What Happened to All 53 of Marissa Mayer's Yahoo Acquisitions | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to All 53 of Marissa Mayer's Yahoo Acquisitions

gizmodo.com

108 pointsghosh114 comments

"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...

Additionally, she had a nursery built in her office.

So 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

2. a nursery for herself

AFAIK only she used it.

Not 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...

While bragging how easy being a mother is

She did mostly the same that every CEO seems to do when they're hired to pull the cart out of the mud.

Fire a bunch of people.

Remove freedom from employees.

Make the company more conservative in gerneral.

The parental leave was just a marketing stunt.

Same happend at the last company I was employee, that's why I left.

And this is probably why I'll be freelancing for a long time. My lifetime is to precious to be multilated by some managers.

So true. Went through this myself at my last company.

Reid 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

> 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.

lol 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.

lol, you didn't get the memo , did you ?

http://mashable.com/2016/06/15/how-yahoo-derailed-tumblr/

Since 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.

I 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.

How 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.

> 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.

Yeah, and the core business is still waaay undervalued. Plenty of people use Yahoo, it's just not us.

Yahoo 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.

Is 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?

Just 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.

A 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.

>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.

Yahoo 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.

I'm sure there more of value stored somewhere in the bully of Yahoo than just Finance, IM and email. I think there is money to be made like you suggest, but that's not the kind of company that Yahoo indicates that they want to be, sadly.

Yahoo will run it self into the ground trying to revive the glory days of Yahoo being the front page of Internet for millions of people. Management will not settle for a smaller service company, for a few niche markets.

Exactly, finance is the best thing they have and they already have the groundwork for creating a more general Bloomberg terminal.

They could have built an API to integrate broker/dealer systems and become a very nice plugin for equity trading. Or in reverse, they could offer you your existing brokerage right on the same page as the news.

Go social like InvestingNote. Track user models against the markets and host competitions.

Yahoo has a management problem, not a talent problem. There are plenty of talents at Yahoo capable of building and delivering great apps. Most of these acquisitions under Mayer were worthless and wouldn't fix Yahoo's internal issues.

It sounds like you have an insiders's perspective. From my very outsider's perspective it would appear that Yahoo did not manage to make much of the talent and opportunities it had or acquired.

Not really. It looks likes c-suit hubris and narcissism.

You 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.

I 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.

I'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.

Inspite 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

I read Yahoo! Finance dayly.

I 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".

Honest question/not trolling: How often do you style personal/non-business/marketing emails?

By writting CSS directly, never. But then you would think all the other newer, "better" companies would have this little detail fixed already. But they don't. And it becomes hugely important as soon as you open your own online shop and you want to send a proper HTML email.

Here'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.

At least it isn't bankrupt, as opposed to Gizmodo's parent company.

What does that have to do with anything?

It'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.

Gawker 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.

Trying to acquire talent is not a terrible approach. From 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...

"In theory"

I'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.

I 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.

Yeah, 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!

Failure for whom?

If I'm the one cashing out, then I think it's a successful model.

It's also driven by past successes in this arena. Over the years products like Powerpoint, Android and YouTube have all been acquisitions that have gone on to be huge successes for the parent company (I can actually think of a few more Google purchases such as Waze and DoubleClick).

Of course, that means other companies see this as a successful strategy and attempt to replicate it. Now there's a rush to find the best acquisitions targets, more companies enter the market, and at least some will be acquired based on hype alone, causing some companies who focus more on their hype than their product. Bubble ensues.

I think the real failure is at companies like Yahoo who buy the hype and not the product.

EDIT: I should also note that for some companies, it seems unlikely that they could have scaled without an acquisition. Making phone hardware or hosting so many videos is expensive. In their case, acquisition was really the only viable strategy for success.

> 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.

Exactly. They just went with it because its "normal". Either way, didn't Paul Graham sell a company to yahoo and then started YC?

This 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?

> 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).

Yeah, but they're difficult to monetize as part of a general-purpose site like Tumblr.

I don't know what kind of tumblrs you're looking at, but this is certainly not my experience.

I though he was pretty clear about what kind of tumblrs he's looking at.

I wonder if it's like those people getting salty at google auto-completes without realizing the influence of their search histories.

Tumblr 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".

According to published studies of Tumblr traffic, porn now dominates.

Lots 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.

Also 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.

Does 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?

"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.

When 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.

Businesses 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.

What 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.

Why did they shut down all the apps/software that they acquired? Why not simply to continue with the service like they did with tumblr?

> "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-deve...

