Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…You guys first. So, did it end up being a good deal? I think the way that we talk about these things on Acquired is was it in the long run, did it end up being worth it and a strategically a good decision and a good use of capital for the acquiring company to be buy the acquiree. For a variety of reasons, no, I think there was big integration failure. There was lack of clarity on why they were making the acquisition internally because they tried to have it both ways by being its own business and by integrating it. Yahoo really wanted to be a media company, not a tech company. They got to the tech company game kind of late. And if we look at what they are today, it’s still a media company. I mean, they’ve bought up all these other media companies, Tumblr and Flickr and the things that do well are stocks and sports. None of these are their search business. At the end of the day, they’re getting sold to Verizon. I mean, I think maybe I would call this successful if they had managed to get more out of the patents, maybe some kind of like rev share in perpetuity with Google where they could actually make money from each and every one of Google’s searches through that license or something. I don’t think that’s the best way for a company to make money or the most noble way but it seems like a way that they could have gotten something better out of this deal. And I’m going to call this a D because while not being a total failure, this did not help Yahoo compete in what would eventually become entirely Google’s market. Yeah. I’m going to give two grades here as I sometimes exercise my right to do. I’m going to grade Yahoo, and yeah, I'm with you, like D. This was the wrong thing to do. Everything about it was wrong. They should have just essentially sold themselves to Google. But regardless, trying to acquire all these mish-mash companies and rebuild Panama and like “we’re going to be Google” at their own game even though we’re not a technology company culture-wise wasn’t going to work. But, I’m going to say like A+++ for the startup ecosystem because I know I’ve said this several times on this episode, but like I can’t underscore enough how important Hadoop and all of the technology and all of the people who come out of Yahoo’s efforts with Panama become in the next 15 years of tech. You know we talked about Jeff Wiener, we talked about the importance Hadoop the technology, and then Hortonworks and Cloudera directly come of those people as well. But there’s actually even another set of companies. WhatsApp would not have happened I don’t think without Project Panama because Brian Acton and Jan Koum, they worked on Project Panama at Yahoo, that’s where they met and then they left and they started WhatsApp. So the list just goes on and on. It’s almost like a PayPal mafia type moment.…

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