Showing posts with label Jerry Yang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jerry Yang. Show all posts

Monday, December 22, 2014

Betting On Jack Ma: Jerry Yang's Master Stroke

Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba Group
Jack Ma, Founder of Alibaba Group (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Entrepreneurs can be great investors. They are out there making moves. Some times they spot opportunities that they themselves can not execute on. There is a reason VCs listen to entrepreneurs they respect when it comes to investment decisions, like whne Peter Thiel listened to Sean Parker and invested 500K in Facebook very early on.

Finding Alibaba: How Jerry Yang Made The Most Lucrative Bet In Silicon Valley History
Yahoo’s board agreed to sell 523 million Alibaba shares, half of its stake, back to Alibaba at $13 apiece. Yang hadn’t been so keen to sell. They did anyway. By then he’d quit the board. Sure enough, Alibaba’s IPO last month rocked global markets. Shares of the Chinese e-commerce giant are now worth around $90. Yahoo still has a 16% stake worth $36 billion, but it left almost as much money on the table–some $35.5 billion–as its entire current market capitalization. ....... When the official history of Silicon Valley is (re)written, it will be hard to judge which of Yang’s achievements is bigger: starting Yahoo or betting early on Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of Alibaba. ....... Nine years ago, before Yang was CEO of Yahoo, he spent $1 billion of Yahoo’s money for 30% of Ma’s company. He knew the asset would be hugely valuable someday and refused to sell Yahoo to Microsoft when Steve Ballmer came calling in 2008, a decision that cost him his CEO job. Yahoo’s current CEO, Marissa Mayer, can do whatever she wants to put a better face on things, but Wall Street has marked her business down to zero. It’s now a proxy for Alibaba, and that was all Yang’s doing. ...... guess who’s getting a seat on Alibaba’s board post-IPO: nobody affiliated with Yahoo except Yang. His clear-eyed and early confidence in Alibaba has brought a whole new appreciation to his role as Silicon Valley’s new East-West power broker..... Yang has deep ties in Asian tech circles and will be there to point Jack Ma and the others in the right direction. ..... Earlier this year Tango, a messaging-app firm in Mountain View, Calif., took on $215 million from Alibaba at a $1 billion valuation, a deal that Yang helped along through his connections to Jack Ma’s deputy. ..... His new role of superangel offers a chance to shed his reputation as a bounced-out business mogul. Under his watch Yahoo steadily lost search and advertising share to Google. It also let Facebook slip through its fingers in 2006 by dithering over a $1 billion price tag. .... “I wanted to get back to being close to entrepreneurs,” says Yang, sipping Taiwanese green tea and ignoring his smartphone for an hour straight. ..... Yahoo’s fortuitous connection with Alibaba would never have happened if a Japanese telecom billionaire named Masayoshi Son hadn’t made a detour to Mountain View in 1995 to sit down with the young Yang and Filo. ..... The next day Son went to Mountain View and had take-out pizza and sodas with the young Yahoo founders. SoftBank invested $2 million for a 5% stake in Yahoo, putting in another $105 million in 1996 and then another $250 million in 1998 to take as much as 37% of the company at one point. ...... While Yahoo Japan began gaining millions of customers, Yang took his first trip to China in 1997. A junior staffer in the economic ministry was assigned to take Yang on a tour of the Great Wall of China. His name was Jack Ma, a former English teacher who had tried and failed to start a Chinese version of the Yellow Pages. ..... “Jack was one of the first people I ever met [in China],” Yang says. ........ Along the hike the two hit it off and talked about the growth of the Web. “He was very curious about what it’s like on the Internet and what the future might be.” Several months later Ma began building another startup based on grand and rather vague plans to connect Chinese companies with the rest of the world. He called it Alibaba. ...... BY THE SPRING OF 1999, the height of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo had bloomed into one of the most popular websites on Earth, and Son was briefly almost as rich as Bill Gates. Ma’s Alibaba outfit was piddling by comparison, just a handful of people working out of his apartment in Hangzhou. ........ But Son found him during his periodic hunts for new investments. After visiting Ma for the first time, Son recalled that he liked “the look in [Ma's] eye” and his “animal smell. It was the same when we invested in Yahoo, when they were still only five or six people.” Son put $20 million into Alibaba, before eventually amassing a 37% stake in the company, even as the dot-com crash wiped 99% off of SoftBank’s market cap and close to 90% of his net worth. ............ The star attraction at the event: Robin Li, CEO of search giant Baidu. Though Ma’s startup had swelled to 2,400 employees and $50 million in sales, Alibaba’s future looked uncertain. EBay had bought Ma’s auction-site rival EachNet two years prior and was dominating the market. Ma needed funding and hoped to get it from talking to Li, according to people who attended the summit. ........ Ma stood on the sidelines while bankers, keen to underwrite Baidu’s IPO, scrambled to tee off with Li. As a nongolfer Ma even found himself the subject of a teasing, $100 bet by other delegates: Which newbie could drive the golf ball the farthest–the slight Ma or the brawnier founder of SoftBank-backed UTStarcom, Ying Wu? ....... At the cocktail reception later that day Yang started talking to Ma, his old tour guide from eight years before. ...... Soon they slipped out through the patio doors ahead of a steak-and-seafood dinner and headed for the beach, a five-minute walk away. Within 30 minutes they had talked–mostly in Mandarin–about a partnership that would change the fortunes of both their companies. ....... Ma later told venture capitalist Deng that he had never expected to negotiate with Jerry at Pebble Beach. “Somehow they just chatted and then found out it was a good idea,” Deng remembers. “They made the decision quickly.” ...... “The Chinese ecosystem was not really Jerry’s natural habitat,” says Carmen Chang, a lawyer who helped lead Google’s 2005 investment in Baidu. “It meant he had to work harder.” ....... The deal was exceedingly complex, and both Yahoo and Ma almost walked away a few times. At a CEO conference last March, Ma recalled that Yang eventually sat him down for dinner at a small Japanese restaurant and convinced him over a glass of sake. ........ THE ALIBABA DEAL ALWAYS looked a bit risky. Even Yang had to be talked into doing it initially. Half of Alibaba’s value was attributed to Alipay, an online payment service, and Taobao, the e-commerce site that was up against eBay’s EachNet. Both were losing money. But Yang says he was captivated by the founder. ... “Once you meet an entrepreneur like Jack Ma, you just want to make sure you bet on him,” he says. “It’s not a hard decision.” .......... EachNet, the rival that looked like it might kill Alibaba, was doing just as badly as the brawny golfer who’d hacked at the ball at Pebble Beach. EBay’s management insisted on controlling the Chinese firm from San Jose, demanding a 3% charge for listings and a standardization based on eBay’s technology, slowing the site down. Ma watched and learned. ...... With its $1 billion investment from Yahoo, Alibaba held off on charging for listings, prompting merchants to flee EachNet for cheaper, faster Taobao. By spring 2007 Taobao had taken 82% of the online auction market, leaving EachNet with just 7%. ...... Activist investor Dan Loeb won a proxy skirmish and grabbed three board seats. He called for Yang’s head and got it in January 2012, when Yang finally stepped down from the boards of Yahoo, Yahoo Japan and Alibaba. ..... Yahoo sold half its stake in September 2012 for $7.1 billion before tax, or $13 a share. (Alibaba would close at $94 exactly two years later.) ..... “In some ways the Americans got played,” says hedge funder and Yahoo investor Eric Jackson. “Yahoo panicked while Masayoshi Son kept his head down. If Jerry had been around, he would have had the long-term view as well.” ....... Yang brokered one of the first successful Asian investments in the messaging sector earlier this year when he introduced Alibaba to one of his investments, Tango, which has more than 200 million registered users. While Alibaba had its own Chinese messaging service, Laiwang, it wanted a presence outside the country and in March invested $215 million, valuing Tango at $1 billion.