What is Yahoo doing in mobile? What does it mean that "the team joined Yahoo's mobile unit?"

I tried their Flickr app once. Not bad, but I didn't find anything innovative there (back then).

mail app, messenger app. I have both and they are good.

i use yahoo weather app. it uses flickr pics from your current location as its background.

I 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.

Did 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?

I 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/).

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.

What 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

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?

She 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.

Yeah, this is sort of like blaming the fire department for burning down your house.

Only if the fire department showed up without water opting instead to spray money at the fire in the hope it would fix itself.

And 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.

That thread doesn't seem that positive to me, besides the first post and a few comments about the Tumblr post itself.

Comment threads are not reliable for gauging what a community thinks. The selection affects for comments can be extreme.

You're right.

No, that thread was talking about it being positive for Tumblr, and the community thereon. Or at least not destroying it by trying to clean up the NSFW blogs.

I can't see any of those posts saying it would be great for Yahoo or its investors.

Did you see the very first comment?

"I really think Yahoo's back in the game now. I would never have used yahoo before. Now hundred thousands of people are. And they are from the new generation."

It is very, very hard to integrate different companies, so is it any wonder that buying 52 of them isn't going to work out too well?

All those founders must have been laughing all the way to the bank though.

> What blows my mind is how positive the HN crowd were about the acquisition of Tumblr at the time:

Self-selection bias. Those who post in a given topic are not always the same people.

What blows MY mind is how it is possible to wonder how in huge groups of people there can form sub-groups (through self-selection, in this case) who hold very different views. Yes, that happens. HN isn't a person.

Only 6 months!?

Why would any corporation think entrepreneurs at heart would want to stay once they got there?

53 acquisitions in 4 years (13/year) seems like a lot. I wonder if they kept track.

Has anyone ever figured out what the point of the Summly acquisition was?

What'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?

You sound a little bit jealous. What apps / web services have you made?

He 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.

Reminds me of that scene from The Simpsons [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+simpsons+je...

I think you'll find that jealousy is now synonymous with envy as well as its previous meaning, which is derived not proscribed.

There's no need for an ad hominem

http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

You're right. I'm quite envious/jealous. I would love to have been a Yahoo acquisition target during that period.

Regarding my previous work, I've contributed to many open source projects related to realtime systems. I also wrote my own popular open source project http://socketcluster.io/ and built a community around it.

Right now, I'm working on getting it to run on any Kubernetes infrastructure (inside Docker containers) to allow it to be deployed and scaled automatically across distributed clusters of machines. Then we will offer a managed service around it.

Marissa, if you're reading this, please acquire my open source project (and my team of core collaborators too). We're cashflow positive. Our annual profit is an incredible +$00,000,000.

Hey, sorry... I wasn't trying to be mean.

I'm envious too! And to be honest... quite bummed as I'm again too late (no more Yahoo buyouts?) coming up with something that might get acquired.

Can confirm. Was one of those kids.

We built a shitty FB app with some fancy features and sold the shit out of it as the next big thing in that space.

It was average at best, they bought it, we made bank, worked for half a year and left to start a company doing what we want to do, without needing any funding.

Familiar story... quite a few of the acquisitions were run by former Google APMs that worked directly/under Marissa. Most / all of these people are marketers / non-technical product guys... lots of the startups that were acquired had beautiful design and good PR but delivered underwhelming experiences beyond the shiny veneer.

I have to say though that Marissa seems like a great boss to work for. She definitely rewards loyalty!

The next great SV satire should be a House of Cards parody. House Brin & Page vs House Bezos vs House Zuckerberg.

lol

How would it go?

Brin & Page and their academics try to get everything scientifically done while the Zuckerberg hackers run circles around them and Bezos sells both of them the infrastructure for their fights?

I've got to ask -- what was your company, and what is the company that you're working on now?

Sort of doubt he'd give out his identity after a statement like that.

Talent acquisitions seem like a strange solution to many of the problems here.

If you only have 50 mobile devs and simply need more competent bodies, why drop millions buying out a social networking startup? Hiring isn't that hard, and the acquisition approach essentially guarantees you hires who want to make their own projects in a different domain. Pick up some devs the normal way, it's not impossible yet.

My general view is that acqui-hires are a way to bring on top-flight talent that will continue doing similar work once hired. If you need a world class VR or deep learning expert, you might have to pick them up this way; they're worth it, and they'll probably stay on if you keep giving them interesting tasks in the same domain.

Mayer's acquisitions don't follow that model at all. They picked up fairly mundane startups and then redirected the (probably quite competent) founders to unrelated corporate tasks. That seems like a waste at both ends.

edit: on second thoughts, most of these are peanuts compared to what they're paying Couric...

