28 ms·

Verizon closes $4.5B acquisition of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer resigns

744 points by pyprism 9y ago

aerovistae 9y ago
Whoa! The beginning of the end of the end.
- samstave 9y ago
  When will the end of the beginning begin or end?
pram 9y ago
I really wonder what the ultimate fate of Flickr and Tumblr will be, especially the latter since the acquisition was deemed "essentially worthless" lol
- simonsarris 9y ago
  For some context to pram's comment, by essentially worthless he's referring to how Yahoo recently completely wrote off Tumblr's goodwill value from when they acquired it, which was most of the purchase price. In other words, Yahoo paid a premium because they thought Tumblr had a lot of potential, then... wrote it off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) For more context see: 2013 talk of 75% value being goodwill: http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/09/technology/yahoo-tumblr-goodwill/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/09/technology/yahoo-tumblr-good... Then 2016 writedown: http://gizmodo.com/yahoos-latest-earnings-report-basically-confirms-that-t-1783873667 http://gizmodo.com/yahoos-latest-earnings-report-basically-c...
  - notfromhere 9y ago
    im sure david karp isn't complaining
chollida1 9y ago
A list of Marissa Mayer's/Yahoo's accomplisments with her at the helm.... https://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/161775943139/nostalgia-gratitude-optimism https://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/161775943139/nostalgia-g... Even though all of these gains, plus more as core yahoo lost value was from Alibaba this does look impressive at a first glance..... > We oversaw the creation $43B in market capitalization and shareholder value. Our market cap has gone from $18B to $51B (increasing our valuation by $33B), while we returned nearly $10B in cash to shareholders. Sadly the list of employee gains seems very spartan compared to the shareholder gains. For those of you wondering what the Yahoo/Altaba shell contains now... - approximately 15 percent equity stake in China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., - about 36 percent in Yahoo Japan Corp., - cash and marketable debt securities, - certain minority investments and Excalibur IP, which owns some patent assets.
- dreamdu5t 9y ago
  Why is the CEO credited with market capitalization? They don't have anything to do with it.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    Market cap = share price x shares How would you measure a CEO's performance of a public company if not share price?
    - antidaily 9y ago
      Well let's start with that logo redesign.
    - bitJericho 9y ago
      http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-pay/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buyba...
    - Retric 9y ago
      Over the long term the delta between company X profit and similar company Y's profit. Granted this does not really work over less than a decade, but if BP, Shell, and Exxon move in lockstep then none of the CEOs are doing an exceptional job even if all three companies are wildly profitable.
joeblubaugh 9y ago
Savvy PR move doing this on the same day the Uber report drops and Jeff Sessions testifies in the Senate
- mbaha 9y ago
  Why ?
  - patrickg_zill 9y ago
    It's a way of hiding/burying information. The info is legally required to be disclosed, but with so much else going on the news is unlikely to be widely covered.
    - UnoriginalGuy 9y ago
      This wouldn't have been widely covered regardless. Nobody cares about Yahoo! anymore except in niche tech circles. That's why you're reading this on techcrunch.
  - joeblubaugh 9y ago
    A lot less oxygen to write one more "decline and fall of Yahoo" story or "what went wrong for Marissa Mayer" story.
- bmpafa 9y ago
  In fairness, by these standards, there hasn't been a day in months that wouldn't qualify as a 'good day to deliver bad news.'
- empath75 9y ago
  Lol. I work at aol. This has been 'the day' for months and months. You don't schedule multi-billion dollar mergers around the news cycle. Tomorrow is supposedly when everyone is supposed to start finding out if they have a job in the new company and for how long.
  - 9y ago
signal11 9y ago
If anyone knows what impact Verizon's ownership will have on Flickr, please could you share? I've been on Flickr for a long time now and it works well for me, should I be worried?
- epmaybe 9y ago
  I jumped ship from it after the Verizon ownership. I only used Flickr for storage, not for the social aspect, so I just moved everything to Google Photos. I don't personally notice a huge decrease in quality in their compressed pictures, but your mileage may vary.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- empath75 9y ago
  Short term, no. Long term, maybe. Aol and yahoo intend to keep all brands going for both companies in the short term. In the medium term, where there are duplications, they'll pick one back end over another, and try to keep both front ends going. Long term, who knows--they'll start evaluating things as a new company, but that's likely years off. For Flickr in particular, since aol doesn't have a competing product, it's going to be safe for a long while.
- camus2 9y ago
  Yes, Verizon is about to fire Yahoo 2100 employees. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/technology/verizon-yahoo-deal-layoffs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/technology/verizon-yahoo-...
- owenversteeg 9y ago
  Same, I use it for the free auto-upload and terabyte of space. It works beautifully, unlike any other auto upload tool I've used, and the terabyte of space is fantastic. I've used the auto-upload to hide photos (crudely) from authoritarian governments and I can actually count on it to upload instantly. If it goes away I don't know what I'll use. Google Photos hasn't worked well at all for me, and I haven't tried Onedrive because the interface is fairly clunky.
invincibles 9y ago
Coming soon: All Verizon phones will contain tons of Yahoo crap and use Yahoo by default.
- panzer_wyrm 9y ago
  People that don't buy unlocked phones but on contract seems so be ok with carriers treating them poorly.
  - erik-g 9y ago
    Well some people don't have a few hundred dollars to drop on a new phone when they need one. At that point you're at the whim of the carrier anyways.
    - parthdesai 9y ago
      I would rather buy a phone like moto g than get a super phone that is locked to a career and bloated with all the shit. But then if you are on hacker news, you most probably are not an average joe when it comes to tech.
      - HillaryBriss 9y ago
        a footnote about the Moto G and Verizon: some people who bought unlocked Moto G phones from a 3rd party (e.g. Amazon) have reported that 911 doesn't work properly with Verizon. dunno. maybe that's why Verizon doesn't sell it on their US website.
      - JBReefer 9y ago
        I have a Moto G, outright. It cost as much as a night out, and it works perfectly. It's got nearly stock Android, and the battery is good. The camera is HORRIBLE, but the difference is not worth >$650 to me
        parthdesai 9y ago
zw123456 9y ago
Verizon is combining the AOL and Yahoo operations and calling the new organization "Oath"
- jhou2 9y ago
  My initial thought was, "How did they misspell OAuth like that?"
  - floatboth 9y ago
    Also isn't "OATH" like the group that standardized TOTP?
- eplanit 9y ago
  "Oaf" would be more fitting.
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    I sense a meme forming.
- jandrese 9y ago
  That is a downright bizarre name for an advertising company. It think it's worse than the Honest Name™ of "90s Graveyard Holdings Incorporated".
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    What about The Honest Company that lost a lawsuit for using chemicals and stuff in their products?
drzaiusapelord 9y ago
Kind of a sad day for me. Yahoo was so instrumental in the early web where I cut my teeth. Seeing it now sold to some telecom giant at around what a handful of unprofitable mobile apps go for is a bit depressing. For Millenials, imagine if Google was sold to AT&T 5-10 years from now after beaten by hungrier competitors. I guess all these companies fold eventually but Yahoo had quite the terminal illness and it lasted far longer than I assumed and often with bouncebacks that made you think things were getting better. Perhaps Verizon can do something useful with the brand, but the Yahoo I knew is dead and probably has been since Mayer took over. She was brought in as a hatchet-woman to get an acquisition and got the job done.
