Yahoo

VS

Joe Bongiovanni, Frank Natale, Parth Patel, Jonathan Rego, Justine Young

March 1995-Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Stanford)

August 1998- First funding secured

June 1999- $25 mil round of equity funding

March 2001-(reluctantly) hire first CEO Eric Schmidt-CEO tenure 3/01-1/11

August 2004-IPO ->19.6mil share @ $85 ($1.7b)-NASDAQ -> GOOG

April 2011- Larry Page becomes CEO (current)

Fun Fact: “Google” the result of googol being misspelled. (googol = 1 followed by 100 zeros)

January 1994-Jerry Yang and David Filo (Stanford)

April 1995-Two rounds of fundraising ~$3mil

April 1996-IPO ->2.6 mil share @ $13 ($33.8m)-NASDAQ -> YHOO

CEO History (8 total since 1995)

Fun Fact: Originally called “Jerry and David’sGuide to the World Wide Web”… changed to“Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”

T. Koogle 1995-2001T. Semel 2001-2007J. Yang 2007-2009C. Bartz 2009-2011T. Morse 2011-2012S. Thompson 2012R. Levinsohn 2012Marissa Mayer 2012-

5 year growthOperating Profit Margin‘14

Net Profit Margin ‘14Operating Cash Flow ‘14

Net Income ‘14ROE ‘14

Cash Flow Margin ‘14P/E current

Industry Avg P/E 32.3

22.8%24.3%26.3%$6.4B$4.9B15.1%15.5%25.6

Stable

6.5%11.2%13.3%$111M

$166.3M26.84%

3.4%6.2

Volatile

- Started by 2 Stanford PhD Students in the early days of the internet (mid 1990’s)- Started as search engines- Started in a garage (Google) and a trailer (Yahoo)

Leadership

• Talent Management • Acquisitions

• 163 Companies• $28 Billion• 15 Years

August 2005$50 MillionMobile OS

March 2008$3.1 Billion

Online Advertising

October 2006$1.65 Billion Stock

Video Sharing

Larry Page – CEO- Larry Page walks into the lab…- Willing to take risks- Have a hand in everything- Critical of the company’s

progress- “Don’t be evil”- Business for a better future

David Filo Jerry Yang

Yahoo refused to be called a technology company.

Flickr was valued as a database, not as a social networking community and asset.

8 Yahoo CEOs in the past two decades

Tim Koogle 1995-2001Terry Semel 2001-2007Jerry Yang 2007-2009Carol Bartz 2009-2011

Tim Morse 2011-2012 (Interim)Scott Thompson 2012

Ross Levinsohn 2012 (Interim)Marissa Mayer 2012-Present

A company as large as Yahoo needs clearperception of what it stands for

and where it wants to go.

Marissa Mayer

• Great Student• Excellent Academic Record• Excellent History at Career at Google

– More Technical Exposure– Employee #20 at Google

• Being new CEO of struggling enterprise

Marissa’s leadership skills and influential effectiveness are questionable.

“Good students are good at all things?”

EQ is just as important as IQ.

• Lecturer hating to get feedback

• Micro-Manager– Has more than 2 dozen direct reports– Involved in all decision making processes

• Should not apply to everyone – Instead, create trust and align values– If you think workforce is unproductive, either coach them

or let them go– Place isn't going to change people’s nature– Google has more remote workers

• Each worker generate $931,657 revenue vs Yahoo’s $353,657[2]

– Top talent will leave where they are more empowered

– classic way of treating the symptom and not the problem

– Recklessness?– Inexperience– Regressive decision?

• Lack of Trust• Inexperience• Arrogance• Insecurity• Poor Judgment

• It’s very different being employee number 20 than being the new kid on the block and moving into a house that’s already on fire[1]

• Yahoo’s employees to feel a lot like abused children– They don’t know who to follow or what to expect– Mayer has to earn the right to lead before she

leads– No one is going to follow her until they believe

she’s going to survive

-In the world of the web business, it takes 100 observations to make one action

-Monetization through ad clicks (~95% for Google, ~80% for Yahoo)-Human minds require time to focus

http://www.cenedella.com/why-does-yahoo-fail/

Scan 100 headlines on a news site and read some THEN look through 100 profiles on the dating site THEN look through 100 flight options and THEN look through apartment listings on real estate sites, or….

Would you read one article, followed by reviewing one dating profile, followed by reviewing just one listing of a flight followed by reading one apartment listing THEN going back to read another article, another profile, another flight, and another apartment listing THEN repeating this 98 times?

http://www.cenedella.com/why-does-yahoo-fail/

“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

Concentrated in one stack of information – intentions – inferences – interactions

Too many different KINDS of things… with too many different KINDS of customers… and despite

the evidence that all of these different options made their customers brains hurt…YAHOO!’s Leadership fail to have the guts or insight to refocus on things the consumers can understand.