9 ms·
What Happened to All 53 of Marissa Mayer's Yahoo Acquisitions
- ara24 10y ago53 acquisitions in 4 years (13/year) seems like a lot. I wonder if they kept track.
- wmil 10y agoHas anyone ever figured out what the point of the Summly acquisition was?
- Lagged2Death 10y agoDid Gizmodo do a similar comprehensive rundown of Eric Schmidt's acquisitions? Or of Mark Zuckerberg's acquisitions? Have they in fact done anything so exhaustive and pointed for even one male tech CEO, of which there are far more to choose from?
- existencebox 10y agoI downvoted you, here is why: Yahoo is a company on the brink of a sale, currently undergoing (some perception of) slow collapse. The gender of the CEO is to me _entirely_ aside the point. There has been quite a bit of press surrounding Nest's CEO as well, companies in turmoil attract media, it's "business soap opera". Now to play devils advocate, it may be fair to ask if she is receiving _undue_ attention due to the above, but given my anecdotal views of high profile businesspeople being put under the microscope when failures come to light (and the fact that it's rather an occams razor explanation; "rubbernecking" in the broader sense) as well as the fact that it's very easy to cite broad examinations of aquisitions even without the prompting of a "newsworthy" event (from an EXTREMELY cursory googling https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/25/the-age-of-acquisitions/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/25/the-age-of-acquisitions/). Frankly, your statement feels like a strawman LOOKING for there to be some gender aggression when that just isn't merited over an examination of a company with some rather entertaining decision history, that I at least would have been inclined to read about regardless of any other information.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fforflo 10y ago> "Gizmodo also made him cry once." Really?! The original post [0] wasn't even necessary. But refering to it again! Come on... 0: http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15-year-old-app-developer-cry http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15-year-old-app-deve...
- vorotato 10y agoLots of complaining at someone who took the stock from 15 dollars to 30 dollars. It was take some risks or die. Yahoo had long gone stale. You can argue she took the wrong risks, but you'd probably do just as bad. That's why they call them risks.
- vorotato 10y agoAlso lets not forget they had a lot of extra cash flow due to the pushed sale of a good chunk of their alibaba stake. Surely any sane businessperson would conclude that for them to just... sit on it is not a wise decision.
- davedx 10y ago"She deployed quick fixes to solve Yahoo’s morale problems, including expanding parental leave and hiring high-profile celebrities to run the company’s media division." Didn't she also cancel work from home arrangements? I think it's highly debatable if that was good for morale...
- ianhawes 10y agoAdditionally, she had a nursery built in her office.
- pawadu 10y agoSo the 2 good things she did at Yahoo: 1. Parental leave 2. A nursery Now, I wonder how things would have been if she herself was not pregnant when she joined Yahoo
- gadders 10y ago2. a nursery for herself AFAIK only she used it.
- effingwewt 10y agoNot only that, but other employees had to watch this after losing their work-from-home "privileges". Was in all the big papers, caused quite the kerfuffle. http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-who-just-banned-working-from-home-paid-to-have-a-nursery-built-at-her-office-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-who-just-banned...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- whamlastxmas 10y agoWhile bragging how easy being a mother is
- k__ 10y ago
- hkmurakami 10y agoThis really is a bit sad to see. Tumblr by all accounts is just a porn aggregator site at this point, so the lone possible bright is BrightRoll... maybe?
- Chris2048 10y ago> Tumblr by all accounts is just a porn aggregator site at this point As opposed to some vapid meme aggregator, Tumblrs pron communities are actually of value (to me).
- makomk 10y agoYeah, but they're difficult to monetize as part of a general-purpose site like Tumblr.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoI don't know what kind of tumblrs you're looking at, but this is certainly not my experience.
- vidarh 10y agoTumblr has a ton of sub-cultures that are very segregated from each other, so I'm not surprised if someone things Tumblr is "just X".
