Yahoo's business giant capsized, blame its founder who no longer ventured

Yahoo 's big business ship is

overturned , blame it on the founder who no longer takes risks At the helm, Yahoo lost its way not only strategically, but culturally as well. Yahoo! America, the internet portal whose name is forever followed by a passionate exclamation mark, has finally written a long, sad series of stories. Welcome to his final home. After a five-month bidding process, Verizon Communications finally acquired the core assets of Yahoo, an old Internet portal, for $4.83 billion. Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer will assist with the deal until it closes, after which she will leave with a "parachute" worth more than $50 million in cash and stock. So, there is no need to feel sad for her. Still, a series of stories about how she failed to save the company after four years of trying is probably inevitable. To a large extent, that's unfair, because Yahoo's downfall wasn't entirely her fault. At least part of the blame lies with Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yahoo's early startup story Yahoo's early startup story is now a Silicon Valley myth. Jerry Yang and Filo, who were then graduate students in engineering at Stanford University, created a directory index called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" in 1994. This provided a fairly handy map for the Digital Realm, which was not yet freely navigable at the time, and was loved by surfers at the time. The following year, after the company was renamed, it attracted investment from Sequoia Capital, and former Motorola executive Tim Koogle became CEO.












That was the norm in that era - bring in an experienced CEO and go public early. Although they relinquished the CEO position at the time and became the "chief Yahoos" on their business cards, Filo and Yang were not far from running the company. Filo, as the technical leader, personally wrote the first version of Yahoo's search engine, and most of the decisions on the underlying technical architecture were made by Filo. Jerry Yang has been closely involved in strategic decision-making. After the burst of the Internet bubble, Yahoo decided to hire Terry Semel, who had been the co-CEO of Warner Bros. for a long time, to replace Tim Koogle. Jerry Yang played a big role in this decision-making process. effect.

Following Semel to join Yahoo were a number of media executives at the time, who are now well-known figures in Silicon Valley, such as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and textbook rental platform Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig. This is the root of Yahoo's long-running "split personality" problem: Is it a technology company or a media company? Possibly the most valuable internet infrastructure, commuting between offices in Santa Monica, California, and Sunnyvale, Yahoo's executives wanted to do both.

We now know what makes a tech company successful: passionate founders who are often difficult to get along with, who can make difficult decisions and make up their minds even when they are not favored. For example, in Yahoo's media-focused years, Amazon's Jeff Bezos made a big foray into the unprofitable online retail industry, watched its stock price drop day by day, and faced layoffs. pressure, but Amazon finally made a fortune in a completely new business area such as cloud services, establishing Amazon Web Services. At Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin brought in Eric Schmidt as CEO, but the three of them jointly managed This led to the development of a huge "gold mine" of text advertising, which appeared to enrich search results rather than distracting like Yahoo's prominent banner ads.

Yahoo's mistakes

Entering the new century, the biggest mistake Yahoo made was a series of decision-making mistakes. As Fred Vogelstein reported on Wired, Semel had a chance to buy Google in 2002. In 2006, Yahoo was once close to reaching an acquisition of Facebook. According to David Kirkpatrick's book "The Facebook Effect", after a disappointing performance report was announced, Semel lowered its bid from $1 billion to $850 million, further Alienated Mark Zuckerberg, who was already reluctant to sell the company.

These deals may seem too risky and uneconomical for Yahoo's shareholders to like. But that's the crux of the matter. Internet companies need the unique power of founders to do things that are not viewed favorably. Larry Page pushed Google to buy YouTube, a cash-burning video site, in 2006; Zuckerberg bought Instagram, a photo-social app, in 2012 for a price that outsiders saw as grossly overpriced. That's how tech companies survive -- they have to be adventurous.

杨致远在2007年接替Semel担任雅虎首席执行官，但他的表现要么是过于老好人，要么就是在面对困难抉择时犹豫不决。在其掌印时期，有太多应该开除的员工没有开除，应该大手笔押注科技以及新兴的智能手机革命却没有这么做。现如今看来，杨致远最大的失误在于他亲手扼杀了雅虎所能够遇上的最佳的退出机会之一，2008年微软时任首席执行官鲍尔默（Steve Ballmer）为了和谷歌抗衡，曾出价450亿美元求购雅虎，却被后者拒绝。

2008年6月份爱达荷州Sun Valley举办的Allen & Co.大会上的一张照片，如今作为雅虎回绝微软的最佳写照恐怕是再合适不过了。在这张照片中，杨致远同拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林坐在一起，双手托着头，看上去像是为了微软放弃收购雅虎而感到遗憾不已。从这张照片可以看出，杨致远当时搞错了雅虎真正的敌人。并不是鲍尔默和微软，而是坐在对面认真聆听的谷歌的这群家伙。

在此之后，对于行动迟缓的雅虎来说故事已经临近尾声，互联网行业的发展可谓是日新月异，雅虎却在Carol Bartz和Scott Thompson等缺乏创造力的CEO的带领下勉力求存。在一些零星曝光的信函中，公司高层抱怨称雅虎业务精力太过分散，生产了太多乏力的产品。没有了创始人为公司掌舵，雅虎不仅在策略上，同时还在文化上迷失了方向。公司财务、法务和产品经理人事臃肿，雇佣来为公司消除风险的人比尝试冒险的人多。杨致远未回复置评请求，Filo发言人则拒绝置评。

但两位创始人对于公司也还是曾经有过巨大贡献的。2005年时，杨致远主导了可谓是雅虎历史上所做出过的最佳的一笔交易：将在华业务售予阿里巴巴并向后者投资10亿美元。为此给予杨致远多少赞誉都不为过。还有一个可能是杨致远的声音并未获得足够的倾听。2012年雅虎董事会作出灾难般的决定聘用PayPal的Scott Thompson担任首席执行官，然后又因为履历作假而闪电开除，此后杨致远从董事会离职。就Filo来说，在一个公司忠诚度算得上是稀缺事物的时代，Filo展示了什么叫做忠诚。在梅耶尔掌印之后，他加入了雅虎董事会，而且据大家所说，他一直扮演着鼓舞人心的角色。

然而到了此时，前期所犯下的错误已经太大。对于梅耶尔来说可能曾经有过稍纵即逝的机会，押注一笔大胆的并购或者是一个新产品，但机会的窗口很快就关闭了。她的策略很奇怪，2013年花费重金11亿美元收购在市场竞争中落败的社交应用Tumblr。就像Flickr等众多雅虎的收购对象一样，Tumblr此后也是毫无进展，可能是因为雅虎无法为创业公司提供快速增长的足够营养。

关于梅耶尔所犯下的错误，其他不少著作都有记载。但如今都已经变成互联网的老黄历了，成了商学院学生们的学习分析对象。对于我们来说是时候哀悼雅虎了。不好意思，我的意思是Yahoo!。