No Exclamation: Yahoo! No More

My friend MM and I began a small venture back in 1992. Both of us were geeks, and in fact, I wrote my first serious piece on MM's Kaypro, complete with a 5.25 floppy! About then I told MM, "You know, I had email in school, you wanna get email?"

So we went off to a big trade show armed with our biz cards and email addresses. I still remember the director of a division at THE company we were vying to strike a deal with, holding my card and staring at it. "What's this?" he asked, pointing to our email address.

It underscores the point I've always believed; entrepreneurs are the cutting edge, the visionaries, the real innovators, the real risk takers... and yet, this country of mine does nothing but flap its yap about "entrepreneurs... blah blah blah" while hoovering up all our money and shoveling it into the pig mouths of the real terrorists destroying my country -- and the world -- at a record setting clip.

Two years ago I cited two mistakes -- one past and one present -- made by Yahoo! Simply, hiring both Terry Semel and Marissa Mayer. While Mayer is the closer, I think Semel's hiring was far more fateful.

Yahoo! The once king of the hill, THE Internet destination, was run over and leap-frogged by a young upstart company that didn't waste money on hiring an old media guard like Semel, and stuck to what good entrepreneurs do: innovate. The irony is that Yahoo! used to license search from Google, and in fact, Semel tried to buy Google. Page and Brin rebuffed him, and behind the scenes I bet they held him in contempt as an old media walrus, plying old walrus ways like buying out what you failed to innovate on.

Old walruses like to lay around and throw money at problems and desires. Take away their bankroll and these folks wouldn't know what to do with themselves, as they're useless. Actually, since they're useless and don't have a work ethic (as evidenced by their lack of innovation/problem solving and thus having to rely on buying their way to success) they're worse because they're drags on society.

Yahoo! is no more, they're just yahoo, a sad signpost of those early exciting "Net days." I remember when Jerry Yang left, I thought, "Well, there's the bell tolling."

And now, with the news of what appears to be Yahoo!'s imminent sale, the wagons are circling.

There's a distant wind blowing, gathering the dust and detritus of things past, only to sweep into the midst of the present. Don't let it get in your eyes.

LA TIMES

April 18, 2016

Will Yahoo find a buyer? Bids are due

by Tracy Lien [yes, that's her name!]

Yahoo's turnaround strategy could turn into a sell-off strategy starting Monday.

After a tumultuous decade that saw the Internet company lose the battle for search to onetime underdog Google, churn through five chief executives plus an interim CEO, and largely miss out on tech's move to mobile, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company sought "strategic alternatives" this year — industry-speak for a buyer.

Bids are due Monday.

A sale would mark an end for a company once considered a giant of the Web, but it's an option investors — who have grown increasingly frustrated with Yahoo's direction — have rallied behind.

Under Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, Yahoo has spent millions trying to be a media and technology company, while doing neither particularly well. Though its websites get nearly 1 billion visitors each month, the company has struggled to attract the big ad dollars its competitors reap. Costly bids at creating original content — including hiring high-profile news anchor Katie Couric on a $10-million-a-year contract — have yet to pay off. After building up a video arm intended to compete with Netflix and YouTube, the company quashed the project and canceled its original programming — a $42-million revival of the TV show "Community" and two comedy shows — after only one season.

Yahoo's failure to spin off its stake inAlibaba — worth $32 billion — only added to investor scrutiny.

Although Mayer has in the past been hesitant to explore a sale, tech analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research said Yahoo is now clearly in selling mode, affirmed by changes it made to its employees' severance plans this month.

"At this point, the only way Yahoo doesn't get sold is if they insist on a price no one is willing to pay," Dawson said. "But it seems like there's a willingness on all sides to do a deal."

But even if the company overprices itself, Yahoo soon might wind up on the auction block again.

Activist investor Starboard Value last month sought to oust Yahoo's board of directors in a proxy fight, a move that, if successful, would end Mayer's reign. The new board of directors would presumably push to sell immediately. Shareholders are expected to vote on the board members in June.

That is, of course, if the board doesn't choose to sell before then.

So far, at least 40 potential buyers have reportedly looked at Yahoo's books, but analysts say only a handful of names have emerged as serious contenders.

Verizon

The mobile and broadband company is considered the front-runner to buy Yahoo. Aside from having the means to make an acquisition this large, analysts say Yahoo would complement Verizon as it continues to bolster its media efforts.

Last year, Verizon acquired AOL, a former Internet giant that itself had become more of a media company. Last month, it bought a 24.5% stake in AwesomenessTV, a Los Angeles entertainment company known for its digital videos. Yahoo properties such as Yahoo Finance and its online lifestyle magazines could be a valuable addition to the telecom's portfolio, expanding its audience and reach and opening additional revenue opportunities as its pool of new potential mobile and broadband customers dwindles.

