Yahoo Tries to Woo Facebook With $900 Million 108
Krishna Dagli writes writes to mention a New York Times article on Yahoo!'s attempt to buy Facebook. Their current standing offer is $900 Million, with the deal including a degree of autonomy for the site and founder Mark Zuckerberg still in charge. From the article: "When Viacom offered $750 million for Facebook in January, he asked for $2 billion and was rebuffed, according to a person involved in the negotiations. Now, he remains undecided about the latest offer, made in the last few weeks by Yahoo. That offer, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed yesterday by two industry executives, one briefed on the deal by Facebook and the other by Yahoo. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are continuing."
my advice . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Go On! (Score:2)
the "bubble" (and JCM) taught me that..
Take the Money and Run (Score:1)
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Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead, the owner currently has $50m/year tax-free (since he re-invests ALL of it into the company). This is projected to double next year.
Also, considering his aspirations of becoming the next Jobs or Brin, perhaps selling off is not the best idea?
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It also really depends on whether the site can be constantly re-invented to keep up with what keeps its users interested. If they miss a tren
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True enough, but building a webite that makes $50 Million a year or sells for $900 Million is very, very, very low as well. Someone is goning to be the next Jobs, Gates, Brin, whatever. This guy's odds probably increased significantly since he already has a wildly successful dot com.
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it's a subtle way of saying "F*ck you"
When someone offers you $900 Million and you seriously consider it...
Either
1. You don't think your property is now worth $2 Billion
2. You like the company offering to buy
3. He needs the money?
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Dude, it's fucking facebook. You think anyone aside from dim investors actually cares about being in that loop?
Sell the stock and get out of the dotcom biz. The only thing more depressing than being known as 'the dumbass who could have had $750 mil but held out for more' is being known as 'the next Marc Andreessen.'
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The fun part is already over. Now it's just about marketing deals and tie-ins, which is not nearly as much fun as watching the thing get off the ground.
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"Marketing deals" and "tie-ins" == $$$
That's not fun? Hell, I do a lot of things that aren't fun (like work) for $$$
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Re: Your sig? (Score:1)
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Take the Money and Run (Score:3, Interesting)
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Jackpot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Jackpot (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, the guy is already fairly rich. Going from being a millionaire to a half-billionaire (say) is nice in many ways, but it's going from riches to more riches, not rags to riches.
Third, one suspects he actually gets more out of the power and glory of running a successful company. It doesn't sound like his Main Goal is to have lots of money. It sounds like he enjoys more the constructive pleasures of building a massively successful venture. Who wouldn't? I mean, unless you're a total slacker, then being successful, admired, influential and seeing your ideas come to fruition exactly as you'd want them to is much more rewarding than the next million (once you already have a few million in the bank already).
What happens if he sells the company? Sure, he's got a lot of dough, but he's no longer in sole control of the company. He's working for Yahoo. He's got a boss. Not likely he's going to enjoy that very much.
He could take his big chunk o' change and his fame and go start another copmany. But no doubt the deal would include a non-compete clause, so it can't be the same type of company. Got to be a totally new venture. What are the odds lightning will strike twice? That the next "brilliant" idea he has about a company is going to work out as well? He's going to be worrying about that.
If he had run the company for 10 years already and had had all the fun there was to have in it, I think he'd sell. But he's only run it for a very short time. On the other hand, he also knows what the commenters here are saying, which is that this is probably his best golden opportunity. I'd say the guy's in a bit of a bind.
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Alas, no. It's certainly the next best thing, and can often be turned into power with judicious and wise use, but money is not synonymous with power. Just ask, oh, say Martha Stewart or Ken Lay.
He could....[insert random business plan here]...
No doubt. But what makes you think your plan would work? For every 100,000 "brilliant" ideas to make a bazillion dollars that one can think up, you'd be unbelievably lucky to find even one that actually works o
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Social Networking.. (Score:1, Funny)
Jaysyn
Deal? (Score:2)
That's right, The Banker IS calling you a "sucka" right now!
Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The open registration uses the facebook infrastructure, but is in a completely different, walled off partition than the existing college user space facebook.
Orkut has a closed registration system and nobody gives a shit about them. There are obviously other factors involved.
Not bad... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not bad... (Score:4, Insightful)
But I'll tell you this:
Ideas aren't worth much if you can't execute on them.
-david
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http://www.commonroom.com/ [commonroom.com]
Take a look at the timeline under "I'm New."
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If Yahoo buys, it will fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If Yahoo buys, it will fail (Score:4, Insightful)
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Flickr? (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, Flickr has boomed since Yahoo! came into the picture. If they can avoid trashing Flickr, maybe they can keep Facebook cool too, eh?
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Climb down off your high horse. I've been a college student, and I'm also currently working on a Master's degree. Students don't sign up for Facebook because it's a snobby exclusive club just for them. They sign up because 1) it works, 2) it isn't ugly like Myspace, and 3) it offers reasonable privacy protection. Nobody really cares who made it or who runs it.
