Joe Stump in a post titled, “Dear Yahoo!, hire me as your next CEO“
- I’d buy Instagram and put them in charge of both Instagram and Flickr. They would have 100% autonomy over the entire “Yahoo! Photo” division.
- I’d buy Soft Facade and run them as an internal design and branding agency for all of our products.
- I’d figure out a way to wrestle The Barbarian Group into the fold and put them in charge of all PR and marketing initiatives.
- I would buy Twitter and Square in order to bring Jack Dorsey on full-time to run a new division called “Yahoo! Mobile”. He would have 100% autonomy over the entire mobile strategy.
- I’d buy Path and With for the sole reason of bringing Dave and his team on to lead the new “Yahoo! Social” division.
- I’d buy the NYT (for a mere $1.5bn!) and recruit John Gruber to be Editor in Chief of the “Yahoo! News” division.
It’s not that easy. You can take the top 100 bloggers on Technorati and force them to all write for one publication (yours) and aside from their existing readers, you won’t suddenly have the best blog in the world. The same analogy goes for Joe’s. Each of these entrepreneurs have done something great. Naturally, it would make sense that their collective talents could “save Yahoo!” but that’s far from the truth. In fact, many of these entrepreneurs have had many failures in the past and not every one of their ideas was a billion dollar idea. Asking that person from Instagram to lead Yahoo! Photo doesn’t guarantee its success. Gruber can’t run Yahoo! News. Maybe he can but you just don’t know that. Gruber’s analysis works well in what he does but applying his style of reporting to gossip news or the obituaries would be insane. It wouldn’t work.
Yahoo! is undoubtedly full of amazing people. The company I work for is full of amazing people. In fact, most people would say their company has the most amazing people in the world. However, as a founder yourself, you know that there are many more variables that equal success. A lot of it has to do with what your competition does and how they execute. Apple received a lot of help from Microsoft in the success of the iPod and Mac OS when Microsoft continued to release crappy offerings in digital music and operating systems. Google succeeded because other search engines were slow and had slow indexing. In addition, the collective synergy of talent + ideas + timing + execution + capital will equal success…sometimes.
Acquiring Instagram and Twitter won’t save Yahoo!. Yahoo! has to save Yahoo! and a few dozen amazing people under one roof doesn’t mean shit.