Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedMatt Mullenweg: belief
2 Mar 2025 Lenny's Podcast The creator of WordPress opens up about becoming an internet villain, why he’s taking a stand, and the future of open source | Matt Mullenweg (founder and CEO, Automattic)
“Who was at the time, again, Yahoo, we don't think about it now, but I feel a little old. But at the time, Yahoo was one of the internet giants and had recently Marissa Mayer, who was one of the big early people at Google, I think part of creating the API program and everything like that, was the CEO of Yahoo.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Matt Mullenweg
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 2 Mar 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Oh, wow. Who was at the time, again, Yahoo, we don't think about it now, but I feel a little old. But at the time, Yahoo was one of the internet giants and had recently Marissa Mayer, who was one of the big early people at Google, I think part of creating the API program and everything like that, was the CEO of Yahoo. This was, I think, one of her first big acquisitions. Now subsequently, obviously ,we know how Instagram went. I think people were like, "I can't believe you bought this for a billion dollars." And obviously now it's worth hundreds of billions. So that's had a really good trajectory. At Yahoo, I think things became more challenged. So again, this is a little bit of history, but Yahoo then had this thing where they owned part of Alibaba, which then became more valuable than the rest of the company. They had activist investors. I think they had some CEO switches. I think Marissa Mayer leaves or gets fired at some point. There's all this turnover, and I think Tumblr really languished under their ownership. And from what I can understand, the team was actually held back a lot from things they wanted to launch or ways they wanted to iterate. Then Yahoo merges with AOL, which is another kind of early internet thing. That goes for a little while. So again, then Tumblr's just kind of stuck underneath this stuff. Tumbling along.…
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