Facebook Has Become The New Yahoo, And It's Obvious Mark Zuckerberg Knows It

Is it wrong that I just won't read anything from Business Insider?

It seems like Marissa Mayer is trying to do something similar with Yahoo!'s acquisition binge. Perhaps a lot of it is for talent, but she did make one big play with Tumblr. Only given Yahoo's market cap (vs. Facebook & Google), she can't make bolder plays in the range that Facebook/Google can.

I think Mark & Marissa are similar in that respect that they see the past pattern of BigCos ignoring the start-up's potential to grow and haggle on price and want to make a bet anyway because the technology/users/growth is there to pan out in the future.

In this example Yahoo (under Terry Semel) missed out on buying Facebook. In 2002 (or 2003) Yahoo missed out on buying Google [0] also under Terry Semel's leadership. Obviously it is easier to point this out in retrospect and Yahoo did make acquisitions that didn't pan out on the scale of GOOG/FB, but in the case of missing out on these breakout companies, it was a result of haggling on price. Of course in an alternate universe Yahoo could have made the bold plays with Facebook + Google and could have been one of the most valuable companies in the world (Hindsight is 20/20).

Mark Zuckerberg has been there and seen first hand of what the other side of the table looks like and what founders of young super-growth companies want. He perhaps also has some of the smartest people advising him. And I think that is why Zuckerberg is going to leave his acquisitions alone (Oculus, WhatsApp, Instagram) like the press releases mentioned because he realizes that these "subsidiaries" of Facebook might have a better chance of succeeding as stand-alone teams than as a merger with other facebook staff teams.

Also, I'm not sure how much of it has to do with the fact that Google & Facebook are run by founders vs. Semel who came in from Warner Brothers and wanted to personally enrich himself as much as he could (He made north of 450 million from his 6ish year tenure at Yahoo). If I'm making so much money at a company that I didn't help start and I'm already in my late 50s, the last thing I would care about is what the future of technology might look like and how I can capture that value by paying billions of dollars to young companies. Perhaps the case of misaligned incentives?

[0] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html