- bognition 9y ago
  >Perhaps Verizon can do something useful with the brand They are abandoning the brand completely. After the merger goes through VZ will combined AOL and Yahoo! into a single new brand Oath. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/technology/verizon-oath-yahoo-aol.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/technology/verizon-oath-y...
  - empath75 9y ago
    They are 100% not abandoning the brand-either yahoo or aol. Oath is just the umbrella organization.
- _jal 9y ago
  Reminds me of when defiled corpse of Netscape ended up... at AOL.
  - TremendousJudge 9y ago
    Its spirit lives on as Mozilla though
- kilroy123 9y ago
  It too makes me sad. I grew up chatting on Yahoo messenger and sitting in chat rooms. Had a Yahoo mail account before gmail, etc. What a fall from grace.
rb808 9y ago
Congratulations to Marissa on a job well done. That boat was a sinking ship that no one wanted to captain, and she kept it alive long enough to a satisfactory outcome.
- johansch 9y ago
  Yeah, that wasn't really how her appointment was sold: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-ceo-idUSBRE86F13T20120717 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-ceo-idUSBRE86F13T201... "Yahoo turns to Google's Mayer for revival" https://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/07/16/3-reasons-why-marissa-mayers-hiring-is-a-huge-win-for-yahoo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/07/16/3-reasons... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-18/yahoo-help-us-marissa-mayer-dot-youre-our-only-hope https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-18/yahoo-hel...
  - dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y ago
    Who are reuters, forbes, and bloomberg to say? They don't know the market; it's not like rescuing yahoo was actually in any way possible. The site was a finance site, a sports site, and a shitty email server stuck to a link farm. Not to mention flickr, tumblr, etc that had little to no role in the revenue generation of the company. RIP del.icio.us. If the company had been saved it would not have been Yahoo! anymore.
- jonknee 9y ago
  Millions of people would have taken the job of draining YHOO's coffers while sitting on a huge stake in one of the world's hottest pre-IPO companies... Yahoo's board just so happened to want a flashy name.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Really though? It's hard to imagine it could have gone worse really. Look at Flickr.
- josefresco 9y ago
  Tim Armstrong might disagree.
redm 9y ago
I for one hope this works out well, more diversity is good for consumers. IMHO, anything that chips away at the dominance of Google and Facebook are positive too.
- kingbirdy 9y ago
  how is two major corporations merging an anti-monopoly move?
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    The point OP was making is that this gives the internet ad industry a 3rd major player. Still far short of FB and Google but a lot closer than anyone else.
deleted 9y ago
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troxwalt 9y ago
They should probably just end all fantasy baseball leagues for this year too. I'd hate to have this year count. In all seriousness, Yahoo! has done an amazing job with their fantasy sports.
Simulacra 9y ago
I give it about 3 years until Verizon unloads it onto someone else for half the price.
- disgruntledphd2 9y ago
  I actually think that they might make some money off it. They can serve way more crummy over-priced ads than Yahoo! ever could (apparently).
- debacle 9y ago
  You have to consider things like: - Defaulting search for Android. - Owning the search engine behind their DNS hijacking. - Setting Yahoo as the default search when you install their ISP software. - Being able to eliminate Verizon mail (and integrate with Yahoo's mail platform). - Having less reliance on Google for mobile.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  No they won't. It's going to be merged with AOL and run by AOL's CEO, Armstrong, but now with a ton more views and more ad tech. Verizon should do good money with all their data combined with Oath (AOL and Yahoo).
chibg10 9y ago
I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role. Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section. Why is this? Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former engineer? Because she's a female CEO? Is she just a politically polarizing topic ala Elon Musk? Genuinely curious. Anyone have any ideas?
- krisdol 9y ago
  Because she's a female CEO and any news-provider's comment sections are absolute cesspools.
  - nobleach 9y ago
    I'm not so sure it completely boils down to her gender. I mean, I'm sure that's an issue for some folks... but I can't say that explains 100% of the vitriol. She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. That was a douche move. Any CEO that plays the "us and them" policy with their workers vs execs rubs me the wrong way. I'm not at all bothered that she got 23 million as a "thank you". She had an extremely hard job. The pressures she dealt with are nothing I could understand. So by all means, reward her for it! But I'm still kinda chapped about the work from home thing.
    - 1024core 9y ago
      > She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Google does not have a WFH policy. She killed the policy because internal audit showed that many people were just not working when they claimed to be; VPN and sign-in logs turned up many slackers. There were some who were allowed to WFH. So it wasn't a blanket "no one's allowed to WFH", but more a "justify your need to WFH and show that you're doing a good job". > Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. She did not take much of a maternity leave at all. She came back within 2 weeks of giving birth via a cesaerean(sp). She just converted a cube nearby to where she kept her kid.
deleted 9y ago
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redm 9y ago
I can't help but think about the Microsoft buyout offer back in 2008. From a $44 billion dollar offer to an offer 1/10th the value 9 years later. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-offers-446-billion-to-acquire-yahoo/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-offers-446-b...
- gcb0 9y ago
  you are comparing an offer for a car vs an offer for 4 tires.
- Steko 9y ago
  The 15% of Alibaba and 35% of Yahoo Japan that Yahoo owned are not part of the $4.5B sale price and are worth something like $40B.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Jerry Yang, the most competent higher up at Yahoo for the past decade and a half, is the one who said no to the buy out. And rightfully so. The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes would be worth over $80B today. Unfortunately the board and some activist investors first kicked Jerry out and then continued on with selling almost half of the Alibaba stake.
PayForPeenus 9y ago
Marissa Mayer was already on the sinking ship - but I admire her ambition on trying to make that thing work. God speed on her future en-devours for sure.
brookside 9y ago
I have disliked her ever since being influenced by this gawker screed some years back: http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-failure http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-fail.... Subsequent reporting has hardend my opinion: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh... I have tried to examine what role gender plays in my visceral dislike for Marissa Mayer. I hope it is a small one. I give myself some consolation that I recoil almost equally when reading any news coverage of Travis Kalanick.
- urda 9y ago
  I'm not a fan of her, but Gawker is not to be taken as a serious news outlet at all. So you may want to re-read that with a big grain of salt.
  - jtmarmon 9y ago
    https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Gawker isn't some tabloid. Sure it wasn't the best but without looking at the article you're just assuming it has to be taken with a "big grain of salt". You should be weary of everything you read to some extent and try to make sure what you're reading is valid. NYTimes and The Economist (I enjoy both of them just making a point) both did horrible reporting for the Iraq War. I assume you would consider them serious news outlets.
    - wmeredith 9y ago