Sunday, December 21, 2014

Marissa Mayer: Going Down?

Marissa Mayer
Marissa Mayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I just came across this article in the New York Times. Just a few days back I read another article like it. What do I have to say?

The media builds you up, then the media breaks you down. That is their bread and butter. But the questions I am asking are:

(1) Is/was Yahoo ever salvageable? Did it ever have a chance to become a Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple again? Or had it descended permanently to an AOL status?

(2) Is two years enough time? Maybe it is. I don't know.

(3) Marissa never was Steve Jobs. She has no track record of having invented an entire industry in her early 20s. So this never was like a second coming of Steve Jobs. But I did think then and do think now she was Yahoo's best hope. Blaming Marissa now would be like blaming Barack Obama in 2010 for the sorry shape of the US economy. Although, let me make it clear, I do not think Marissa Mayer is Barack Obama.

(4) And all along I am looking at Jerry Yang's master stroke of having invested a billion dollars in Jack Ma. That move was as brilliant as the founding of Yahoo itself. Are more such moves possible? I would like to believe so.

What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Lytro: A High End Product?


Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com
Hi Paramendra, I personally really like the photo with the martial artists and the sword. The dimension you get is really intriguing. Although your photo is of course great, too. I know what you mean about not carrying a camera around always because they can be so bulky; I’m really trying to remember mine more often because I often see pretty things in nature that I want to capture. The Lytro tech seems really awesome for people who need a little help taking professional-quality photos, but I don’t think most people will be able to afford it if it’s too expensive. The CEO Ng said it will cost under $10k, which is obviously way too much for most people, so it will be interesting to see if the company prices it for the consumer since they said it’s supposed to be for the consumer market. I wanted to share this video on the Lytro tech with you. I think you’ll appreciate how it analyzes news coverage from different sources to show various perspectives on the impact the cameras will make. I hope you’ll consider embedding the video in your post. http://www.newsy.com/videos/lytro-to-revolutionize-photo-technology/ Thanks, Kate (comment left to this Lytro blog post from earlier)
It takes a white woman to drive an Asian to his senses. What was I thinking? The founders of both Color and Lytro are "Asian." I need to be rooting for them. Every attack on Carol Bartz is an attack on Jerry Yang.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter



Jerry Yang, David Filo. That is a count of two. No wonder they got beat by Google. But if the count were not two but a billion, or even 200 million like Facebook which is what Twitter will have to hit on its way to the magic billion? Then what? Then are we talking some serious competition? I think so.



Twitter does not pay anybody to tweet. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing application. I think humans are going to take over the world. Unless machines fundamentally innovate.

If I were to take a really long view, I think this thing is going to be cyclical. Humans 2, Machines 1.

Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News





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Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element

Image representing Jerry Yang as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase


Jerry Yang and David Filo camped in some trailer park on Stanford property and started creating a directory of all the interesting websites they came across. Jerry is human, so is David. This was when there were only a few hundred, then a few thousand websites on the web.

Then the whole thing exploded. Enter Sergei Brin and Larry Page. Larry once scared an Advisor by saying he wanted to download the internet, not one webpage, or website, or some data across the internet, but the whole damn thing. Sergei and Larry said humans can't, let machines do the search thing. And they won big.



But Twitter has all the buzz now. And Twitter is not exactly a search engine. But then it does something that Google does not do, and that is real time search. Their little search engine - the little engine that could - is still a machine, but it only bothers to search these little itty bitty tweets that get created by humans. The internet is more huge, and more explosive than ever before. And I am curious as ever. But I have only 24 hours in a day. So I guess I will let my circle of contacts act as a filter. JP Rangaswami out there in London has used the firehose metaphor to describe the internet. You are thirsty, but the internet is a firehose. How do you drink? Well, you use Twitter.

Twitter is not out to replace Google. But what if the power users end up spending more time on Twitter than on Google? Then Google has a problem on its hand.

The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Search: Much Is Lacking
The Next Search Engine
Email, Search, News







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Monday, January 26, 2009

Yahoo: The Original Dot Com


Before there was Google, there was Yahoo. Before there was MSN, there was Yahoo. The starry-eyed Google founders did make a serious attempt to sell off to Yahoo back in the days. But Yahoo was not interested. Yahoo already had a search box, and search was thought of only one of many things netizens wish to do. The action was elsewhere. Search was nowhere close to a central function that it is thought of today. Back then AltaVista was the search king, and Yahoo was good enough.

A few years after Google tried to get sold off to Yahoo, Sergei Brin would go on dates, and he noticed there were not too many second dates. I don't know if this story is true, but Larry Page said it somewhere. This was in 2000 when dot coms were crashing left and right, especially dot coms that did not have any revenue whatsoever, like Google at the time.

Bill Gates did make an attempt to buy Google. Buy it "at any price," he ordered his lieutenants. This was perhaps a year or two before they went public, or maybe even right after. This time around the Google founders knew better than to sell.

But search just kept getting bigger and bigger. Google became the sexy company, always in news. In a scramble Microsoft made an attempt to buy Yahoo. What actually happened after that offer was made is murky story. Jerry Yang has been hammered with the story that he refused an offer he should not have refused, especially with where Yahoo stands today in the market. Jerry says he did mean to take it, but when he went for it, Microsoft was no longer interested. Then they came back saying they just want Yahoo's search business. Yahoo minus its search would not be a Yahoo no more. A portal like Yahoo without a search engine?

