to get this far.…

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