      > Gawker isn't some tabloid. Almost spit out my coffee.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      The difference is the NYT and other actual journalism outfits strive to report fairly and have standards they hope to achieve. Gawker did not. In fact the standards they held themselves to were deemed illegal by the courts, and when the courts told them that their journalistic standards were illegal, they attacked the court and doubled down. It's no wonder they were sued out of business. 100% tabloid. They had no journalistic integrity beyond "lets get more clicks" and were not afraid to break the law or ignore the truth to do it.
deleted 9y ago
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shawnee_ 9y ago
> Those who are keeping jobs in the media division in the newly merged operation include Jared Grusd leading the News vertical (including yahoo.com, aol.com, HuffPost, and Yahoo News); Geoff Reiss leading the Sports vertical; David Karp leading the People and Community vertical (including Tumblr, Polyvore, Cabana, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo View, and Kanvas); Andy Serwer leading Finance media (including Yahoo Finance and Autoblog); Michael LaGuardia leading Finance product and utilities; Ned Desmond leading TechCrunch and Engadget; Alex Wallace leading OTT video production & distribution as well as lifestyle & entertainment (that includes BUILD, RYOT, Yahoo Celebrity, Yahoo Style, Yahoo BeuYahoo TV, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Music, and Yahoo Entertainment); Dave Bottoms heading up distribution products (Newsroom and video OTT products) as well as growth, monetization, and syndication; Tim Tully leading all of engineering; Dave McDowell leading subscriptions, commerce, and customer care (including Yahoo Shopping and AOL Shopping); and Mary Bui-Pham leading our operations (including design, UXRA, analytics, and program management). The problem with consolidations like this into bigger and bigger conglomerates is that it reduces editorial independence in favor of a false sense of corporate unification among all the "verticals". The heavy and overweight company has a "great" vision which involves being everything to everybody. But that never works. End result will likely end up providing a lukewarm mediocrity in them all. What Yahoo probably should have done was divest; instead it allowed itself to be swallowed whole by an ISP whose sole goal (as evidenced with its malfeasance to destroy Net Neutrality) is be able to selectively prioritize traffic in the ways that are most profitable to them... Ergo, the objective of this kind of empire is not to track down the truth and inform people about what is really going on, but to entertain and distract.
- hengheng 9y ago
  I dunno, did you really look at Yahoo for content that profits from editorial independence?
- hengheng 9y ago
  I dunno, did you really look at Yahoo for content that profits from editorial independence?
ddebernardy 9y ago
Didn't Microsoft extend a $40+B (however hostile) bid a decade ago or so? I'm still at a loss as to why Jang et al didn't sell then...
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Just going to mostly reiterate a previous comment - Jerry Yang, the most competent higher up at Yahoo for the past decade and a half, is the one who said no to the buy out. And rightfully so. The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes would be worth around $80B today if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately the board and some activist investors first kicked Jerry out and then continued on with selling almost half of the Alibaba stake.
adamonkey 9y ago
She should become COO of Uber. Perfect!
- sgs1370 9y ago
  Not quite related but I always thought Sheryl Sandberg would be a great CEO of Uber. Of course, I don't think she would want the job.
parantap2001 9y ago
Question - Can someone explain the $4.5B valuation of Yahoo-Verizon deal versus the $49.46B Market cap of Yahoo! Inc. ticker on Nasdaq. Thanks.
- syntheticnature 9y ago
  Yahoo owns 15% of Alibaba, due to an investment done a long time ago. Alibaba is considered to be quite valuable -- so they are spinning off the core of the company in order to be able to behave more as the investment company they became, since they couldn't extract the Alibaba shares without paying a massive amount of capital gains tax on the increase in value.
  - csomar 9y ago
    So if someone is doing market cap of Alibaba + Yahoo based on Nasdaq calculations, he is counting Alibaba twice? (or 15% twice for this one). How do you calculate the global market cap without falling into this duplication.
    - skinnymuch 9y ago
      Oh right. Either I'm not thinking right or I'm also confused now with what you're saying. I hope someone can respond.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
dopamean 9y ago
I thought the job of a CEO was to increase shareholder value. Yahoo stock is up roughly 230% since she was officially signed on as CEO. Sounds like she did her job to me.
- opo 9y ago
  All of that increase is due to the increase in value of the Alibaba stock - which was pushed through by Yang long before she got there. If she hadn't sold half of their Alibaba holdings when she got there, the value of the company would have been about double. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/09/30/how-jerry-yang-made-the-most-lucrative-bet-in-tech-history/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/09/30/how-jerry...
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Mayer didn't sell the 40% stake. The deal was begun and going through before she was CEO. It was only finalized and completed with her as CEO. Not like she was going to be allowed to stop the deal. The bad board and activist investors are the ones to blame.
    - opo 9y ago
      >...Not like she was going to be allowed to stop the deal. I am not sure how you can be so sure about that. I wasn’t privy to the discussions with her and the board, were you? If she recognized how bad of an idea that was she could have made it a condition of taking the job. My guess is that she saw the 7 billion from selling their position as free money that would take the pressure off of her for a while.
      - skinnymuch 9y ago
        No of course I'm not privy to everything. It was known the board wanted to get rid of some of the Alibaba stake for cash. So they just wouldn't hire Mayer if she wouldn't allow the deal as part of her being CEO. You can of course say we don't know for sure but if we know the board really wants some cash from Alibaba and has kicked out Jerry Yang already, then it isn't hard to think that Mayer hasn't no leverage here. Also just for basic timeline sake - in 2012, the deal was announced in the media in May, Mayer is CEO in July, and the deal completes in Sept.
pvsukale3 9y ago
"Ye to hona hi tha " English : this was going to happen anyway
CodeSheikh 9y ago
I am still waiting for Silicon Valley TV show to pick up this vast subject of Myer's tenure at Yahoo into one of its episodes.
- 2017throw 9y ago
  You think they are brave enough to touch the "inspirational female leader" topic? Theranos and HP would be enough alone...
  - CodeSheikh 9y ago
    Since when Myer is an "inspirational" leader? Oh sarcasm.
  - johan_larson 9y ago
    It doesn't have to be about a female leader. It can be about a grand old company that has fallen on hard times and whose board ponies up big bux to attract a promising young CEO. Unfortunately the promising young CEO can't deliver a return to the glory days, so the second best is a carefully negotiated sale.
59bcc3ad677 9y ago
Wow
fred256 9y ago
I noticed the YHOO stock ticker is still active. Is that now the empty shell that still has the Alibaba stake, or something else entirely?
- detaro 9y ago
  Mostly Alibaba stake, and they also still own Yahoo Japan. I guess they might change their ticker symbol, since they announced a name change to "Altaba"?
faragon 9y ago
Does anyone know any significative achievement made by Mayer in Yahoo?
- darkstar999 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545456
faragon 9y ago
Does anyone know any significative achievement made by Mayer in Yahoo?
justboxing 9y ago
> As expected, Marissa Mayer, who had been the CEO of Yahoo and recently received a $23 million ‘golden parachute’ for her work there. Nice! I dream of a day when the Engineers who make the Tech Company what it is, are also offered 'Golden Parachutes' as part of a Job Offer.
joering2 9y ago
