Blog Yes & Know

Can Mayer Save Yahoo and How?

Today, BusinessWeek ran a front cover story on Marisa Mayer’s leadership of Yahoo, asking what seems like a 10-year old question, ‘can it be saved?’ Having grown up in Silicon …

Yahoo’s ShakeUp Demands Fearlessness

Four longtime Yahoo board members, including the chairman, are leaving the company. In this one move, Yahoo is trying to make a clean break from the past — signaling that …

Resentment, Resilience and Rebounding

“It’s them, not me”. That’s effectively what Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo (YHOO), has been saying in the few days since she’s been fired. Well, she said it more …

Open Letter to Carol Bartz, Yahoo

Congrats on your new role. For many of us in the tech industry, Yahoo is more than a company, it’s a Silicon Valley icon. By putting in the kind of strong management you represent, I hope the board is signaling the company’s intent to reinvent itself and thrive once again. Your opportunities speak to opportunities for every tech firm, so we’re going to make this an Open Letter in the hope that everyone can learn from the experience you’re about to have.

Making Money During Disruption

While failure for the high-tech entrepreneur is less likely to result in death, the parallels between the Gold Rush and the current Web-based economy are many. In both cases, participants must to adapt to a new way of life, with new rules. Or rather, no pre-existing, fixed rules.
Silicon Valley’s famous tolerance of entrepreneurial failure has its roots more than 150 years ago in the Gold Rush when more than 90,000 people made their way to California in the two years following John Marshall’s discovery of gold near Sacramento in January, 1848. By 1854, more than 300,000–representing more than one percent of the total population of the United States at the time–had come west in search of fortune.

Ballmer to Yang: I Just Can’t Quit You

Two NYT journalists see Microsoft ‘needing a franchise’ as the software giant puts the moves on Yahoo all over again. Two weeks after walking away from takeover talks with Yahoo, …

To be reborn

There is this old chinese proverb: “Sometimes to be reborn, you must first die”. I always think of that when I see major companies floundering. Yahoo is likely today’s good example. A historical example could be IBM which went through a real and profound redirection before it came back strong with its services emphasis.

Difference bw Google and Yahoo

The press sometimes depicts Google and Yahoo as head to head competitors, but if you work closely with the two companies you’ll notice substantial differences between them. These differences affect the sorts of partnerships you can create with them, and the sorts of competition you can expect if you end up competing with them.