Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Of course, the relationship between Yahoo! and Microsoft, many of our listeners probably know, is really long and complicated. A topic for another day. Brian and Jan have become kindred spirits when Jan joins Yahoo!. Brian really rises through the ranks. He ends up becoming the Chief Architect of Project Panama within Yahoo!, which was super. They would talk about it on their earnings calls. I remember Carol Bartz talking about it all the time and then Marissa Mayer, after she became CEO. That was a massive project to re-architect all of the back-end of how Yahoo! Search worked and how ads worked on Yahoo! Search. The two of them, with Brian leading on the technical side, go through this experience of re-architecting at massive scale, this original Internet company. But doing it while this company is going from over a $100 billion market cap, darling of Silicon Valley, all the way down to below $10 billion and then just plummeting. Ben, what price did ultimately buy Yahoo! for? I think it was like $3 billion or something? I don't know, but if your final resting face is at Verizon, it's irrelevant where your final market cap was. They get this incredible technical experience, but they also see this business model of portal that Yahoo! is. It's so fickle, it's so dependent on user attention, and it's so dependent on advertising. They start to believe that Yahoo! makes a ton of product compromises in service of their ad partners and that that was a big reason. Through these years, they simultaneously see the rise of Google. These days, Google famously is just one white page with a search box on it. Meanwhile, Yahoo!’s throwing up all of these display ads and doing all this stuff. It becomes super, super disillusioned with it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.