What Sank Yahoo? Blame Its Nice Guy Founders
The epilogue in the long, sad story of Yahoo!, the web portal with the perpetually ebullient exclamation mark, is finally being written. After emerging as the top bidder in a five-month auction, Verizon Communications has agreed to buy the historic web franchise’s core assets for $4.83 billion.
Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer will assist with the transition until the sale is complete and then depart the company with a comfortable parachute worth more than $50 million in cash and stock. So let’s not weep for her. But inevitably, a passel of eulogies will be crafted about her failed four-year attempt to turn around the company. These reflections will be largely unfair, because the decline and demise of Yahoo isn’t totally her fault. It’s at least partially the fault of its founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo.
The early story of Yahoo is now Silicon Valley mythology. As graduate students at the Stanford School of Engineering in 1994, Yang, a math-oriented Taiwanese immigrant, and Filo, a quiet programmer from Louisiana, created a directory of links called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. It was a handy map to what was then an unnavigable digital landscape, and web surfers loved it. The following year, when Sequoia Capital invested in the newly renamed startup, it brought in a former Motorola executive named Tim Koogle to be CEO.
bloomberg.com
|
