Allison Fass reporting on Peter Thiel’s talk at SXSW this year where he recounted the time in 2006 that Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy Facebook:
His only partial rationalization at the time was that in the history of Yahoo, it had made two $1 billion offers that were also turned down. And those were to eBay and Google. “At least I could actually make a pseudo-scientific argument that in every case Yahoo offered $1 billion and it was rejected, it was the correct thing to do,” said Thiel.
I should say that I know absolutely nothing about any sort of talks/deals between Tumblr and Yahoo. And I’m not sharing this to suggest that Tumblr should turn down such a supposed offer (my initial gut feeling is actually that such a partnership would make a lot of sense). I just found it fascinating given how closely the reported number is to the key number repeated in Thiel’s story.
“They’re the future for now. But nothing is the future forever.”
Speaking of advertising and Facebook, here’s Mark Zuckerberg talking to Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg Businessweek:
Over the long term I also think we’re going to make more money per amount of time that people are spending on mobile, because it has this focus as a device. It’s more like TV, where you’re doing one thing at a time. The advertising and monetizing has to be integrated in, whereas on desktop we kind of reached this equilibrium where there’s the content and then the ads off to the side of it. So I’m really optimistic about that.
Clearly, Facebook has decided to focus on this “more like TV” pitch and they’re instructing everyone to talk it up.
Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance of Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with Mark Zuckerberg on the milestone:
We’re having a hackathon to celebrate this when we announce it publicly, and the theme is going to be the next billion. So people will be thinking of ideas and working on prototypes and things that we’ll need to do to help connect the next billion people, which I think is pretty cool.
“Betting completely on HTML5 is one of the, if not THE biggest strategic mistake we’ve made.”
On Friday, a day after announcing it was slashing 10,000 jobs, the Finland-based company was worth about $9.3 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. That’s a mighty fall from the middle of 2000, when Nokia’s market cap neared $269 billion as cell phones first became ubiquitous.
Ouch.
Also, look at the macro-trend. Two companies are trending upwards (Apple, Google). While two are trending downwards (Microsoft, Nokia). Just thinking about the companies the past 10+ years in general terms, this alignment makes perfect sense.
“He pointed out Apple’s headquarters, then Hewlett-Packard and a number of other big tech companies. Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”