For 2 weeks now I'm fighting an enormous amount of spam that start popping up from nowhere and I did trail-back in my memory to not find a single instance in last 3 months where I would give out my email address to anyone new. Its insane how much of it goes to my direct mailbox right in front of my eyes! Some even have "viagra" word in subjects, they come from weird addresses like hJGabtmDwbaiaJUsgUNiepwwUzDUUdanBHFpiMEghzLKNsotQTbrhZdpDzCHFWatqQB@perico.hunmooth.com and open up with images and everything ready for my click. I suspect Verizon is already working hard on break the remaining thing that worked fine until now - yahoo mailbox. But I'm fine with that. I had it in my pipeline to move out of them for so long now another incentive to actually do so :)
jellicle 9y ago
When she took over, there were numerous articles about how Yahoo's core business had negative value (the business plus the Alibaba investment was worth less than the Alibaba investment). Since then she's given a lot of cash to shareholders, raised the stock price, and is selling the "negative value" core business for $4.5 billion. That's an astounding success.
EternalData 9y ago
Yahoo thought the media they provided users was important, Google thought user data was important -- it's possible Mayer tried to bring some of Google to Yahoo. But I don't think it was enough to bring Yahoo anywhere close to competing.
timdellinger 9y ago
The whole Net Neutrality situation just got more interesting.
nadim 9y ago
1996-2017. Rip. https://goo.gl/images/WYRMqj https://goo.gl/images/WYRMqj
rayalez 9y ago
What do you think is going to happen to Tumblr? Tumblr has a massive audience, but some of the worst tech among the social media, and now it seems like it might get abandoned completely. So people will eventually migrate to something else, right? What can other platforms, like Medium, do about this? If you had a platofrm that might be valuable for a similar usecase(though, hopefully, much better), what would you be doing right now? Any ideas or advice?
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Does it still have a massive audience? I would think it has lost a lot since Yahoo wrote of 2/3 of its value already.
khazhou 9y ago
Her mega-salary, like that of other comparable executives, is decided by other mega-rich people. It's no hardship for them to hand her (one of their own) enough cash to buy a small town. Let's ponder that $260M compared to every time an outgoing job offer was dialed down from $145K to $135K. Or when the yearly bonus for a rank and file is a healthy $25K (1/1000th her accumulated comp). Sour grapes? Yes, and why not? We're all giving our lives to these same companies.
- valuearb 9y ago
  She was given $30M in restricted stock to get her to walk away from being owed that much at Google. Then they gave her some incentives in stock options (valued at $22M if yahoo stock increased by something like 8% a year for a decade), because otherwise why would she take the job? Instead Yahoo stock tripled and that created her $260M. Now she may not have had a lot to do with the stock increase, but she certainly didn't screw it up. Her compensation was mostly incentive based, which is what you want for a CEO. CEOs aren't going to be paid like an engineer. They probably are overpaid. But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't.
  - verytrivial 9y ago
    > But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't. This is how most organised religions work.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. A $2500 bonus ($250 million divided by 10k employees) is also a small amount to pay.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
myrandomcomment 9y ago
I love how everyone here thinks they can do better. Yahoo was a deadman walking before she took over. Overall she did what she was suppose to do as a CEO of any company, return value to the shareholders. Now you can disagree with that being the goal, but it is the way it works today. By that measure it worked. Is it the right thing long term, most likely not. We have lost focus on long term planing in favor of quarterly reporting. It is the world we live in. Please go can change it, but don't sit here and say you could do better as I do not see any of you saying you have the job as a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. Oh, I expect this to get down voted to oblivion. Prove me wrong.
- castis 9y ago
  Once more, from the guidelines! Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted.
calimac 9y ago
Finally the era of Marissa mayor is over hopefully for good
calimac 9y ago
Now you really can't trust anything piped through yahoo servers with Verizon's dirty grubby paws on it. They are stealing your data and modeling you with precision now. Why else would the buy yahoo Fuck what has he world come to?
michaelfeng 9y ago
Another empire fall down. Bless!
Markoff 9y ago
does this mean i should stop using Flickr as backup?
smoyer 9y ago
What if Mayer's actual role was determined by Google? could it have simply been "keep them alive so we're not viewed as a monopoly"? Or maybe "put them out of business but make it look good"? I don't think that anything quite so evil went on but you have to wonder, given Mayer's investment in Google, whether there weren't sub-conscious components to her decision making. One advantage to hiring a successful CEO from another industry is the lack of this background (of course, one of the disadvantages is Scully).
ianamartin 9y ago
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Marissa Mayer took on a shit job to pull a losing company out of a hole. She knew what she was getting into, and she knew what was going to happen. She deserves every penny for the reputation hit that she's taking over this. This entire thread is why she deserves the money. Most people in tech hate her for some reason. (Let's guess what that could be . . .) Good for her for bargaining well and pulling a dream deal out of an assclown. Yahoo was a joke when she took over, and now when she leaves it's a much more valuable joke. On paper, at least. But still a joke. If you're going to leave google to run the laughing stock of the internet, you damn well better get paid the big bucks to get it sold for more than it has any right to be worth. Good for her. <shameless pandering> (Also, if you're reading, Marissa, hit me up. I know you're going to start something up soon. No way you are just going to sit still.) </shameless pandering>
- Bakary 9y ago
  With sums of this magnitude the notion of just deserts quickly becomes a fuzzy concept, if it really made sense to begin with. Nobody really deserves anything.
  - ianamartin 9y ago
    If I were going to take a very high-profile job as the head of a failing company with the mandate that I fix it, a high probability of failure, constant criticism from the press, the issues around being a woman leader in a major silicon valley company, and low expectation of another similar gig after, you bet your sweet ass I would negotiate a golden parachute. Did she make some mistakes? Yeah. The weekend redesign of the logo was probably insulting to a lot of people at the company, and it seemed kind of ridiculous to people outside the company. But the bottom line is that for the rest of her career she's going to be branded as the woman who failed to save Yahoo!. A much more likable Carly Fiorina. Likable, but still a failure. That's a shit thing to have to live with, but it's a risk she took. Who is going to hire her next? She's way over qualified for most positions in the tech industry, and she will always be perceived as under qualified as a CEO. You take a risk like that, you deserve the reward she got. Her career is toast for a while unless she starts something up on her own, which she has the money to do. What kind of package would you trade in exchange for likely never being able to work in your capacity anymore and having your name very publicly and widely shit all over? I'd take everything I could get if I thought that was going to happen. The board made a deal with her, and she took it. I don't see a problem. Good for her. Also, considering so many of the comments in this thread about how this has nothing to do with her being a woman--what do you think the HN threads are going to look like when Kalanick gets kicked out of Uber and makes millions? Guarantee you there won't be any criticism. The narrative will be that he was a smart guy who made a savvy deal.
minmaxmux 9y ago
Working as Corporate slave is a trend. Hey my boss is nice, office is big and I have nice people around me.. Until they found new guy to replace you. Then you are alone, no office and quess how many people is your friend ?
minmaxmux 9y ago
Minus ? Why.. are you an corporate rate race person ?

