Marissa Mayer, former CEO of YahooShe regrets something. Six years after she left the role, she opened up about things she should have done differently this week.
“We looked at a transformative acquisition and bought Tumblr,” she said in a tech brew interview.
Yahoo acquired Tumblr, a social blogging platform, for $1.1 billion in 2013 – a deal Mayer was instrumental in. It quickly became clear that the price was far too high: by 2016, Yahoo had done it written down Tumblr’s value by more than $700 million.
But in addition to Tumblr, she said the company was considering the possibility of buying it Netflix or Hello.
“I think Netflix was $4 billion at the time and Hulu was $1.3 billion,” she told Tech Brew. “And both would have been a better purchase in hindsight 20/20.”
That’s something of an understatement. Today, Netflix’s market cap is over $140 billion Disney has been majority-owned by Hulu since 2019.
As much as Mayer wishes she’d tried to take over Netflix, the regrets among former Blockbuster executives run much deeper. In 2000, Netflix co-founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph tried to sell their startup to Blockbuster for just $50 million — and they did laughed from the room.
At the time, of course, Netflix was an unprofitable startup offering DVD rentals by mail, while Blockbuster stores were a staple of American life.
Today, Mayer is the CEO and co-founder of Sunshine, a startup offering an app that uses AI to organize contacts on smartphones. “We thought about calling the company Mundane AI,” she told Tech Brew. “How do you take cutting-edge AI and simply apply it to everyday problems we all deal with?”
Mayer shared few other regrets. She admitted she hired the wrong person as chief operating officer. 2014 you repressed Henrique De Castro, whom she personally handpicked for the role in 2012 despite warnings it was a mistake and he was overcompensated.
And she said she wishes she’d “done tax free Alibaba spinoff‘, which ‘would have saved our shareholders or made them $10 billion’ and ‘allowed Yahoo to continue as an independent company’.
Three months ago, Yahoo, now owned by Apollo Global Management, said it would cut about 1,000 jobs and further reduce the number of employees in the course of this year.
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