It seems like a scatter gun approach to hoping to hit something big by just buying enough companies.

They were the wrong types of acquisitions. She, like Armstrong at AOL, tried to turn the company into a digital magazine with a social networking layer, but was never really able to surface high quality content above their shitty aggregated articles. I never ever felt a compelling desire to visit yahoo to read their content. She shut down way too many products. What she could have been doing is buying the successors to yahoo offerings, and netflixing yahoo (creating an entirely new product type to replace your existing service.) Yahoo seriously needed to stop playing catch-up and start playing leap-frog. They were too concerned with being a metoo, while Google/Facebook/Apple are still trying to be the NEXT BIG THING.

I could have made better acquisitions if yahoo had handed me a war chest.

Yahoo Finance

- https://openfolio.com/ (a way to make investing social and competitive)

- https://www.robinhood.com/ (mobile first stock trading)

- http://www.sparkfin.com/ (curated stock portfolios)

- http://www.forcerank.com/ (fantasy stock market)

- these 4 teams together would be an amazing Yahoo Finance 2.0, been in direct competition with motif investing AND offer a free fantasy layer to let people tip their toes in the water, or bet on stock market knowledge/intuition. would be a great way to get Finance people interested in Fantasy and vice versa.

Yahoo Messenger

- first thing to do before ANY acquisitions, would have been to let you open messenger chats at the bottom of ANY yahoo web property, ala facebook chat.

- can you imagine yahoo Finance/Fantasy/Flickr/Publishing/Local/Tumblr/Groups/Answers all being relevant AND having one consistent chat&annotation experience across all the properties.

- how did they not gently push a modern Messenger onto the tumblr crowd to let them chat realtime. Reddit is being similarly "stupid" and letting their userbase go offsite to irc/slack to have live discussions (but at least for reddit it makes sense to want everyone to use comments and not hide good content in live chat logs.)

- obviously WeChat/FBMessenger are the way of the future with regard to Chat being THE interface to the rest of your services. "Yahoo Messenger 2 Alpha" is a great place to experimentally compete with the Aviate group to be the "one launcher to access everything." FB hiring David Marcus as CEO of Messenger should have been a shot across Yahoo's bow, a wake up call, to hire a payment processing person to run messenger. Competing with Venmo within messenger is a strategy must. being able to access shopping, product reviews, and order things from within the Chat Interface is absolutely necessary.

Publishing

- https://launch.blendle.com/ (paywall middleman, to compete with google amp vs facebook instant articles)

- https://atavist.com/ (publishing platform to compete with medium/wordpress)

- http://www.ranker.com/ (huge huge repository of data)

- https://redef.com/ https://longform.org/ (human curation at its best)

- yahoo really lost one of its niches, paying people to write articles. A blendle/atavist merger would make them an instant player against wordpress and medium and kinja before implosion. I would have let a merged version of those two companies completely replace the old Yahoo Contributor Network. probably would rename it Yahoo Writer.

- http://genius.com/ or https://hypothes.is/ to compete with reddit/facebook/disqus as the discussion metalayer laid on top of content.

Verticals/writingtalent

- http://thewirecutter.com/ http://thesweethome.com/ (modern consumer reports, affiliate clicks. Would go well with blendle/atavist/ranker. Let consumers contribute reviews, rank the reviews. This could be a good way to reinvent Yahoo Shopping & integrate with the publishing/advertising platforms. pit your own paid in house writing staff against the community)

- http://www.seriouseats.com/ (both content for a lifestyle vertical, and selling kitchenware like sweethome. could also experiment with premium content subscriptions like cooks illustrated/americas test kitchen, because we now own blendle)

- http://birthmoviesdeath.com/ http://thedissolve.com/ http://www.cinephiliabeyond.org/ http://brightlightsfilm.com/ (first rate movie criticism)

- http://www.theonion.com/ (should never have let univision make this purchase)

- https://theconversation.com/us (adopting a high quality, not for profit writing center, and offering to host it on your new publishing platform would have been a demonstration of confidence in the product. also a tax writeoff)

Pipes

- doubled down 10 fold on Yahoo Pipes, and letting people remix the web. make it easier to use, directly compete with Flipboard, Feedly, Nuzzle, Wordpress, Reddit.

- the redef/longform/ranker teams would work here too. you would need people liking/following content ala Twitter/Facebook/Reddit. People would be able to subscribe to content, and mix up feeds.