744 points by pyprism 9y ago

aerovistae 9y ago

Whoa! The beginning of the end of the end.

samstave 9y ago
When will the end of the beginning begin or end?

pram 9y ago

I really wonder what the ultimate fate of Flickr and Tumblr will be, especially the latter since the acquisition was deemed "essentially worthless" lol

simonsarris 9y ago
For some context to pram's comment, by essentially worthless he's referring to how Yahoo recently completely wrote off Tumblr's goodwill value from when they acquired it, which was most of the purchase price. In other words, Yahoo paid a premium because they thought Tumblr had a lot of potential, then... wrote it off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) For more context see: 2013 talk of 75% value being goodwill: http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/09/technology/yahoo-tumblr-goodwill/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/09/technology/yahoo-tumblr-good... Then 2016 writedown: http://gizmodo.com/yahoos-latest-earnings-report-basically-confirms-that-t-1783873667 http://gizmodo.com/yahoos-latest-earnings-report-basically-c...
- notfromhere 9y ago
  im sure david karp isn't complaining

chollida1 9y ago

A list of Marissa Mayer's/Yahoo's accomplisments with her at the helm.... https://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/161775943139/nostalgia-gratitude-optimism https://marissamayr.tumblr.com/post/161775943139/nostalgia-g... Even though all of these gains, plus more as core yahoo lost value was from Alibaba this does look impressive at a first glance..... > We oversaw the creation $43B in market capitalization and shareholder value. Our market cap has gone from $18B to $51B (increasing our valuation by $33B), while we returned nearly $10B in cash to shareholders. Sadly the list of employee gains seems very spartan compared to the shareholder gains. For those of you wondering what the Yahoo/Altaba shell contains now... - approximately 15 percent equity stake in China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., - about 36 percent in Yahoo Japan Corp., - cash and marketable debt securities, - certain minority investments and Excalibur IP, which owns some patent assets.

dreamdu5t 9y ago
Why is the CEO credited with market capitalization? They don't have anything to do with it.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  Market cap = share price x shares How would you measure a CEO's performance of a public company if not share price?
  - antidaily 9y ago
    Well let's start with that logo redesign.
  - bitJericho 9y ago
    http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buybacks-pay/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-buyba...
  - Retric 9y ago
    Over the long term the delta between company X profit and similar company Y's profit. Granted this does not really work over less than a decade, but if BP, Shell, and Exxon move in lockstep then none of the CEOs are doing an exceptional job even if all three companies are wildly profitable.

joeblubaugh 9y ago

Savvy PR move doing this on the same day the Uber report drops and Jeff Sessions testifies in the Senate

mbaha 9y ago
Why ?
- patrickg_zill 9y ago
  It's a way of hiding/burying information. The info is legally required to be disclosed, but with so much else going on the news is unlikely to be widely covered.
  - UnoriginalGuy 9y ago
    This wouldn't have been widely covered regardless. Nobody cares about Yahoo! anymore except in niche tech circles. That's why you're reading this on techcrunch.
- joeblubaugh 9y ago
  A lot less oxygen to write one more "decline and fall of Yahoo" story or "what went wrong for Marissa Mayer" story.
bmpafa 9y ago
In fairness, by these standards, there hasn't been a day in months that wouldn't qualify as a 'good day to deliver bad news.'
empath75 9y ago
Lol. I work at aol. This has been 'the day' for months and months. You don't schedule multi-billion dollar mergers around the news cycle. Tomorrow is supposedly when everyone is supposed to start finding out if they have a job in the new company and for how long.
- 9y ago

signal11 9y ago

If anyone knows what impact Verizon's ownership will have on Flickr, please could you share? I've been on Flickr for a long time now and it works well for me, should I be worried?

epmaybe 9y ago
I jumped ship from it after the Verizon ownership. I only used Flickr for storage, not for the social aspect, so I just moved everything to Google Photos. I don't personally notice a huge decrease in quality in their compressed pictures, but your mileage may vary.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
empath75 9y ago
Short term, no. Long term, maybe. Aol and yahoo intend to keep all brands going for both companies in the short term. In the medium term, where there are duplications, they'll pick one back end over another, and try to keep both front ends going. Long term, who knows--they'll start evaluating things as a new company, but that's likely years off. For Flickr in particular, since aol doesn't have a competing product, it's going to be safe for a long while.
camus2 9y ago
Yes, Verizon is about to fire Yahoo 2100 employees. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/technology/verizon-yahoo-deal-layoffs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/technology/verizon-yahoo-...
owenversteeg 9y ago
Same, I use it for the free auto-upload and terabyte of space. It works beautifully, unlike any other auto upload tool I've used, and the terabyte of space is fantastic. I've used the auto-upload to hide photos (crudely) from authoritarian governments and I can actually count on it to upload instantly. If it goes away I don't know what I'll use. Google Photos hasn't worked well at all for me, and I haven't tried Onedrive because the interface is fairly clunky.

invincibles 9y ago

Coming soon: All Verizon phones will contain tons of Yahoo crap and use Yahoo by default.

panzer_wyrm 9y ago
People that don't buy unlocked phones but on contract seems so be ok with carriers treating them poorly.
- erik-g 9y ago
  Well some people don't have a few hundred dollars to drop on a new phone when they need one. At that point you're at the whim of the carrier anyways.
  - parthdesai 9y ago
    I would rather buy a phone like moto g than get a super phone that is locked to a career and bloated with all the shit. But then if you are on hacker news, you most probably are not an average joe when it comes to tech.
    - HillaryBriss 9y ago
      a footnote about the Moto G and Verizon: some people who bought unlocked Moto G phones from a 3rd party (e.g. Amazon) have reported that 911 doesn't work properly with Verizon. dunno. maybe that's why Verizon doesn't sell it on their US website.
    - JBReefer 9y ago
      I have a Moto G, outright. It cost as much as a night out, and it works perfectly. It's got nearly stock Android, and the battery is good. The camera is HORRIBLE, but the difference is not worth >$650 to me
      - parthdesai 9y ago

zw123456 9y ago

Verizon is combining the AOL and Yahoo operations and calling the new organization "Oath"

jhou2 9y ago
My initial thought was, "How did they misspell OAuth like that?"
- floatboth 9y ago
  Also isn't "OATH" like the group that standardized TOTP?
eplanit 9y ago
"Oaf" would be more fitting.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  I sense a meme forming.
jandrese 9y ago
That is a downright bizarre name for an advertising company. It think it's worse than the Honest Name™ of "90s Graveyard Holdings Incorporated".
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  What about The Honest Company that lost a lawsuit for using chemicals and stuff in their products?

drzaiusapelord 9y ago

Kind of a sad day for me. Yahoo was so instrumental in the early web where I cut my teeth. Seeing it now sold to some telecom giant at around what a handful of unprofitable mobile apps go for is a bit depressing. For Millenials, imagine if Google was sold to AT&T 5-10 years from now after beaten by hungrier competitors. I guess all these companies fold eventually but Yahoo had quite the terminal illness and it lasted far longer than I assumed and often with bouncebacks that made you think things were getting better. Perhaps Verizon can do something useful with the brand, but the Yahoo I knew is dead and probably has been since Mayer took over. She was brought in as a hatchet-woman to get an acquisition and got the job done.

