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What happens after Yahoo acquires you

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Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#111

Post by jfager »

mscarborough wrote: post #108
JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

At the risk of preaching to the choir, here's some more input from another Yahoo acquiree - pg on 'What Happened to Yahoo' (Aug '10) http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Sigh. I work for Yahoo, after 6 years of ('failed') startup work. I respect YC and pg immensely. However, linking to this article that is written in 2010 that references the mid-1990s (except for a single mention of Facebook in 2007) seems a bit weak. It doesn't bother me that HN folks dismiss Yahoo as a company, so much as it does that HN folks ignore Yahoo engineering. Hadoop, WOEID, Pipes, etc. For me as an engine…

I don't think anyone who would care ignores Hadoop. It and Yahoo's involvement with it are very well known and credited.

WOEID seems pretty niche. I don't work with geo much, so I don't understand right away why I would want to use a WOEID over a simple lat/long. Who else uses WOEIDs, for instance?

Pipes would be approximately a billion times more interesting if it didn't have the commercial use restrictions and had a version I could get some kind of SLA for. If Yahoo is so proud of Pipes, why won't you let people build businesses on it? And why did you only post 2 blog updates about it in 2010?

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#112

Post by jasonkester »

jackowayed wrote: post #84
wheels wrote: post #70

Hmm, for some reason they forgot to include: You sell your company for $50 million in Yahoo stock, which over the course of your two year tenure at Yahoo will see a tenfold increase in value up to $500 million and your team will use that wealth to go on to create a disruptive seed-stage funding group called Y Combinator. Must have been an oversight. I can't imagine 37signals only telling half of these stories to make…

Wow, did their stock actually 10x between when they got there and when they sold it?

It was the 90's. That's what stock did.

When I bought my Yahoo stock, it went up 62% in the first five days.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#114

Post by wladimir »

jrockway wrote: post #104
InclinedPlane wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the best engineers balk at corporate bureaucratic bullshit like timesheets. They don't work merely to pay the bills, they work because it's their passion. Once you take away that passion they may still come to work but maybe they're just zombie-ing through the day just for the paycheck, they're not giving you their best work anymore. And they're also no longer happy, so they'll slowly evaporate out of your co…

I agree completely. As soon as I have to do bullshit like timesheets, that mental switch flips and my creativity is gone. I assume my employer has decided, ``it's worth making each employee do 20 minutes of busywork a week and killing their happiness rather than doing without a sheet of numbers that says "8 8 8 8 8"''.

Heh, it can be worse. In my last job we actually had three parallel time reporting systems. One for billable hours, one for hours worked on project, and one that clocked on entering/exiting the building. Of course, they all three had to match.

I've always wondered how that's useful to anyone. Judge me by the quality of work I do, but not whether I sit in the chair the required number of minutes.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#115

Post by lancewiggs »

hartror wrote: post #58
edw519 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a right way to do this? Yes. a. Make it a fully owned subsidiary. b. Don't fuck with it.

Do you have some examples of where that has worked in the medium - long term? (i.e longer than the 2-3 year mark most of these founders have bailed out at) I am guessing it can work but founders/entrepreneurs aren't necessarily the best managers and are likely to get bored and be looking for their next startup. As a new owner of a company it seems to make sense to transition the senior management to people who are mo…

Trade Me - the New Zealand site that owns Auctions, motors, and half of the property and jobs markets in the country. It was bought by Fairfax Media, the biggest media company hereabouts, and they followed the golden rule for several years now. The founder is gone, but the CEO is a tech and the site still dominates both in numbers and hearts and minds.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#116

Post by cdavid »

wladimir wrote: post #114
jrockway wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. As soon as I have to do bullshit like timesheets, that mental switch flips and my creativity is gone. I assume my employer has decided, ``it's worth making each employee do 20 minutes of busywork a week and killing their happiness rather than doing without a sheet of numbers that says "8 8 8 8 8"''.

Heh, it can be worse. In my last job we actually had three parallel time reporting systems. One for billable hours, one for hours worked on project, and one that clocked on entering/exiting the building. Of course, they all three had to match. I've always wondered how that's useful to anyone. Judge me by the quality of work I do, but not whether I sit in the chair the required number of minutes.

Judging quality is difficult, and sadly does not scale well. It is much easier to measure time. A lot of (bad) management is about measuring things which are easy to measure instead of measuring things which matter.

That's also one of the rationale for constantly asking to do the same stuff with less (money, employees, etc...): because trying to measure efficiency is almost hopeless in most companies, just asking that 10 % improvements actually leads to actual improvements globally. You just don't know where exactly. The bigger the organization, the more efficient this inefficiency is in some ways.

Of course, in small companies, this is awful, because most smart people, especially smar engineers, really hate this way of working.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#117

Post by nostrademons »

TY wrote: post #81
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: IMDB, Audible, and Zappos. Also, the issue isn't that the founders leave; it's that the energy does. Founders are always going to leave.

Interestingly, all of them purchased by Amazon.

YouTube and Android as well, both purchased by Google.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#118

Post by roel_v »

I've just joined Flickr but I'm finding it awkward in some places, and the 'community' (at least that of extension/tool developers) seems to have died in 2008 or so. The upload tools are atrocious, no reliable way to download stuff for backups, the UI is unpolished and doesn't seem to get updated much.

So, where do I go for online photo hosting / backup? Picasa / Web Albums isn't better, plus it's very desktop focused. Are there any modern offerings that can step into Flickr's shoes?

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#119

Post by torpor »

pdaviesa wrote: post #105
InclinedPlane wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the best engineers balk at corporate bureaucratic bullshit like timesheets. They don't work merely to pay the bills, they work because it's their passion. Once you take away that passion they may still come to work but maybe they're just zombie-ing through the day just for the paycheck, they're not giving you their best work anymore. And they're also no longer happy, so they'll slowly evaporate out of your co…

All this talk of freakin timesheets - they may be the biggest waste of time in the post-industrial era. Outside of a "billable hour" type firm, how many managers go back and look through timesheet data to make tactical or strategic decisions? I am now convinced that timesheets will be the downfall of civilization as we know it!

Timesheets are there so managers don't have to do their job and actually go and find out what their personnel are working on. Without timesheet culture, there wouldn't be golf courses teeming with after-lunch slackoffs^Wmanagers ..

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#120

Post by petervandijck »

lenn0x wrote: post #57
petervandijck wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are being acquired, you could say: "We're worried about loosing our culture, which has brought us the success we've seen so far. I want to agree that our group will be allowed to set its own rules to some degree in terms of working environment." And give a few examples. No need to push it or make this legally binding, or even put it in writing. Then, when the timesheet dude shows up (which they will), just s…

We tried this approach at MyBlogLog. Managements response is: we'll not let you ship and refuse you resources.

And did they/you take this to upper management, to the people who acquired you?
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