Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…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. Amd you bring up an important point there, Yahoo! was the very first Internet company that’s business model was to monetized attention. I don't need to paint the picture to our listeners that the most successful company to ever be on the Internet and monetize attention is Facebook. I think there's this incredible book ending of the story there. That's where I was going to be going with it. It's also during this time famously that Yahoo! tries to acquire Facebook for $1 billion.…

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