The Daily Mail

The British tabloid newspaper and website confirmed it is in talks with private equity firms to consider a bid. Media analysts say it's somewhat out of the blue, but the two companies could be a good fit for each other.

“I think it's an opportunistic move,” said Richard Broughton, research director at British data and consulting firm Ampere Analysis. “The U.S. certainly is a market where the Daily Mail group has been doing well, and this could be a springboard for them.”

Analysts have noted that Yahoo and the Daily Mail trade in similarly low- to mid-brow, attention-grabbing content and target similar audiences — although those audiences are largely on different continents. A Yahoo acquisition could help Britain's most-visited news website quickly expand its U.S. footprint.

Google

Google's name has come up in media reports as a potential bidder, but analyst Jan Dawson says a Google acquisition seems implausible.

“Why would they want Yahoo?” Dawson said. “Google is an enormously successful company. It does some of the same things Yahoo does. Why would it spend a lot of money to get an inferior version of what it already has?”

There are bits of Yahoo tech from which Google could benefit, such as combining Yahoo-owned photo storage site Flickr with Google Photos. But that would be “a heck of a lot of money and work to add an incremental amount of functionality,” Dawson said.

Not to mention the risk of antitrust concerns were it to snatch up Yahoo's email, search or online advertising business.

Microsoft

A Microsoft acquisition also seems unlikely. The tech giant famously tried to buy Yahoo in 2008 for $45 billion; an offer that Yahoo rebuffed.

Eight years later, Dawson doesn't think Yahoo has much that Microsoft would want. The company recently shut down and sold its display advertising business as Chief Executive Satya Nadella pushes the company toward the cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Their search technology could potentially be interesting,” Dawson said. “But Yahoo uses Bing anyway, so it's just a small slice of additional tech. They'd be buying 99% of stuff they don't want.”

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IAC/CBS

Media companies IAC and CBS would “make more sense” as bidders, Dawson said, because “if you're already an online content business, Yahoo gives you scale and an audience.”

IAC, which has shown a willingness to work with different business models outside of content (it spun off the Match Group last year, which is responsible for online dating apps Match.com and Tinder), could find a creative way to repackage Yahoo's properties for new revenue streams.

CBS, a more traditional media company with websites and a broadcasting network, could leverage Yahoo's size to have a greater online footprint.

But Yahoo also comes with a lot of baggage. If IAC or CBS were to win a bid, they'd have organizing — a task that they might not want to undertake.

Private equity

Private equity firms are rumored to be interested in Yahoo's assets — and if they win Yahoo may wind up being sold off piecemeal.

“Private equity may recognize that an asset like Yahoo has tremendous potential that has not been unlocked yet,” said Peter Csathy, chief executive of business consulting and legal services firm Manatt Digital Media. “They'll look for synergies, they'll look at cost reductions. Their job is to find undervalued assets and build those up for an ultimate, significant return on investment.”

::

Yahoo by the numbers

1 billion – the number of people who visit Yahoo every month

9,000 – the number of employees Yahoo expects to have by the end of 2016 after it culls 15% of its workforce

$35.33 billion – Yahoo's market cap

$32 billion – The amount of Yahoo's market cap linked to its stake in Alibaba

22 – the number of offices Yahoo has closed since Marissa Mayer joined the company. Another five will close by the end of the year, including those in Milan, Madrid and Mexico City

tracey.lien@latimes.com

Message for America: Nucor & its Ole Skool Ways

Good interview with Dan Dimicco. He speaks forthrightly and plainly about America, which is refreshing.

If You build It

"In the fall of 2008" as I'm usually saying these days to the point where, notice, I'm quoting myself, "if Barack had done one thing, just one, if he'd have tossed us one bone, I could maybe say, 'okay, I get how the system works. But he at least threw us a rope we can hang on to.'"

Back then I had the idea to take $70 billion out of the TARP and tell the banks, Look, assholes, we're not gonna just hand over $770 billion to you numbnuts and not give the people whose money you're robbing nothing. So write down this $70 bil and stfu! You're STILL getting $700 BILLION so, one more time, STFU!"

Then, take that $70 bil and start a campaign where startups can apply for seed money. They go to the "restartamerica.org" site and can view tutorials, go through a bootcamp, see examples of what works, find mentors, find co-founders, network with others... 

That leads to putting together a pitch package: exec summary, slide deck, maybe wireframes or diagrams if applicable, maybe a short video. Then it gets vetted. If it passes muster, it gets seeded, let's say up to $70k. That's a lot of startups.

Most will fail. That's ok. Because even the failures will be better off; they'll have acquired very valuable skills in how to prepare a professional presentation, how to meet and greet, learn what investors are looking for... and with the advent of crowd funding, now they even have a second chance. Maybe that'd even be their first choice.

