It is now official that Tumblr will become part of Yahoo. Marissa announced the news in style with an animated gif. I have been lucky to be part of Tumblr’s journey as an angel investor and as an active blogger on the service since February 2008. I am excited about the combination with Yahoo. When Marissa took over Yahoo, I expected that acquisitions would play a role in her transformation of the company. At the time I wrote that the ideal target would be “startups that have very talented peo...

A number of people have published lists of things that Marissa Mayer should fix as the new CEO of Yahoo. Several of these recommendations include firing a lot of people. And we can now also read Marissa's first memo to Yahoo employees, which clearly tries to alleviate fears of layoffs. My own theory of organizational change is a bit different and it is based on observations of several successful and failed turnarounds going back to my days as a management consultant. You can’t have chang...

If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream issue. That was sort of the gist of Mark Cuban’s post. The first group of people who should really start t...

Yesterday, Yahoo fired CEO Carol Bartz. Whether or not you agree with that, one thing is clear: firing someone over the phone is wrong. Much as it may be difficult this is a message that should be delivered in person if at all possible (for a remote contractor might have to use Skype). Hearing that Bartz was fired over the phone reminded me not just of “Up In the Air” but also of struggles with firing that I have encountered myself. Firing is probably the hardest thing to do and I was terribl...

After at first appearing to be shutting it down, Yahoo is now apparently selling delicious (or possibly giving it away). Google or Microsoft should be first in line to pick it up, but especially Google. Why? Because delicious would help immensely with battling spam and content farms, something many folks have criticized Google for lately, including Jeff Atwood and Marco Arment. That was of course the original idea behind Yahoo buying delicious – at that time Yahoo was still very much in the s...

Hats off to Mark Zuckerberg and the entire team at Facebook. They are managing that most impressive feat of innovating at scale. They are also incredibly ambitious in what they want to accomplish. The goal seems nothing short of one identity and one graph to “rule them all." With over 400 million users worldwide and a sign on system that is being widely adopted this ambition doesn’t seem crazy. Especially when you layer on top of this the possibility that soon many of these users might have F...

This afternoon I am participating on a panel for Yahoo! OpenHack NYC titled “Building on Others’ APIs: A Strong Foundation or Recipe for Disaster." That will make a good complement to yesterday’s discussion at the USV portfolio summit where we spoke about the importance of having an API. In preparation for the summit, I asked Oren Michels from Mashery whether he had a good example illustrating the importance of having an API. Oren kindly send along this impressive chart: Now of course this do...

A while back, I wrote that display advertising is too complicated. Today Google announced their entry into the display ad exchange business. Both in their announcement and in this conversation with Neal Mohan from Google, the idea of bringing simplicity to the market is cited as a major driving force. Google also describes the system as if it were the first display ad exchange ever. Of course the reality is a bit different, with Yahoo/Right Media and others having offered exchange capabilitie...

The top link on techmeme right now is yesterday’s post by Jason Calacanis titled “Yahoo committed seppukku today." It is worth reading because it powerfully (and hilariously) lays out the position that handing over search to Microsoft is a huge mistake for Yahoo. It is a position I am very familiar with, because I made much of the same argument (although in a less entertaining fashion) last May. But it is more than a year later and I am not sure the logic still applies. First, Yahoo has lost ...

Fred posted on the weekend about giving Bing a chance. I am doing the same this week having set Bing as the default search engine in Firefox. My main reason is that I firmly believe in the need for search diversity. A search mono-culture would be bad for the Internet for several reasons:Too much power. Search is so central to the web experience that it provides a lot of power. That power should not be concentrated in a single player with a very high market share. I am not suggesting that Goog...