Paul Graham published an essay about "the problems that hosed Yahoo" which got shared by many people via Twitter and Hacker News. Many people called it "customarily brilliant."
I really enjoy Paul's writings but this one didn't sit well with me. I disagreed with key points and came away concerned that young entrepreneurs would learn the wrong lessons from history.
In the essay, Paul suggests that Yahoo failed due to two problems - 1) easy money and 2) ambivalence about being a technology company.
Money
Paul takes us back to 1998, when Yahoo was riding high, making money from big brand advertisers as well as over-funded, "fat startups" (a term popularized recently by Ben Horowitz). In Paul's words, Yahoo was "a de facto beneficiary of a pyramid scheme."
I agree that too much easy money, especially over-funding, can harm companies. Too much money can mask problems. That said, I don't think it had much to do with Yahoo's demise.
We can second guess how Yahoo could have re-invested profits but I would not fault them for pursuing it. They built a very successful company which beat every competitor of their era.
Everyone benefited from the bubble. If Yahoo had not taken the money it may have been diverted to others and weakened its competitive position. You have to be in the game to even have a chance at riding the next wave.
Maybe what Paul meant to say was that Yahoo management should have recognized that they were lucky or that their business model was not sustainable?
In hindsight, it's clear that Yahoo did not appreciate the potential for search and perhaps over-estimated the quality of their revenues. But, as Paul acknowledged, no one else, including Larry and Sergei, knew how big search was going to be, in 1998.
It's hard to predict the future and deceptively easy to come up with simplistic explanations in hindsight. Yahoo beat its competitors hands down and built a very profitable, growing business. I would not diss them for it.
Paul's second point was about culture and leadership.
Hackers
Paul suggests that Yahoo was a technology company but either didn't know it or were ambivalent about it. He also seems to imply that if hackers had run the place Yahoo would have been fine (or at least would not have been hosed).
I disagree with both points.
Yahoo was never a technology company. They were a media company (albeit a "new media" company) from the day that Dave and Jerry started serving up pages from their trailer at Stanford.
When Mike Moritz invested in Yahoo, it was the emerging brand and traffic that impressed, not the technology. Unlike Google, there was no core technology from day one. Later on, Yahoo did develop many technologies - they had to in order to scale (Hadoop is one example).
Bill Gates would have also said that Yahoo was never a technology company. When Gates saw Google, he saw a company that reminded him of Microsoft. It was probably the only company that ever scared him. He never had that reaction to Yahoo.
The important thing is not to be like a Google or Facebook (or the early Microsoft). The important thing is to be yourself. Be authentic. Be genuine.
So maybe Paul's point is that Yahoo didn't know who they were. Perhaps, but I disagree that Yahoo had to be like a Google or Facebook because that is not who they were.
Pixar is a great media company. The fact that they were founded by technologists doesn't confuse them. They even sell rendering software to other companies, including competitors. It doesn't diminish their identity as a media company.
Disney is another example. Walt Disney Imagineering has been inventing cool new technologies for decades. They were the "new media" company of their generation. You don't have to fit someone else's mold. Be yourself. Be unique.
Another key point Paul seems to make is that "adult supervision" is bad. Implication seems to be that if hackers had run the place Yahoo may not have lost. Again, I disagree.
There is good adult supervision and bad adult supervision.
Amazon is an interesting case study that, on the surface, defies hacker conventional wisdom. Even as they delve deeper into technology, Amazon's management is stacked with MBAs.
Even their most technical businesses, Amazon Web Services and Digital Media (including Kindle), are led by a Harvard MBA and a Stanford MBA, respectively. Even so, Amazon continues to attract and retain plenty of good hackers. In fact, momentum seems to be increasing in the hacker community.
There is nothing inherently wrong with adult supervision or non-technical management per se.
That said, I do think people can get seduced by the belief that there is a mythical "world class" management team that can fix your company. On this front, I think Paul and I probably agree. Don't count on someone coming in from the outside to fix your company (or, in the case of Yahoo, your stock price).
When the bubble crashed, Yahoo looked for a savior. In contrast, Amazon stuck with Jeff Bezos even though their stock took a similarly huge beating. Bezos likes to remind everyone how the pundits called them "Amazon dot toast."
Terry Semel knew little about Yahoo or the Internet when he took over in April, 2001. It quickly led to the mass exodus of the future leaders of Yahoo. The fallout we are witnessing now may still be the after shocks.
To conclude, I'd like to share a great story about how Nike is still shaking up the shoe industry. When Phil Knight retired after almost 40 years as CEO, he decided to bring in fresh blood and passed over the leading internal candidate for CEO.
Luckily, Nike had such a strong culture that it quickly rejected the outsider. The new CEO, from S.C. Johnson (the makers of Pledge, Windex and other cleaning products) lasted only 18 months. The new CEO is a home grown prodigy - a former shoe designer who was the internal CEO candidate in 2003.
With 33,000 employees, there is plenty of "adult supervision." It just happens to be the right kind.
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