Google is search king. The competition is not arithmetic where if MSN search and Yahoo search were to get together they would eat away Google's market share. Challening Google search is an innovation challenge. But at this point Google's search business is so capital intensive, it is hard to imagine a startup that will come at it from behind.

Google might not get challenged by another search startup, more likely it will get challenged by a startup that finds another central internet application. Facebook comes to mind. Facebook is not search, it is not email, it is not shopping, it is a new application. I am not saying Facebook will grow bigger than Google. Search will stay a central application online. And I expect Google to keep innovating in that search space.



The next sexy company might not even be a dot com. It might not be a 2D company, a rectangle on a screen. Maybe all the key internet applications have already been found. Now you can just keep making it better and better and better. But perhaps there is no fundamental discovery to be made. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Jerry's two big career mistakes. He should have bought Google. He should have sold off to Microsoft. Ha.

In The News

Microsoft and Yahoo: Deal or no deal? Fortune

Laptop Modem Demand to Drive Early WiMAX Device Shipments Teleclick.ca As Mobile WiMAX devices begin to hit the market, the bulk of early product shipments will be external USB modems and WiMAX cards built into portable computers ....... In-Stat expects annual WiMAX device shipments to break the 10 million mark in 2010
WiMAX: The next-gen net connectivity Merinews higher quality and almost no wiring. WiMAX has already found it space in Indian market ans is growing rapidly. ..... Presently, WiMAX technology is being used by Tata Communications Internet Services Ltd ( TCISL ) at several Metro cities to its broadband customers. Customers also have enthusiastic response towards its performance as they are not facing problem of interruption in service due to cable cut/damage problem.
When a Rock Star CEO Leaves the Stage
Washington Post Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 but was ousted in a power struggle in 1985. ..... In late 1997, Jobs returned. ...... hitting nearly $200 per share in December 2007, from about $3 in 1997, adjusted for splits and dividends
Quantum, Runcom Technologies Team to Develop Low Cost WiMAX Handsets
TMCnet
Quantum Telecom has entered into an exclusive agreement with Runcom Technologies for the development, manufacturing and selling of ultra low cost (ULC) WiMAX (News - Alert) fixed and mobile handsets. ....... Recently, Runcom signed a framework agreement with ChinaTel for WiMAX deployment in 29 major cities across China, covering area of 300 million people.
Sprint’s WiMAX Deployments – Uphill Battle Gerson Lehrman Group, New York
Possible DTV Delay Roils Mobile Operators PC World Faster wireless broadband in the U.S. may be held hostage to the already lengthy transition to digital TV if the deadline for shutting down analog broadcasts is pushed back ........ TV stations are required to move all their programming to digital channels after Feb. 17 as part of a process in which valuable frequencies in the 700MHz band will be turned over to mobile broadband providers. ....... The nation's two biggest mobile operators, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both plan to use 700MHz spectrum for the next generation of mobile broadband, based on LTE (Long-Term Evolution) technology. ...... AT&T is using HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), which can deliver as much as 48Mb per second in the same size band ....... Before Sprint Nextel launched its first commercial WiMax network in Baltimore at the end of September 2008, it spent months building and testing the networks in its initial target cities. Sprint WiMax networks in two of those cities, Chicago and Washington, D.C., still aren't open for business.
Wireless: The Outlook Gets Murkier for Clearwire BusinessWeek Last May some of the biggest names in the technology and media business, including Intel (INTC), Google (GOOG), Sprint (S), and Comcast (CMCSA), teamed up to invest $3.2 billion in the startup Clearwire (CLWR). ...... founded by entrepreneur Craig McCaw had high hopes of shaking up the wireless industry ...... Billions more in losses are projected for the coming years as Clearwire invests heavily to roll out its network. ......... the credit crunch could crimp Clearwire's ambitions. ....... The company needs to raise an additional $2 billion to $2.3 billion to reach its target of offering wireless broadband service in most of the top 100 U.S. markets by the end of 2010.
Recession Comes to the PC Makers The fastest-growing segment of the market is so-called netbooks—stripped-down notebooks that cost $300 to $500 and deliver far less profit than standard notebooks. ........ Microsoft is said to get about $13 per copy for the Windows version that goes in netbooks, vs. more than $50 for those that go into standard PCs. ...... Acer operates with a super-lean Taiwanese cost structure that allows it to price its products aggressively. Apple seems content to stick with making ever-more-powerful PCs for premium prices. ..... Big Blue sidestepped the tumult by selling its PC business to Lenovo four years ago.
IBM: Outsourcing at Home the U.S. economic downturn has already claimed more than 60,000 tech jobs in the past three months alone ........ With 200,000 service employees worldwide and nearly 80,000 in India, IBM ....... Dubuque and Iowa offered IBM an enticing package of incentives worth $55 million over 10 years. They include a loan of $11.7 million that will be forgiven if IBM fulfills its hiring pledge.
Broadband Bill Disappoints Nearly Everyone $6 billion is not going to get you to ubiquitous broadband ...... pegged the cost of creating universal broadband in the tens of billions of dollars ........ $44 billion over three years. ...... "advanced" broadband will be defined as service of 45 megabits per second or higher, while "basic" broadband will be considered 5 Mbps
Comstar Soft Launches WiMAX Network in Moscow WELT ONLINE, Germany