- communities aggregating content ala subreddits. give logged out users the ability to browse through the best Pipes.

- collaborative pipes built by teams of people. forking was already a feature. team moderation and powerstructure management.

Flickr

- http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-d...

- she really should have tried harder to go after both the instagram and smugmug markets at the same time.

Fantasy

- i havent investigated this market because yahoo/espn/cbs/nfl own it, but yahoo fantasy mobile is covered in ads, and a terrible experience imho. I would make Fantasy a PRIME focus along with Finance and Flickr and actual Publishing tech/businessmodels.

- https://www.fantasypros.com/ (although this falls into the Publishing/Verticals realm, statistical meta analysis would give them a leg above all competition. jk there isnt much competition here)

Movies

- https://metacritic.com/ (like fantasypros but for movies. acquiring metacritic from CBS might be hard, but the synergy between metacritic, ranker.com, and publishing would be huge.)

- https://letterboxd.com/ (a movie social network to compete with imdb)

- wigglehop (gone, but the best local movie time browser)

- build an inhouse fandango competitor within wigglehop. build integration between Yahoo Movies and Yahoo Local and Yahoo Groups (local film critic meetups)

Yahoo Local

- tons of opportunity to compete with both yelp/foursquare AND facebookpages/squarespace. This is a place where yahoo could actually innovate and make a new way to find places to eat/visit, while at the same time offering page building for businesses. NO one yet has standardized menus and let me follow them for updates. It now looks like Apple Maps will be jumping into this market instead. Missed opportunity for Yahoo to be relevant.

- http://www.meetup.com/ (an interesting way to enter the local space and compete with IAC dating services without being a dating service. people are lonely and want human social interactions)

Yahoo Groups/Answers

- huge opportunity here to compete with Facebook Groups and Reddit. look how many facebook groups are dedicated to hyperlocal buying/selling. groups would be a good place to explore a futuristic synergy between chat, annotation (genius), content surfacing (ranker), local, and shopping.

Yahoo Aviate

- my vision for this would be to compete with Google Play services & Google App Streaming. you download Aviate, it lets you demo/stream all the other yahoo apps, and if you like them you can cache a local copy. kind of like build to offline vdi. maybe forking cyanogenmod or experimenting in the facebook home market could pay off. Microsoft is making too much headway into injecting itself into android, yahoo needs to be more aggressive.

Mail

- people hate email, find a way to reinvent email ala Google Inbox. this task probably requires hiring a proven leader and giving them full autonomy, instead of the integrations i describe for other company parts.

- alternatively do something crazy and buy slack.

Marketing/Advertising Tech

- this one is hard to know who to acquire, but a proven player is probably the better move. I am thinking something akin to microsoft buying parature and letting it continue to exist. as weird as it sounds, buying AOL probably would have made lots of sense. AOL made good marketing tech acquisitions, including gravity.

- hubspot is worth going after either through acquisition or cloning. goes well with helping small business in the Local space above, competes with etsy, fbpages, squarespace. people need an easy way to spin up local and global digital businesses. maybe i am suicidal thinking its a good idea to butt heads with oracle/sap/salesforce/microsoft in this arena, but small businesses are are a neglected market.

(there is still time for investors to go back on selling yahoo, and make it truly relevant and first class destination again. I am available for the CEO/strategy/acquisition-analyst position.)

> Fantasy

Just to add a few details (to this very interesting comment) -- Yahoo has products that competes both in daily fantasy (DFS) with FanDuel/DraftKings (both billion dollar companies) and season long with espn/cbs/etc.

Yahoo is firmly in the #3 spot for DFS, but is the only platform with both season long and daily games on the same site -- lots of opportunity for converting customers I would guess.

for sure, Yahoo Fantasy could use a massive reinvention. I just dont know who I would acquire. This might actually be a place where talent acquihire and reinventing yahoo from within would be better. obviously FanDuel/DraftKings are one of the two directions to be aggressive, the other being traditional fantasy, i just dont know what smaller competitors do things better, because a big part of fantasy is network effect and using a service all your friends use elsewhere. nobody likes using espn for all their leagues but one.

They could have acquired Victiv -- the previous 3rd largest site. It was bought by PokerStars however and Yahoo went with a homegrown solution.

This is a really cool list, but a lot of these either weren't affordable or weren't big in 2012. Keep in mind hindsight is 20/20.

You may think this was harmless, but you've greatly contributed to our rampant inequality.

I don't think anyone claimed it was harmless...

Ha, when they gave him an offer, should he have asked for less money?

By making money? Are you f'ing serious?

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