bognition 9y ago
>Perhaps Verizon can do something useful with the brand They are abandoning the brand completely. After the merger goes through VZ will combined AOL and Yahoo! into a single new brand Oath. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/technology/verizon-oath-yahoo-aol.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/technology/verizon-oath-y...
- empath75 9y ago
  They are 100% not abandoning the brand-either yahoo or aol. Oath is just the umbrella organization.
_jal 9y ago
Reminds me of when defiled corpse of Netscape ended up... at AOL.
- TremendousJudge 9y ago
  Its spirit lives on as Mozilla though
kilroy123 9y ago
It too makes me sad. I grew up chatting on Yahoo messenger and sitting in chat rooms. Had a Yahoo mail account before gmail, etc. What a fall from grace.

rb808 9y ago

Congratulations to Marissa on a job well done. That boat was a sinking ship that no one wanted to captain, and she kept it alive long enough to a satisfactory outcome.

johansch 9y ago
Yeah, that wasn't really how her appointment was sold: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-ceo-idUSBRE86F13T20120717 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-ceo-idUSBRE86F13T201... "Yahoo turns to Google's Mayer for revival" https://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/07/16/3-reasons-why-marissa-mayers-hiring-is-a-huge-win-for-yahoo/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/dorieclark/2012/07/16/3-reasons... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-18/yahoo-help-us-marissa-mayer-dot-youre-our-only-hope https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-07-18/yahoo-hel...
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 9y ago
  Who are reuters, forbes, and bloomberg to say? They don't know the market; it's not like rescuing yahoo was actually in any way possible. The site was a finance site, a sports site, and a shitty email server stuck to a link farm. Not to mention flickr, tumblr, etc that had little to no role in the revenue generation of the company. RIP del.icio.us. If the company had been saved it would not have been Yahoo! anymore.
jonknee 9y ago
Millions of people would have taken the job of draining YHOO's coffers while sitting on a huge stake in one of the world's hottest pre-IPO companies... Yahoo's board just so happened to want a flashy name.
IshKebab 9y ago
Really though? It's hard to imagine it could have gone worse really. Look at Flickr.
josefresco 9y ago
Tim Armstrong might disagree.

redm 9y ago

I for one hope this works out well, more diversity is good for consumers. IMHO, anything that chips away at the dominance of Google and Facebook are positive too.

kingbirdy 9y ago
how is two major corporations merging an anti-monopoly move?
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  The point OP was making is that this gives the internet ad industry a 3rd major player. Still far short of FB and Google but a lot closer than anyone else.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

troxwalt 9y ago

They should probably just end all fantasy baseball leagues for this year too. I'd hate to have this year count. In all seriousness, Yahoo! has done an amazing job with their fantasy sports.

Simulacra 9y ago

I give it about 3 years until Verizon unloads it onto someone else for half the price.

disgruntledphd2 9y ago
I actually think that they might make some money off it. They can serve way more crummy over-priced ads than Yahoo! ever could (apparently).
debacle 9y ago
You have to consider things like: - Defaulting search for Android. - Owning the search engine behind their DNS hijacking. - Setting Yahoo as the default search when you install their ISP software. - Being able to eliminate Verizon mail (and integrate with Yahoo's mail platform). - Having less reliance on Google for mobile.
skinnymuch 9y ago
No they won't. It's going to be merged with AOL and run by AOL's CEO, Armstrong, but now with a ton more views and more ad tech. Verizon should do good money with all their data combined with Oath (AOL and Yahoo).

chibg10 9y ago

I find it interesting that the comments section of the WSJ (a pretty capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) is filled with complaints about Mayer's "overpay" as CEO and outrage over her "golden parachute," while HN (a much less capitalist-friendly corner of the internet) has gone through 40 comments and I've only seen a couple questioning her pay as CEO, and several comments praising her job in the role. Take away Marissa Mayer from this story, and replace her with a generic CEO, and I'm not sure we'd see the same mood in either comment section. Why is this? Is this because she's from Google? Because she's a former engineer? Because she's a female CEO? Is she just a politically polarizing topic ala Elon Musk? Genuinely curious. Anyone have any ideas?

krisdol 9y ago
Because she's a female CEO and any news-provider's comment sections are absolute cesspools.
- nobleach 9y ago
  I'm not so sure it completely boils down to her gender. I mean, I'm sure that's an issue for some folks... but I can't say that explains 100% of the vitriol. She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. That was a douche move. Any CEO that plays the "us and them" policy with their workers vs execs rubs me the wrong way. I'm not at all bothered that she got 23 million as a "thank you". She had an extremely hard job. The pressures she dealt with are nothing I could understand. So by all means, reward her for it! But I'm still kinda chapped about the work from home thing.
  - 1024core 9y ago
    > She came onto my radar after killing the work from home policy that Yahoo had. Google does not have a WFH policy. She killed the policy because internal audit showed that many people were just not working when they claimed to be; VPN and sign-in logs turned up many slackers. There were some who were allowed to WFH. So it wasn't a blanket "no one's allowed to WFH", but more a "justify your need to WFH and show that you're doing a good job". > Then she promptly built a nursery in her office. She did not take much of a maternity leave at all. She came back within 2 weeks of giving birth via a cesaerean(sp). She just converted a cube nearby to where she kept her kid.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

redm 9y ago

I can't help but think about the Microsoft buyout offer back in 2008. From a $44 billion dollar offer to an offer 1/10th the value 9 years later. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-offers-446-billion-to-acquire-yahoo/ https://techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-offers-446-b...

gcb0 9y ago
you are comparing an offer for a car vs an offer for 4 tires.
Steko 9y ago
The 15% of Alibaba and 35% of Yahoo Japan that Yahoo owned are not part of the $4.5B sale price and are worth something like $40B.
skinnymuch 9y ago
Jerry Yang, the most competent higher up at Yahoo for the past decade and a half, is the one who said no to the buy out. And rightfully so. The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes would be worth over $80B today. Unfortunately the board and some activist investors first kicked Jerry out and then continued on with selling almost half of the Alibaba stake.

PayForPeenus 9y ago

Marissa Mayer was already on the sinking ship - but I admire her ambition on trying to make that thing work. God speed on her future en-devours for sure.

brookside 9y ago

I have disliked her ever since being influenced by this gawker screed some years back: http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-failure http://gawker.com/5162532/marissa-mayer-googles-biggest-fail.... Subsequent reporting has hardend my opinion: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh... I have tried to examine what role gender plays in my visceral dislike for Marissa Mayer. I hope it is a small one. I give myself some consolation that I recoil almost equally when reading any news coverage of Travis Kalanick.