Whether or not it's own
EULA Gonna screw you! (Score:1)
Remember, the way facebook makes money is through its users, leave and all these issues will be resolved.
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Dear Mark Zuckerberg.. (Score:3, Insightful)
900 MILLION DOLLARS, PALO ALTO (Score:2, Insightful)
Like you, I am from Palo Alto. I graduated from PALY. I think facebook is a pretty cool website (most of the time). However, I would strongly encourage you to take the money and run. Facebook is definately not worth that much money. Consumers are fickle, and most the users of facebook hate you anyways (perhaps because they are ignorant, but the fact remains..). Why bust your chops and lose $1BN for people who generally don't appreciate you nearly as much as they should?
Good luck,
St
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He's from the east coast. He just works in Palo Alto. Seems he, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes met at Harvard.
Had any of them attended Paly I believe they would have been class of '02. I was class of '01 at Paly. I'm pretty sure none of the three of 'em are in the yearbook.
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1999 called... (Score:1, Insightful)
You may now kill yourself. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think anyone with any modicum of programming skill has been repeatedly slapping their forehead over the last year at the money being made from some very basic PHP scripts and what SEEMED like really silly ideas.
Seriously -- if someone came to you a few years ago and was like, "Umm, ya, we're looking to take, like, Geocities, and mash it up with Blogger, and AOL Instant Messenger, except uglier than any of those things, and maybe graft on some awkward MP3.com type capabilities, and leverage the awesome power of ColdFusion [google.com], and we've registered an awesome domain name -- MYSPACE, get it, like My Space, like My Web Space
Or if someone was like, "ya, I envision this site where everyone at every college can just upload all their personal info, pictures, basically just like Blogger, except only other people at their college can see it, and they can like join clubs and stuff, and groups, like any group they want, and post pictures of themselves doing bong hits, put the whole thing on a PHP/MySQL ball..."
I'd be like, "ya, I don't see college kids posting pictures of themselves doing illegal things, first of all, dumbass. Secondly, why join an online group when you can join a REAL group, in real life, with live members of the opposite sex present? And thirdly, why should they use YOUR facebook when their college prolly has one of its own? Even if they did, why wouldn't they use Yahoo Groups and Blogger and AIM just like everyone else?"
Shows how much I know.
Ya, I could have built this stuff. I'm not even a CS major or programmer, but I know enough scripting (perl/ruby) and server admin I could have pulled it together. But I didn't! It never would have occured to me to make something so bloody simple and so minimally better than what is already out there.
Just goes to show, it's all about the users, and if you're not a user, if you're not in their shoes, it's really hard to anticipate what will be exciting to them.
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Even if this guy wants to be like jobs or something, take the fuckin money and run. 900 mil (even if he ends up with much less after taxes, etc) would be plenty to pick and choose funding of the Real Next Big Thing (Tm). But, thats just what I would do.
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Why even bother buying (Score:1)
Because they've already tried - and failed (Score:2)
And you wonder where they got $900 mil to spend. (Score:2)
SELL NOW!
Let's Make A Deal! (Score:1)
I want... door number one... TWO! No, wait... oh Monty!
Your time is running out, contestant...
Ok, ok... door number THREE!!!!
Carol, show our contestant what she won...
Look! You have won... a donkey! Not just any donkey but a real live one from Pedros Farm in Mexico!!!
qz
So, essentially... (Score:1)
He could be paid a batshit fucking insane amount of money to continue to be in charge of Facebook, meaning that he'll still have a say in the direction that it goes. I am interested, however, in how Yahoo would change it if they bought it, and if they'd tie it to existing Yahoo user accounts or turn it into another MySpace.
I don't mind who owns Facebook,
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pointcast deja vu (Score:2, Insightful)
Dont let this slip by google (Score:1)
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Right, and it's called Orkut [orkut.com], currently used by just about everybody in Brazil.
What a waste of money (Score:1)
How do these people think? (Score:2, Funny)
What goes on inside people's minds when they are debating this sort of shite?
[CEO Thought Bubble]: $1 Billion dollars means a baseball team, 2 small Islands and a nice fleet of cars and jets. Probably enough remaining in stocks for a comfortable living and the odd shopping spree.
[devil]But 2 billion...now we're really talking. Just think of the possibilities. More celebrities to screw, 3 times
So the "News Feeds" Were a Test Run... (Score:1)
(Okay, so I don't actually believe that. But if I were more of a conspiracy theorist...)
Damn! That's a lot of money (Score:1)
may be the my idea not original enough
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Sorry, I mean Robert Persinger.
Seems to me like you're basically a frat boy troll and FaceBook put you in your place.
There's no anonymity on the internet. Between knowing "spazntwich@yahoo.com" and "Robert" I tracked down your name & status at the school.
3rd year English major with Sophmore standing.
Way To Go Bert.
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But your info is a little out of date, as I'm no longer an English major.
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