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 people and also interesting products but could benefit from the scale of Yahoo.” Tumblr fits that bill perfectly. It has super talented people and a really interesting product. It can also benefit from Yahoo’s scale – both for reducing its infrastructure cost and for selling the wonderfully nonintrusive ads that appear occasionally in the Tumblr dashboard.
I am also excited because this will finally bring Yahoo to New York City. During the dotcom days Yahoo moved all of its acquisitions out West (e.g. Hotjobs) which was a tremendous talent drain for New York. Now most of the big Internet companies will have a strong presence here which is great for the local community. These days acquiring companies understand the importance of New York and are enabling the local teams to build out a stronger presence (e.g. eBay and Hunch, Adobe and Behance). We have Google to thank for starting this trend.
And now it’s time for me to reply to all my friends who have sent congratulations over the last few days. I couldn’t reply because the deal had not been officially announced yet. Which reminds me: to all the journalists who sent “congrats” notes fishing for an official confirmation – nice try and better luck next time!