urda 9y ago
I'm not a fan of her, but Gawker is not to be taken as a serious news outlet at all. So you may want to re-read that with a big grain of salt.
- jtmarmon 9y ago
  https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Gawker isn't some tabloid. Sure it wasn't the best but without looking at the article you're just assuming it has to be taken with a "big grain of salt". You should be weary of everything you read to some extent and try to make sure what you're reading is valid. NYTimes and The Economist (I enjoy both of them just making a point) both did horrible reporting for the Iraq War. I assume you would consider them serious news outlets.
  - wmeredith 9y ago
    > Gawker isn't some tabloid. Almost spit out my coffee.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    The difference is the NYT and other actual journalism outfits strive to report fairly and have standards they hope to achieve. Gawker did not. In fact the standards they held themselves to were deemed illegal by the courts, and when the courts told them that their journalistic standards were illegal, they attacked the court and doubled down. It's no wonder they were sued out of business. 100% tabloid. They had no journalistic integrity beyond "lets get more clicks" and were not afraid to break the law or ignore the truth to do it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

shawnee_ 9y ago

> Those who are keeping jobs in the media division in the newly merged operation include Jared Grusd leading the News vertical (including yahoo.com, aol.com, HuffPost, and Yahoo News); Geoff Reiss leading the Sports vertical; David Karp leading the People and Community vertical (including Tumblr, Polyvore, Cabana, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo View, and Kanvas); Andy Serwer leading Finance media (including Yahoo Finance and Autoblog); Michael LaGuardia leading Finance product and utilities; Ned Desmond leading TechCrunch and Engadget; Alex Wallace leading OTT video production & distribution as well as lifestyle & entertainment (that includes BUILD, RYOT, Yahoo Celebrity, Yahoo Style, Yahoo BeuYahoo TV, Yahoo Movies, Yahoo Music, and Yahoo Entertainment); Dave Bottoms heading up distribution products (Newsroom and video OTT products) as well as growth, monetization, and syndication; Tim Tully leading all of engineering; Dave McDowell leading subscriptions, commerce, and customer care (including Yahoo Shopping and AOL Shopping); and Mary Bui-Pham leading our operations (including design, UXRA, analytics, and program management). The problem with consolidations like this into bigger and bigger conglomerates is that it reduces editorial independence in favor of a false sense of corporate unification among all the "verticals". The heavy and overweight company has a "great" vision which involves being everything to everybody. But that never works. End result will likely end up providing a lukewarm mediocrity in them all. What Yahoo probably should have done was divest; instead it allowed itself to be swallowed whole by an ISP whose sole goal (as evidenced with its malfeasance to destroy Net Neutrality) is be able to selectively prioritize traffic in the ways that are most profitable to them... Ergo, the objective of this kind of empire is not to track down the truth and inform people about what is really going on, but to entertain and distract.

hengheng 9y ago
I dunno, did you really look at Yahoo for content that profits from editorial independence?
hengheng 9y ago
I dunno, did you really look at Yahoo for content that profits from editorial independence?

ddebernardy 9y ago

Didn't Microsoft extend a $40+B (however hostile) bid a decade ago or so? I'm still at a loss as to why Jang et al didn't sell then...

skinnymuch 9y ago
Just going to mostly reiterate a previous comment - Jerry Yang, the most competent higher up at Yahoo for the past decade and a half, is the one who said no to the buy out. And rightfully so. The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes would be worth around $80B today if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately the board and some activist investors first kicked Jerry out and then continued on with selling almost half of the Alibaba stake.

adamonkey 9y ago

She should become COO of Uber. Perfect!

sgs1370 9y ago
Not quite related but I always thought Sheryl Sandberg would be a great CEO of Uber. Of course, I don't think she would want the job.

parantap2001 9y ago

Question - Can someone explain the $4.5B valuation of Yahoo-Verizon deal versus the $49.46B Market cap of Yahoo! Inc. ticker on Nasdaq. Thanks.

syntheticnature 9y ago
Yahoo owns 15% of Alibaba, due to an investment done a long time ago. Alibaba is considered to be quite valuable -- so they are spinning off the core of the company in order to be able to behave more as the investment company they became, since they couldn't extract the Alibaba shares without paying a massive amount of capital gains tax on the increase in value.
- csomar 9y ago
  So if someone is doing market cap of Alibaba + Yahoo based on Nasdaq calculations, he is counting Alibaba twice? (or 15% twice for this one). How do you calculate the global market cap without falling into this duplication.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    Oh right. Either I'm not thinking right or I'm also confused now with what you're saying. I hope someone can respond.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

dopamean 9y ago

I thought the job of a CEO was to increase shareholder value. Yahoo stock is up roughly 230% since she was officially signed on as CEO. Sounds like she did her job to me.

opo 9y ago
All of that increase is due to the increase in value of the Alibaba stock - which was pushed through by Yang long before she got there. If she hadn't sold half of their Alibaba holdings when she got there, the value of the company would have been about double. https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/09/30/how-jerry-yang-made-the-most-lucrative-bet-in-tech-history/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/09/30/how-jerry...
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  Mayer didn't sell the 40% stake. The deal was begun and going through before she was CEO. It was only finalized and completed with her as CEO. Not like she was going to be allowed to stop the deal. The bad board and activist investors are the ones to blame.
  - opo 9y ago
    >...Not like she was going to be allowed to stop the deal. I am not sure how you can be so sure about that. I wasn’t privy to the discussions with her and the board, were you? If she recognized how bad of an idea that was she could have made it a condition of taking the job. My guess is that she saw the 7 billion from selling their position as free money that would take the pressure off of her for a while.
    - skinnymuch 9y ago
      No of course I'm not privy to everything. It was known the board wanted to get rid of some of the Alibaba stake for cash. So they just wouldn't hire Mayer if she wouldn't allow the deal as part of her being CEO. You can of course say we don't know for sure but if we know the board really wants some cash from Alibaba and has kicked out Jerry Yang already, then it isn't hard to think that Mayer hasn't no leverage here. Also just for basic timeline sake - in 2012, the deal was announced in the media in May, Mayer is CEO in July, and the deal completes in Sept.

pvsukale3 9y ago

"Ye to hona hi tha " English : this was going to happen anyway

CodeSheikh 9y ago

I am still waiting for Silicon Valley TV show to pick up this vast subject of Myer's tenure at Yahoo into one of its episodes.

2017throw 9y ago
You think they are brave enough to touch the "inspirational female leader" topic? Theranos and HP would be enough alone...
- CodeSheikh 9y ago
  Since when Myer is an "inspirational" leader? Oh sarcasm.
- johan_larson 9y ago
  It doesn't have to be about a female leader. It can be about a grand old company that has fallen on hard times and whose board ponies up big bux to attract a promising young CEO. Unfortunately the promising young CEO can't deliver a return to the glory days, so the second best is a carefully negotiated sale.

