The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Portals optimized for retention while Google optimized for exit speed
“This is basically why Google beat Yahoo. I mean, there's a lot more to it, but The portals all had this mentality of we want to build more and more and keep people on our site, in our ecosystem, continue to look at our banner ads, and Google, from this point, …”
Zuckerberg: Facebook board tried to fire him after rejecting Yahoo's $1B offer
“In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn'…”
Jerry Yang Rejecting Microsoft's 2008 Yahoo Bid Was a Historic Blunder
“In one of the worst corporate decisions of all time, because just two years later,
Bing, after Microsoft would launch Bing the next year in June of 2009, Bing would take over powering Yahoo search for a deal that paid Yahoo one billion dollars.”
Zuckerberg Rejected Yahoo Acquisition After Terry Semel Lowered $1B Offer
“So Mark actually agrees to the Yahoo deal. Billion dollars. It's gonna be all in stock. Yahoo's gonna buy the company. In the interim between when they shake hands on the deal and while the docs are being drafted, Yahoo announces their quarterly earnings, and …”
Zuckerberg: Facebook board tried firing him over $1B Yahoo offer
“In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn'…”
Michael Ovitz proposed that Disney acquire Yahoo and CBS Records
“When I went to Disney, I put together seven initiatives. That I wrote about in the book that would have made Disney a fortune, starting with buying Yahoo, buying CBS records for two billion dollars, which is worth 10 times, 20 times that right now.”
Rosenthal: Google launched in a uniquely narrow historical timing window
“If Larry and Sergey had met and started working on this a few years earlier, it would have been Yahoo! Because the web was just so much smaller. Like, you didn't need a technology-based search engine to understand it. And then if they'd started a few years lat…”
Yahoo rejected an offer to buy PageRank for $1 million
“They tried to sell PageRank to Yahoo for one million dollars and were rejected”
Yahoo invested $10M and powered Google's search backfill in 2000
“In June of 2000, Google signs the deal with Yahoo that they are gonna take over All organic search result backfills on yahoo.com with the Powered by Google branding, and Yahoo is going to invest ten million dollars in Google as part of this deal.”
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel offered $1B to buy Google in 2001
“As recently as late 2001, just months before, there's a dinner with Terry Semel, who's the CEO of Yahoo.
Kind of big media executive guy, comes in, takes over, is the big media CEO.
And he sits down with the founders and he says, so guys, I think we're your bi…”
Gilbert: Google traffic doubled to 14M daily searchers on Yahoo deal day one
“So traffic doubled to fourteen million searchers per day on day one of this deal.”
Gilbert: Human-curated web directories cannot scale as internet content multiplies exponentially
“When you have a small number of total websites, curating them is interesting, but when you have 10,000 times more websites and 10,000 times more niches that people are interested in, directory is not going to be an efficient way to surface what people are look…”
Rosenthal: Yahoo acquired Scott Hassan's eGroups for about $400 million
“Scott leaves, starts a company called eGroups. That company, a couple years later, ends up getting acquired by Yahoo, becomes Yahoo Groups for about four hundred million dollars.”
Rosenthal: Yahoo paid Google $7.2M for search results in 2001
“And the next year in 2001, the first full year of this Yahoo portal search deal, Yahoo pays Google 7.2 million dollars for organic search results.”
WhatsApp founders met while working on Yahoo's ill-fated Project Panama
“This was the ill-fated Project Panama at Yahoo, which, by the way, acquired Easter Egg. That is where Jan Coom and Ryan Acton met at Yahoo, and then they would get so frustrated and leave and start WhatsApp.”
Yahoo's partnership inadvertently saved Google from the dot-com crash
“Google's gonna survive the dot-com crash between the ten million dollar investment from Yahoo plus the revenue from that portal deal.”
Rosenthal: Yahoo went from $1B IPO in 1996 to $20B by 1998
“They'd gone public in 1996 at a billion dollar market cap. By 1998, when google.com is launching as a company, Yahoo's a twenty billion dollar public stock.”