- uptown 10y agoI though he was pretty clear about what kind of tumblrs he's looking at.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoI wonder if it's like those people getting salty at google auto-completes without realizing the influence of their search histories.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
- danieltillett 10y agoIs talent really in that short supply that acqui-hiring makes sense? Wouldn't Yahoo have been better off just paying a million dollars a year to each of the developers Ms Mayer managed to bring on board?
- eknkc 10y agoJust guessing; It might be really valuable to acquire a team of people, known to work / accomplish together. I think talent is not in short supply but god teams are hard to come by. Also, the patents they acquire might be important in the long term too.
- ernestbro 10y agoA team of people known to work & accomplish together had a common motivation when they worked for a startup, usually building a single product for a single market. The effects of this focus + motivation is huge. When a larger company like Yahoo acquires the focus + motivation is pulled from underneath them and quickly become quite average.
- mrweasel 10y ago>Is talent really in that short supply that acqui-hiring makes sense? If not, the alternative seems to be that Yahoo is buying up companies for no reason. My guess would be that they've been buying companies on the off chance that those companies had something that would turn Yahoo around in an afternoon. Yahoo is a desperate company, in search of a money making scheme. It understandable. It can't be easy to look at the competitors and realise that you're on the path to becoming the next MySpace. Yahoo do a few things well, their mail has at least earlier been good, Yahoo Finance is a great service, but there's no profit to be made from either.
- toyg 10y agoYahoo Finance could probably be monetized by shopping some sort of advanced feature to financial-software vendors. An Excel plugin would also be popular -- yes, it's nothing a VBA warrior couldn't code up in an afternoon, but a lot of people don't really want to do that. They could become Bloomberg for the masses, so to speak. Pure email is not monetizable, but if they could tie in some unobtrusive freemium feature, there might be something in there. Remember that thread about commodity traders living on Yahoo IM? Surely some sort of IM/email mashup that could allow you to file and export messages could be popular.
- simonswords82 10y agoWhat blows my mind is how positive the HN crowd were about the acquisition of Tumblr at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737185 Everybody on HN now appears to be firmly in the camp of "Tumblr was a terrible acquisition, it was obvious at the time, what a disaster". Now we read about the other 52 companies that for the most part are also disasters. My questions are: How did Marissa manage to purchase a whopping 53 companies and waste so much money before somebody realised that Yahoo was collapsing from the inside out? Is this all on her shoulders? Surely the board signed these deals off? Are they equally culpable here?
- wodenokoto 10y agoShe was brought in to stop an ongoing collapse, so I guess you could say she did it after everybody realised that Yahoo was collapsing from the inside out.
- s_q_b 10y agoYeah, this is sort of like blaming the fire department for burning down your house.
- ancientworldnow 10y agoOnly if the fire department showed up without water opting instead to spray money at the fire in the hope it would fix itself.
- pessimizer 10y agoAnd if the house was Yahoo and the fire was Yahoo circling the drain for years. You're pushing the metaphor to a place where it really doesn't make sense.
- icebraining 10y agoThat thread doesn't seem that positive to me, besides the first post and a few comments about the Tumblr post itself.
- dhimes 10y agoWhat is Yahoo doing in mobile? What does it mean that "the team joined Yahoo's mobile unit?"
- jccalhoun 10y agoi use yahoo weather app. it uses flickr pics from your current location as its background.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoI used to use that weather app too. Loved it. Then I tried the AccuWeather app and I became convinced that its forecasts were more accurate.
- greyman 10y agoI tried their Flickr app once. Not bad, but I didn't find anything innovative there (back then).
- GoToRO 10y agomail app, messenger app. I have both and they are good.
