Hacker News Reader

You know why Alibaba is profitable? Because they don't make stupid investments like this one.

First Tumblr and now this. Yahoo should stop playing 'save a VC'.

Alibaba is a pretty bad example to use, because Yahoo made $9.4 billion because they DID invest in Alibaba early on.

Actually it's a perfect example.

Jerry Yang made the investment in Alibaba circa 2005. If you told him Yahoo! will be investing in Snapchat he would probably laugh at you.

Now in 2014, Yahoo! is buying a blogging platform and investing in picture messaging with a timer.

The driving force overseas is money, money, money. Not impressions or # of useless users.

Comparing Alibaba investment to Snapchat is simply absurd.

korzun is explaining why it was a good decision for Alibaba to pass on Snapchat.

Yahoo made $9.4B on $BABA because of how revenue-driven their core businesses have always been.

There are strong rumours going around of Yahoo either being acquired by Alibaba or Softbank.

By picking up a share of a very trendy and popular mobile service like Snapchat, this is just more confirmation that they're aiming to be acquired by Softbank. It might have almost nothing at all to do with Snapchat as a business.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com