Ryan on the seduction of selling out early & why Silicon Valley’s heydey might be over.
Especially relevant given the Tumblr acquisition this week, just replace Vancouver references with New York.
Google’s 20th employee (who designed the homepage & Gmail) maybe bought Tumblr
Think of it like that.
Yes, Yahoo killed startups. But now this woman is in charge.
Marissa Mayer is a badass programmer - she’s not just a businesswoman or CEO, but a product manager intimately tied to iconic products that she’s created with her own code.
I doubt the woman who tested every element of Google.com to a painstaking detail is happy every morning when she visits Yahoo.com.
Do you really think that the woman who tested 41 different shades of blue is going to force a team of awesome product designers to put smiley faces and exclamation marks on your dash and turn this beautifully designed product into a monstrosity?
In no way am I a market analyst, but this just seems weird, especially for the price tag when compared to Instagram.
- Facebook acquired Instagram for “1 billion” when it only had 30 million users. Tumblr has over 100 million blogs & an “audience of 170 million,” whatever that means.
- Instagram didn’t make money or have any sort of monetization strategy. Tumblr’s average ad deal is over six figures.
One would just generally assume that Tumblr is worth a hell of a lot more than 1 billion dollars considering it’s the #9 website in the USA*
Other acquisitions to compare it to:
- Microsoft acquired Yammer for 1.2 billion
- Rumoured Google acquisition of WhatsApp for 1 billion
- Salesforce acquired Buddy Media for $689 million
- Wildfire acquired by Google for rumoured $250 million
*I just checked Alexa and it looks like it’s #19 in the US now and #32 worldwide
Twitter and Tumblr Set Their Relationship Status to ‘It’s Complicated’
This whole break-up reminds me of when Berger dumped Carrie via a post-it note. I don’t know why the Atlantic didn’t run this picture instead…