- zuluwill 10y agoReid Hoffman interviewed Marissa Mayer for his blitzscaling lectures at Stanford and she gives some insights into her mobile strategy and why she made these acquisitions. In short and paraphrasing massively Yahoo had a tiny team dedicated to mobile and she wanted to change this fast. Full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS9mzbgI_qk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS9mzbgI_qk
- spriggan3 10y ago> Yahoo had a tiny team dedicated to mobile and she wanted to change this fast I'm not sure what was the point of buying Tumblr 1 Billion if Yahoo had a mobile strategy problem. Tumblr isn't big on mobile.
- vorotato 10y agolol what do you mean tumblr isn't big on mobile. 78%. percent of Tumblr's audience that access it through a mobile device. Their whole site is tailored for mobile.
- spriggan3 10y agolol, you didn't get the memo , did you ? http://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-tumblr/ http://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-tumblr/
- effingwewt 10y agoSince we're being snarky- perhaps read the articles you toss out? It specifically says that a major cause was the merging of their sales/marketing/ads teams and installing middle management (between Marissa and Karp) who knew little-to-nothing about Tumblr, much less how to run it. It's not like Yahoo bought them out to turn them away from mobile. Or even to help Yahoo become more mobilized. They wanted to monetize Tumblr and gain from it's younger audience.
- ssreeniv 10y agoInspite of making so many mistakes, Yahoo is still one of the top 10 most visited sites. What is working for them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites
- leroy_masochist 10y agoHere's an answer based on anecdotal experience; I know maybe a dozen people who have a Yahoo email address and use Yahoo as their browser home page. All of them are of my parents' generation. I think the answer to "what is working" is that Yahoo was able to acquire millions of users back in the late 90's when Yahoo was the only game in town, and many of these users are baby boomers who get very frustrated with new technology, who are familiar with the Yahoo UI due to nearly two decades of interacting with it, and who view switching to Gmail or whatever else as a hassle that is just not worth the frustration of learning how to use another platform.
- hartator 10y agoI read Yahoo! Finance dayly.
- GoToRO 10y agoI still use Yahoo Mail because GMail was changing too often and I had got tired from hunting buttons. Also you can select to see only unread emails in Yahoo. Also, if you send an HTML email to an Yahoo email address you can put the CSS in a <style> tag and Yahoo servers will deal with it nicely and the CSS will work when you read the email on Yahoo's website. But all this Yahoo is dying nonsense did bring some changes. They modified the UI code and now, sometimes you select an email but you can't click any actions (delete etc.) because the app is confused about the state in which it is. It happent less recently. Then they pulled Yahoo Messenger, which is how I was notified of new emails, while not having ready the mobile app. Thankfully the mobile app is really good and I have my other account on it too. And the ads... they are good. As oposed to google that will follow me with the same ad for weeks even if I already made my purchase or maybe it was just a curiosity. With Yahoo it's more like "here are some things people your age look at".
- jondubois 10y agoWhat's worse is that in spite of the ridiculous sums that Yahoo paid, the technical talent that they bought in was of pretty average quality. She just bought over-hyped companies run by a bunch of kids. These kids were better at self-promotion (and perhaps business) than at producing great software. Really good software engineers are not in the public view - They are too busy learning and writing code to waste their time fundraising, blogging about their technical achievements or chatting up journalists. Marissa Mayer turned Yahoo into a startup lottery. What's left of Yahoo is just a freakshow of capitalist excess. I don't see how this acquisition spree was ever going to 'attract talent'. Seriously; would any talented, hard working, self-respecting engineer want to have some entitled multimillionaire lucky startup brat as their boss?
- codecamper 10y agoYou sound a little bit jealous. What apps / web services have you made?
- theodoredziuba 10y agoHe sounds envious, not jealous. Jealousy is the fear that someone else will take what you have. Envy is when you want what someone else has.
- guessmyname 10y agoReminds me of that scene from The Simpsons [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+simpsons+jealousy+and+envy https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+simpsons+je...
- SixSigma 10y agoI think you'll find that jealousy is now synonymous with envy as well as its previous meaning, which is derived not proscribed.
