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 9 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
Mayer: Yahoo should have pursued the Alibaba spin-off instead of selling
“In hindsight, I, you know, and again, hindsight is twenty-twenty, I think it would have been helpful to continue to pursue the spin. I'm optimistic that it would have been ultimately tax-free, though it may have caused an overhang. You know, that said, at that…”
Mayer: Yahoo's core business turnaround would have succeeded with one more year
“Cause I do think if we had with that team, with that base of revenue, with our plan, I really think we would have, if we had had another year, And we'd had 10 quarters of beating plan, and we really could have gotten there.”
Mayer: Yahoo beat street expectations and internal plan for six straight quarters
“I mean, it's a little known fact, but for the last six quarters of Yahoo's existence prior to the sale, not only did we beat the street, we beat plan.”
Kawasaki: I rejected an interview for Yahoo CEO because of the commute
“Michael Moritz. The Michael Moritz of Sequoia. He called me after I left Apple, and he said, guy, I have a company down here by Stanford. I want you to interview for the CEO position. And I said, Mike, what's the company's name? And he told me the name. I look…”
Mayer: Yahoo built nearly $2B in newly invented revenue over five years
“We had almost two billion dollars of wholly new invented revenue inside the company in five years, which, you know, we had bankers saying like, look, can we take that part of the company public? Cause like the growth on that is unbelievable.”
Butterfield: Yahoo acquired Flickr roughly 13 months after its February 2004 launch
“We launched in February 2004 and by March 2005, the acquisition by Yahoo had closed. Basically a year in market, and maybe 10 and a half months before we were in the middle of negotiations.”
Mayer: Yahoo's CEO Challenge received 840 submissions and greenlit nearly 200
“Instead, we got, I believe, 840 submissions of ideas from across the company. There were a lot of Really amazing ideas in there, and I think in the end we greenlit almost 200 of them. We started seeing tens of millions of dollars of new revenue come through th…”