But the successes... there'd be a few... would be so motivating, so positive a message for us that we'd almost forget the evil empire because, well, who wants to focus on them when we got this great stuff over here going?

Hell, take that money and lay fiber in America  everywhere. Massive project, huge job creation, big stimulus for supplier entrepreneurs ... and at the end of the day, something to show for it: a state of the art network that will boost productivity (hopefully).

I believe entrepreneurship is one of the keys to unlocking the unprecedented set of problems that EM08 presents. And though all but the uber-rich have been hit with the EM08 wrecking ball and at least its shrapnel, young people today are up the creek. Have we ever put an entire generation at risk like this? This is suicide in the making, and the EU is foreboding in ts massive unemployment among its young people.

Enter Studio H, its founder, Emily Pillotin, and filmmaker Patrick Creadon's brilliant film on Studio H's foray into the unknown, which in this case is tiny Bertie County, NC. Yee haw, time for a hoedown.

Not quite. Studio H -- Emily and her partner Matthew Miller --  having been recruited by the superintendent to bring their design approach to the local high school. There are, of course, many letters between that a and z, but, as with all good stories, the troubles mount.

What sticks is watching these country kids come alive in new ways -- there's a great line by one of them when he's being introduced to the audience, and he says something like, "I'm an old fashioned boy" -- ways that city kids could never imagine, even in private schools. One of my big buzzwords these days is "craftsmanship," and I believe it's a dead philosophy, certainly in our dead ass educational system. Studio H teaches design from a holistic perspective, from the community perspective, in thinking and doing as one integrated process.

Olvera Street is where the City of LA "officially" got started, and is all touristy now. When Ma would take me there as a kid to eat, I remember wanting to stop and watch the glassblower dude. For me, the fascinating part was not watching the corny animals and baubles "come to life" but how he'd prepare the tubes, how he'd heat them, blow a bit, form them... the technique, the deftness... There is, for me, great pleasure in watching someone who's adept at something.

But the genius of If You Build It is not the voila! of watching these kids as design whizzes, it's in the how they become adept at design. And that speaks to "the 10,000 hour principle," but presents a problem for the artist; how do you convey the sweat magnitude of the principle? For Studio H, it's getting down to brass tacks; design begins with approach, consideration, thinking, then planning, and last but not least, doing. It's a ton of hard work.

One of the observations about East LA's lowriders is this; many, if not most, of the kids then were languishing in school. The schools in my hometown were some of the worst, with ultra-high dropout rates, recidivism and all of the attendant ills that go with a socio-economically-challenged area. But those kids who were into lowriding... they'd ply endless hours at dead-end gigs and plow that revenue into their craft, working tirelessly on their cars. And when you think about what goes into car restoration and customization, the myriad considerations and details... it really is remarkable.

I think that same spirit and practice is on display with the kids of If You Build It. Their "character arc" is also remarkable, as you watch kids who have no inkling of design principles and aesthetics blossom with the water of creativity.

An old acquaintance once remarked his displeasure with the dating scene thus; "Any woman I meet from now on has to be into something." And he didn't mean "shopping". That, I think, is what's so great about watching the kids of If You Build It, that they really get into it. Currently, California is having a statewide debate on the so-called "Common Core," what students must know. But it begs the question: Will students get into it? And beyond, method, to borrow from McLuhan, is pedagogy.

If You Build It is not a panacea, nor is it "the solution." Our educational system is so broken here that saying that is beyond trite. But things that work are already known, and some I have written about here. Let me add design and the pedagogy, the admirable practice of Emily Pillotin and Studio H. If I had a young kid in school now, I'd kill to have her/him experience this program.

The farmers market: Student designed & built.

Studio H founder Emily Pillotin with students CJ Robertson & Stevie Mizelle

IYBI's director, Patrick Creadon

Sundance Channel's, "The Green"

Only a few months ago I wrote about the new trinity which is inclusive of sustainable practices and green technology feeding into and supporting healthy communities. As loose as that sounds, it isn't, but I don't have the time now to go into it. Suffice to say that at this moment I understand how that is vague because of its over-arching reach. (For elucidation, go here: I wrote last year on sustainability in my take on EDENS LOST AND FOUND)

At any rate, I just caught my first viewing of Sundance's "The Green," (corny name) in all of its starbucksy feel. Actually, the program was "Big Ideas for a Small Planet," which I guess flies under the over-arching moniker. I dunno. But it was good. So, I give 'em props here.

The one company that stood out was Bart Bettencourt's and Carlos Salgado's Scrapile. While they make cool furniture from wood scraps, at one point it was suggested that the company change its name to something more "elegant." But they declined.

Good call.

Some Scrapile stuff...