Yahoo

The myth of the omniscient founder: Zuck nearly sold to Yahoo

Shaan punctures the folklore that great founders always knew, noting Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel tell tidy visionary stories. In reality, Zuckerberg actually agreed to sell Facebook to Yahoo for ~$1B and only walked when Yahoo tried to renegotiate down to ~$650-750M.

“Zuckerberg actually went back and actually agreed to a deal to sell to Yahoo for, I think, $1 billion or $900 million. And it was going to happen. And then like a week later or so, Yahoo came back and tried to renegotiate the deal down to $650 or $750 or something like that. And Zuckerberg was like, all right, fuck this.”

The smart Berkeley kids went to HP; the weak students went to eBay and Yahoo

Out of Berkeley in '95, the top students took 'safe' jobs at Intel and HP while weaker classmates took jobs at unheard-of startups like eBay and Yahoo. When Yahoo IPO'd around '96, those friends got rich, and Hong realized he had been playing the wrong game.

“And meanwhile, our friends who were not as strong students who couldn't get into a good grad school, who couldn't get a job at HP, they ended up taking jobs at other places that we'd never heard of, like eBay and Yahoo or whatever. So like around '96 or '97, maybe '96, whenever Yahoo went public, all these friends got rich, and that's kind of like when you realized that like, oh, like— What game should I be playing?”

Offload your biggest cost onto someone else (let Yahoo host the photos)

Image bandwidth was nearly Hot or Not's entire cost, threatening $50k/month and doubling. Their fix was to stop hosting photos themselves and have users submit URLs to photos hosted on Yahoo/GeoCities, killing almost the entire bill by making Yahoo pay for it.

“—so the first thing we did was, that's when we stopped hosting photos and we started sending people to Yahoo and saying, "Hey, just send us the URL of the photo on Yahoo and let Yahoo basically pay for this," right?”

Steal thisFind your single biggest variable cost and engineer a way to push it onto a free third-party platform.

How Druckenmiller flipped from Bitcoin skeptic to buyer: the 86% diamond hands

Druckenmiller long called crypto 'a solution in search of a problem,' but Fed money-printing during the CARES Act gave it a problem to solve. The clincher came from Paul Tudor Jones: when Bitcoin fell from $17,000 to $3,000, 86% of holders never sold, proving a base of religious-zealot holders behind a finite-supply asset.

“Then the second thing that happened is I got a call from Paul Jones, and he says to me, uh, do you know that when Bitcoin went from $17,000 to $3,000 86% of the people that owned it at $17,000 never sold it. Well, this was huge in my mind. Here's something with a finite supply, 86% of the owners are religious zealots. I mean, who the hell holds something through $17,000 to $3,000?”