- twoarrays 10y agoWorst ad hominem in a long time. http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- staticelf 10y agoWhy did they shut down all the apps/software that they acquired? Why not simply to continue with the service like they did with tumblr?
- perseusprime11 10y agoWhat happens when you take some body who is good in the UX department and ask them to run a company? Peter's principle is what happened.
- fleaflicker 10y agoTrying to acquire talent is not a terrible approach. From http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups...
- robbiemitchell 10y ago"In theory"
- stinkytaco 10y agoI'm not sure if I would consider Paul Graham -- a man who largely makes his living by mentoring engineers who get "bought" -- and a terribly reliable source on this. Of course he thinks buying startups is a good way to beat the death spiral since he's in the business of producing startups. And even if we accept that it is a good strategy, all it did for Yahoo was lease a few engineers for a year after their startup was purchased, only to have them leave a year later to do another startup. Either that or struggle to integrate a bunch of disparate teams that you purchased based on the product they made, rather than how they might best serve your mission.
- devchix 10y agoI feel like there's a fundamental failure in this model: create and grow a business to be a target acquisition, then cash out. This implies an untested business riding on trend and PR fluff, whose creator was never committed enough to see it fully realized.
- mxuribe 10y agoYeah, good point. After a while, it starts to sound like what i imagine people would say in the finance heyday of 80s/90s... Nowadays: * Hey, go and create a startup that will make itself ripe for being bought; you'll cash out like mad! What's that? Viable business model? Long term growth? Pshaw, those are just details! Chase that dollar, kid! In the 80s/90s: * Hey, go and play with other people's money on Wall Street! Start selling and buying companies, commodities, etc.; you'll cash out like mad! What's that? What are CDOs? Viable business model? Long term growth? Pshaw, those are just details! Chase that dollar, kid!
- Grue3 10y agoAt least it isn't bankrupt, as opposed to Gizmodo's parent company.
- marknutter 10y agoWhat does that have to do with anything?
- sb057 10y agoIt's just a bit humorous that Gizmodo put out an article that (in essence) criticizes Yahoo's bad business decisions, while at the same time Gawker is filing for bankruptcy.
- pavs 10y agoGawker is not filling for bankruptcy for bad business decisions, it's filing for bankruptcy because they were sued for making a questionable editorial decision and lost the case.
- IkmoIkmo 10y agoI think it's interesting to note Marissa took over in July 2012, since then the stock price rose by 140%. During that same time Google did 152%, Microsoft did 75% and Apple did 15%. Of course this is only a small part of the story, but at the end of the day she works for the owners of the company, the shareholders, and they care about their share price. They've done quite well compared to others, under her leadership. Am I excited about Yahoo, or would I invest, or do I think it's a well run company? Nonono. But there's a narrative that Marissa's doing a terrible job, and contextualised by a declining trend for at least half a decade prior to her joining the company, and shareholders faring quite well so far, I'd say it's nowhere as bad as people think.
- GabrielF00 10y agoHow much of that has to do with the fact that Alibaba had an IPO in 2014? People were using Yahoo as a vehicle to invest in Alibaba. Given that, the stock would have risen regardless of who was CEO.
- matwood 10y ago> I think it's interesting to note Marissa took over in July 2012, since then the stock price rose by 140%. Yep. I bought YHOO when she was hired, and it worked out well. She may not have been the catalyst for they stock price rise (Alibaba), but she was the catalyst that made me purchase some shares.
- vorotato 10y agoYeah, and the core business is still waaay undervalued. Plenty of people use Yahoo, it's just not us.
- yellowstuff 10y agoYahoo owns shares in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, but has no control over those companies. Yahoo's rising stock price is mostly due to those assets going up in value. Sure, Meyer had the foresight not to sell off the Alibaba shares in 2012 and pay maximum taxes, but for the most part she should be judged for how she ran the core business.