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Thursday, June 21, 2007

Money For Yahoo And Money For Google


Yahoo

Yahoo wins on the sticky factor. Yahoo visitors linger around longer. And so the Yahoo properties are better suited for ads that are dedicated to building brand names rather than pay per click text ads. Image ads are the answer for Yahoo. It might even have an edge for video ads. And video ads will be big money.

Yahoo is not anywhere near to beating Google on search. Google's search is an invention. Yahoo should keep at it, but it might be wiser to augment its strengths, and it does have those.

Semel is and has been an old media guy. He had a wonderful career during the pre dot com era. The guy is outstanding. But he did dampen innovation. He just did not "get it."

Jerry Yang might not be an MBA, but he has the instincts of a pioneer. He knows what it means to keep sniffing at the cutting edge.

Yahoo was hot property when Google was a non entity. Yahoo was so big and Google so small, Yahoo actually invested in a startup called Google. Yahoo back then did not foresee the Google potential, or they would not have passed on the opportunity to buy Google. That was years before Google offered text ads that have been minting gobbles of money.

In short, Yahoo is better suited for image and video ads. Google will continue with its edge on text ads.

And Yahoo Mail, that needs a major facelift. Make it easier to fight spam, danggoneit.

Google



Google needs to do two things fast it can.

One, figure out a way to add a two second ad at the end of the video clips on YouTube. It is like when you blog at Google's Blogger, placing text ads on the property is so easy. It should be that easy for users to monetize their original videos. But the ads should not distract. They should not be a 30 second video in the middle. Rather an image ad at the end.

Marry Blogger to mathematics. Make it possible to put down equations easily. Do calculations. The property will go up in value for that.

In The News

How Yahoo can catch Google San Jose Mercury News Compared with most companies, Yahoo is in good shape. But Yahoo's problem is that it's compared with Google, one of the fastest-growing and most profitable companies in the world. ..... more popular products that keep people on its site longer than any other property on the Web ....... Yahoo shouldn't try to out-Google Google ..... collection of highly popular Web sites and services ..... his company's uncanny ability to identify Internet services that resonate with ordinary Americans ..... Google has been earning 12 cents a search, compared with 8 cents for Yahoo. ..... uses math to figure out which ads are likely to get clicked on by Internet users, and it places them in the most prominent positions ....... Yahoo grew revenue a respectable 22 percent from 2005 to 2006, from $5.3 billion to $6.4 billion. But Google grew 73 percent from $6.1 billion to $10.6 billion. ..... he said Yahoo could still be No. 1 in search. "We need to figure out how to differentiate, and the way the current search game is being defined is not being defined by us." ...... average Internet users spend more than 11 minutes each time they visit Yahoo, compared with less than six minutes for Google and less than four minutes for Microsoft. ..... "They have the strongest reach and engagement on the Internet" ...... Yahoo's data on users could bring success during the next phase of the Internet, which he believes will include highly targeted, individualized advertising. ...... "Just like any other company, Google is going to mature and decline," Rafer said. "What comes after search advertising? You can beat your head against the wall. Or you can plan for the future for when Google is a one-trick pony."
Google's Iowa arrival should bring investment, jobs UI The Daily Iowan (subscription) create 200 jobs ..... an average salary of $50,000 each .... will pay the state an estimated $65 million in property taxes over the next 15 years. ..... combat Iowa's brain drain issue.









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