59bcc3ad677 9y ago

Wow

fred256 9y ago

I noticed the YHOO stock ticker is still active. Is that now the empty shell that still has the Alibaba stake, or something else entirely?

detaro 9y ago
Mostly Alibaba stake, and they also still own Yahoo Japan. I guess they might change their ticker symbol, since they announced a name change to "Altaba"?

faragon 9y ago

Does anyone know any significative achievement made by Mayer in Yahoo?

darkstar999 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14545456

faragon 9y ago

Does anyone know any significative achievement made by Mayer in Yahoo?

justboxing 9y ago

> As expected, Marissa Mayer, who had been the CEO of Yahoo and recently received a $23 million ‘golden parachute’ for her work there. Nice! I dream of a day when the Engineers who make the Tech Company what it is, are also offered 'Golden Parachutes' as part of a Job Offer.

joering2 9y ago

For 2 weeks now I'm fighting an enormous amount of spam that start popping up from nowhere and I did trail-back in my memory to not find a single instance in last 3 months where I would give out my email address to anyone new. Its insane how much of it goes to my direct mailbox right in front of my eyes! Some even have "viagra" word in subjects, they come from weird addresses like hJGabtmDwbaiaJUsgUNiepwwUzDUUdanBHFpiMEghzLKNsotQTbrhZdpDzCHFWatqQB@perico.hunmooth.com and open up with images and everything ready for my click. I suspect Verizon is already working hard on break the remaining thing that worked fine until now - yahoo mailbox. But I'm fine with that. I had it in my pipeline to move out of them for so long now another incentive to actually do so :)

jellicle 9y ago

When she took over, there were numerous articles about how Yahoo's core business had negative value (the business plus the Alibaba investment was worth less than the Alibaba investment). Since then she's given a lot of cash to shareholders, raised the stock price, and is selling the "negative value" core business for $4.5 billion. That's an astounding success.

EternalData 9y ago

Yahoo thought the media they provided users was important, Google thought user data was important -- it's possible Mayer tried to bring some of Google to Yahoo. But I don't think it was enough to bring Yahoo anywhere close to competing.

timdellinger 9y ago

The whole Net Neutrality situation just got more interesting.

nadim 9y ago

1996-2017. Rip. https://goo.gl/images/WYRMqj https://goo.gl/images/WYRMqj

rayalez 9y ago

What do you think is going to happen to Tumblr? Tumblr has a massive audience, but some of the worst tech among the social media, and now it seems like it might get abandoned completely. So people will eventually migrate to something else, right? What can other platforms, like Medium, do about this? If you had a platofrm that might be valuable for a similar usecase(though, hopefully, much better), what would you be doing right now? Any ideas or advice?

skinnymuch 9y ago
Does it still have a massive audience? I would think it has lost a lot since Yahoo wrote of 2/3 of its value already.

khazhou 9y ago

Her mega-salary, like that of other comparable executives, is decided by other mega-rich people. It's no hardship for them to hand her (one of their own) enough cash to buy a small town. Let's ponder that $260M compared to every time an outgoing job offer was dialed down from $145K to $135K. Or when the yearly bonus for a rank and file is a healthy $25K (1/1000th her accumulated comp). Sour grapes? Yes, and why not? We're all giving our lives to these same companies.

valuearb 9y ago
She was given $30M in restricted stock to get her to walk away from being owed that much at Google. Then they gave her some incentives in stock options (valued at $22M if yahoo stock increased by something like 8% a year for a decade), because otherwise why would she take the job? Instead Yahoo stock tripled and that created her $260M. Now she may not have had a lot to do with the stock increase, but she certainly didn't screw it up. Her compensation was mostly incentive based, which is what you want for a CEO. CEOs aren't going to be paid like an engineer. They probably are overpaid. But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't.
- verytrivial 9y ago
  > But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't. This is how most organised religions work.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. A $2500 bonus ($250 million divided by 10k employees) is also a small amount to pay.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

myrandomcomment 9y ago

I love how everyone here thinks they can do better. Yahoo was a deadman walking before she took over. Overall she did what she was suppose to do as a CEO of any company, return value to the shareholders. Now you can disagree with that being the goal, but it is the way it works today. By that measure it worked. Is it the right thing long term, most likely not. We have lost focus on long term planing in favor of quarterly reporting. It is the world we live in. Please go can change it, but don't sit here and say you could do better as I do not see any of you saying you have the job as a CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. Oh, I expect this to get down voted to oblivion. Prove me wrong.

castis 9y ago
Once more, from the guidelines! Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or proclaim that you expect to get downvoted.

calimac 9y ago

Finally the era of Marissa mayor is over hopefully for good

calimac 9y ago

Now you really can't trust anything piped through yahoo servers with Verizon's dirty grubby paws on it. They are stealing your data and modeling you with precision now. Why else would the buy yahoo Fuck what has he world come to?

michaelfeng 9y ago

Another empire fall down. Bless!

Markoff 9y ago

does this mean i should stop using Flickr as backup?

smoyer 9y ago

What if Mayer's actual role was determined by Google? could it have simply been "keep them alive so we're not viewed as a monopoly"? Or maybe "put them out of business but make it look good"? I don't think that anything quite so evil went on but you have to wonder, given Mayer's investment in Google, whether there weren't sub-conscious components to her decision making. One advantage to hiring a successful CEO from another industry is the lack of this background (of course, one of the disadvantages is Scully).

ianamartin 9y ago

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Marissa Mayer took on a shit job to pull a losing company out of a hole. She knew what she was getting into, and she knew what was going to happen. She deserves every penny for the reputation hit that she's taking over this. This entire thread is why she deserves the money. Most people in tech hate her for some reason. (Let's guess what that could be . . .) Good for her for bargaining well and pulling a dream deal out of an assclown. Yahoo was a joke when she took over, and now when she leaves it's a much more valuable joke. On paper, at least. But still a joke. If you're going to leave google to run the laughing stock of the internet, you damn well better get paid the big bucks to get it sold for more than it has any right to be worth. Good for her. <shameless pandering> (Also, if you're reading, Marissa, hit me up. I know you're going to start something up soon. No way you are just going to sit still.) </shameless pandering>

Bakary 9y ago
With sums of this magnitude the notion of just deserts quickly becomes a fuzzy concept, if it really made sense to begin with. Nobody really deserves anything.
- ianamartin 9y ago
  If I were going to take a very high-profile job as the head of a failing company with the mandate that I fix it, a high probability of failure, constant criticism from the press, the issues around being a woman leader in a major silicon valley company, and low expectation of another similar gig after, you bet your sweet ass I would negotiate a golden parachute. Did she make some mistakes? Yeah. The weekend redesign of the logo was probably insulting to a lot of people at the company, and it seemed kind of ridiculous to people outside the company. But the bottom line is that for the rest of her career she's going to be branded as the woman who failed to save Yahoo!. A much more likable Carly Fiorina. Likable, but still a failure. That's a shit thing to have to live with, but it's a risk she took. Who is going to hire her next? She's way over qualified for most positions in the tech industry, and she will always be perceived as under qualified as a CEO. You take a risk like that, you deserve the reward she got. Her career is toast for a while unless she starts something up on her own, which she has the money to do. What kind of package would you trade in exchange for likely never being able to work in your capacity anymore and having your name very publicly and widely shit all over? I'd take everything I could get if I thought that was going to happen. The board made a deal with her, and she took it. I don't see a problem. Good for her. Also, considering so many of the comments in this thread about how this has nothing to do with her being a woman--what do you think the HN threads are going to look like when Kalanick gets kicked out of Uber and makes millions? Guarantee you there won't be any criticism. The narrative will be that he was a smart guy who made a savvy deal.

minmaxmux 9y ago

Working as Corporate slave is a trend. Hey my boss is nice, office is big and I have nice people around me.. Until they found new guy to replace you. Then you are alone, no office and quess how many people is your friend ?

minmaxmux 9y ago

Minus ? Why.. are you an corporate rate race person ?