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Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

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Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#91

Post by elmuchoprez »

thegna wrote: post #65

Ask HN: who is the biggest winner in the Yahoo-Tumblr merger? David Karp? Marco Arment? Marissa mayer? Union Square Ventures? Greylock Partners? Sequoia Capital?

I think it almost certainly has to be David Karp. This should be an insane and guaranteed payday for him.

Marco Arment hasn't had anything to do with Tumblr in years. He might hold some equity as a result of his time there, especially since he was there at the very beginning, but certainly not more equity than Karp.

Mayer/Yahoo has a long way to go to prove that this was a smart idea. Two years from now they might be the biggest winners, but they're also taking on all the risk at this point.

And as for the investors, this should be a big win for them (although I don't know how much they invested, so hard to say how big of a win), but they are investment firms who have to spread the profits around, opposed to Karp, who is one guy who just got a huge check.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#92

Post by swang »

Swizec wrote: post #21
btipling wrote: post #14

Maybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr. Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never caught on. I wonder how that works, who wins for what reasons. It does not seem to be for product or technology reasons as I think Posterous had Tumblr beat. It's almost luck and magic who picks up the right kind of early users that lead to success. Admittedly it did see…

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

Didn't porn pick HD-DVD to win?

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#93

Post by SatvikBeri »

wahsd wrote: post #88

I am genuinely confused about something because my realization does not coincide with my previous held beliefs. So I would appreciate if someone else could validate or make a good argument for why I am wrong. These companies, especially the biggest ones and the ones that are acquired by them; they all seem to have one thing in common. They are all not at all about what they built, but, once you control for the variab…

I think you're spot on. Cloning the technologies is relatively easy. But getting attention is a hard problem.

As a general rule, companies rarely[0] win because of superior technology. Rather, they win because they use their tech in a way that provides superior value to their users.

This is something all aspiring entrepreneurs should keep in mind. Nobody cares if your company uses incredibly elegant code or highly sophisticated Machine Learning/NLP/Functional Programming/whatever. All users care about is whether your product provides value. And remember that "value" is highly subjective-you may not think that Facebook is useful, but many people will disagree with you.

[0]: there are certainly exceptions. If you know that the problem you're solving has major market demand, then you can win with superior execution. Viaweb is a good example, as pg tells it they won mostly because they could roll out features much faster than their competitors.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#94

Post by roc »

ajays wrote: post #61
citricsquid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A portion of the recent disdain / negativity seems to come from the recent cull of work from home employees and statements regarding the value of working from an office to Yahoo, there was quite a bit of anger directed at Mayer for that.

You must be new around here (said in jest). HN has had an anti=Yahoo bias for a long time; the reasoning behind the bias keep changing ("layoffs", "delicious", "WFH", etc.), but it always seems to be there.

I wouldn't rule out individuals with individual axes to grind, but most of the anti-yahoo sentiment is based on: their track records of no interesting products, acquiring and then squandering interesting products, and management decisions that run counter to HN's preferred "attract and retain top tier talent" approaches.

The reasoning doesn't change, just the examples.

See Also: snide comments about Microsoft.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#95

Post by SatvikBeri »

benjamincburns wrote: post #63
Swizec wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

That's a strange and interesting theory. I can think of a few anecdotal places where this is the case, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure... Edit : Just thinking about the business of porn, this is probably a decent heuristic for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Porn is usually very low budget (compared to other mass market media), with a very high volume of c…

Apple as a whole is pretty anti-porn, and they dominated the profits (though not necessarily market share) in the smartphone/tablet market for a long time.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#97

Post by w1ntermute »

venomsnake wrote: post #24
camus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary i would seriously consider getting another job because i would feel like the management is totally broken. Yahoo is not going to be relevant again because they bought Tumblr. They cant even make their own product relevant. I cant even understand why anybody would buy Tumblr 1 billion or more. Dailymotion would have been a good deal, this service is relevant and people are starting to be willing to pay…

Well yahoo has things to offer to the tumblr team - a lot of technical and scalability know how. I won't be surprised if they are able to shave operating costs a lot and utilize better the labor force. The problem is that the valuable asset of tumblr are its users. And users are fickle bunch.

Cutting costs is nice and all, but these are Internet companies. It's expected that an acquisition will bring about much more substantial synergies than they would for the merger of two ketchup companies.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#98

Post by SatvikBeri »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #17
neya wrote: post #11

The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience. A closer look: "to create advertising opportunities...that enhance the user experience." Yahoo, Seriously?

You can argue (half reasonably I think) that a more targeted advert is better for the user...

I use services like Yelp, Netflix, and Amazon to give me targeted recommendations all the time. If ads could somehow read my mind and bring up good recommendations on my browser's sidebar that would actually be very valuable.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#99

Post by jskonhovd »

mysterywhiteboy wrote: post #10

I don't work for Yahoo, but I must say I would seriously consider working there now with Marissa Mayer at the helm. Mayer appears to be doing everything she can to drag Yahoo back to being relevant, and to me that sounds like an interesting (and potentially rewarding) challenge. I just hope she is looking for innovation from within as well as from acquisitions.

This is a strange comment to me. Does buying a large corporation make you relevant? I didn't see people making the same comment after Google bought YouTube and Motorola, or when Facebook bought Instagram. Now those companies have been attractive places to work for a long time, arguably since they where founded. I don't believe that Yahoo has the attractive engineering culture that Facebook or Google has. I believe if they screw this acquisition up, it will be the nail in the coffin for yahoo. They will go the way of AOL. I think Mayer has the toughest job in Technology right now, I hope this is the move that will spark the turn around.

Re: Yahoo to Acquire Tumblr

#100

Post by sib »

Swizec wrote: post #21
btipling wrote: post #14

Maybe this could have been Posterous had they won that battle with Tumblr. Posterous had the superior product early on, but for some reason it never caught on. I wonder how that works, who wins for what reasons. It does not seem to be for product or technology reasons as I think Posterous had Tumblr beat. It's almost luck and magic who picks up the right kind of early users that lead to success. Admittedly it did see…

Porn. Tumblr has porn. As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

That's right. For example, Betamax (technically superior) was not licensed to porn studios, while VHS was. See also, American Express would not enable "gentlemen's clubs," whereas MasterCard did, which is one of the ways MC broke into the market.
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