- Keyframe 10y agoYou know, at first I thought she would turn Yahoo around due to her cachet and Yahoo still having a ground to leap from. I dismissed naysayers by writing that down to chauvinism and envy our little world is full of. Now, I'm pretty sure she stalled and nose-dived Yahoo to the ground. At first there seemed to be a strategy behind it all, to build-up Yahoo as a media empire of sorts. However, then random acquisitions started and it showed lack of either strategy or focus. Buy shit and instead of building upon what you bought, they moved onto more buying, while ignoring previously bought stuff. That's just bad leadership, lack of strategy.
- mxuribe 10y agoI still think she has cachet and i still believe there is (to a large degree) plenty of chauvinism being thrown at her. Maybe she is a fit leader but dove into a mess that is far worse behind the scenes than the public can understand? Maybe she had no help from her internal staff/teams? And/Or, maybe yes, she is human and could have made a few mistakes? Maybe her skills make her a better COO-type of person as opposed to CEO? It sucks to see the state of yahoo in general these days (I attribute this statement of mine to sheer nostalgia of the older inter-webs)...but it sucks also because I have been cheering on Marissa Mayer, and hoping she succeeds both throughout hr time in google as well as here on yahoo. Good leader / bad leader, I don't know...but I'll keep pulling for her.
- Keyframe 10y agoI'm sure she has chauvinism thrown at her. That's the sad state of the world we live in. I always tend to give positive benefit of the doubt to people. However, her results have shown lack of yield. That's all that matters. She's been at it for four years now and hasn't turned the ship around. Only two conclusions can be met here. Either the ship has already sunk before she came on board or she wasn't fit for the role / bad leadership. Even if she didn't have the support from people around her, that's still lack of leadership. After all, it's your job, as a leader, to persuade people into doing various things (do things, buy things, sell things, morale, whatever...). Results speak for themselves. She has got to go. The patient is flatlining.
- tuna-piano 10y agoOnly 6 months!? Why would any corporation think entrepreneurs at heart would want to stay once they got there?
- tuna-piano 10y agoDoes anyone know the median price for these deals? I assume it's highly skewed. What would a 5 person failing mobile app get, and how long would they be locked in to Yahoo for?
- tuna-piano 10y agoWhen Marissa Mayer states that Yahoo "is the fastest growing startup in the world", I hope she doesn't actually believe that or take pride in that- and is just saying it for hype. They invested 2.8B to produce no meaningful profit and only a fraction of that in revenue. Under her logic, only looking at the output, they'd be a faster growing startup if they just put that money into a bank account.
- vorotato 10y agoBusinesses take risks to create value. It's what they do, and if nobody did it putting money into a bank account wouldn't actually make money. If you want ~0 risk money buy some bonds, but startups are arguably some of the riskiest (and most rewarding) investments. In that regard I'd say she's 100% spot on.
- 2array 10y agoYou may think this was harmless, but you've greatly contributed to our rampant inequality.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vorotato 10y agoI don't think anyone claimed it was harmless...
- tuna-piano 10y agoHa, when they gave him an offer, should he have asked for less money?
- dang 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11915829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11915829 and marked it off-topic.
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y agoBy making money? Are you f'ing serious?
- notacoward 10y ago> Marissa Mayer turned Yahoo into a startup lottery. Yahoo just participates in the startup lottery like every other company its size. The lottery already existed, and Yahoo was already part of it, long before Mayer. Ditto after Mayer, I'm sure. Don't blame her for one of Silicon Valley's fundamental pathologies.
- asimuvPR 10y agoExactly. They just went with it because its "normal". Either way, didn't Paul Graham sell a company to yahoo and then started YC?
- mmaunder 10y ago"Hey, your company isn’t working, therefore we’re bringing you on for the talent. We’re not interested in the product and service you have in market,...." If your goal is to increase revenue and profitability, surely buying companies that have demonstrated they're great at losing money is a really bad idea? You're hand picking individuals who are the very best in the business at blowing investor cash.