Its taken them a while, all their peers except for Amazon have essential gone to the dust. If Geocities had been bought by say Google instead of Yahoo I could have easily flipped my options into my own startup. However dot bomb hit so hard instead of wealth I was left holding a huge capital gains tax bill that forced me into 10 solid years of hardcore poverty as most of my income was confiscated to pay off the debt. Not a nice outcome for companies bought by yahoo back in the 90s!
One person who avoided this was Mark Cuban, who bought a bunch of Yahoo! put options when broadcast.com was acquired, hedging himself against the stock crash.
What it seemed like to me reading over the stories of Mark Cuban was that he realized (with the help of some frugal advisors) that he just made a ton of money on paper and didn't want to lose out transferring that into real actual dollars in the bank. It just seemed he had different goals than everyone else: everyone around him wanted to get as rich as possible, Cuban seemed to want to have as much money in his bank account as possible. Two very different things.
If you read Mark's story, it's clear that he was aware of what was happening at the time but didn't drink the kool-aid, while if you look at the other dot bombs, they definitely thought the world was changing and the rules had changed.
When you just sold your company for a billion dollars, there's no excuse to be ignorant of all the options (ha) at your disposal. If you don't know about puts or collars, you should have an advisor who tells you about them.
haha true. However was the parent who referenced geocities selling a lot of shares or a small amount? I bet someone selling under a million $ in shares might not have the same advisory level as Mark Cuban.
I should. At the time, you got your stock option, if you were like me, just out of school, you really didn't have the resources to make moves like Cuban.
Generally this occurs when you exercise an option to purchase stock, then hold the stock while it significantly depreciates in value. Fairly common scenario during the dot-com bubble.
1) Option at $1
2) Exercise at $100, spending $1 to buy. Tax on $99 short term capital gains owed, or ~$35.
3) Stock falls to $10 and sold for a $9 profit. You still owe $35 capital gains and spent $1. Net loss of $25 per share.
So if you exercise an option to buy a stock for $1, you have to pay taxes on the stock's current value, but if you had bought the stock outright at $1, you don't have to pay capital gains until you sell? That's absurd
Yes. Yes it is absurd. A lot of people have been screwed over by this situation.
I think it's basically a bug in US tax law. The scenario is such an edge case for most Americans.
The other not-so-nice aspect of this is that it disproportionately affects people who aren't already relatively wealthy. Theoretically you can avoid this trap by exercising your options as soon as possible and locking yourself into long-term capital gains. But if you're joining a relatively established startup it may well be pretty expensive to immediately exercise your options. If you don't have, say, 100k lying around you have to wait until there's liquidity, thus opening yourself up to this risk.
There are some downsides but this is one of the reasons that phantom stock and phantom stock options[1] can be good for employees as there is essentially nothing taxable until the actual payout, which is treated as regular income and can have taxes withheld like a normal bonus.
Phantom stock is super interesting. Do startups ever offer it? I'd be curious to know how it worked out.
It seems like it would be better than the worst case with traditional options but not as good as the best case. I mean, ideally you exercise your options early at a very low price and then enjoy long-term capital gains tax rates. Phantom stock means you'll always pay way more in taxes when you get your equity-based payout - 50%-60% vs 20%-30%. At the same time though you are never at risk of ending up underwater.
It seems like phantom stock would be great as an option for companies to offer employees - i.e. you could either get a traditional options structure or phantom stock. I wouldn't be surprised if there were negative accounting or tax consequences for the company though. And maybe the administrative overhead for offering phantom stock in addition to traditional options would be prohibitive for small startups.
This sounds reasonable, however that subsidy/gain is already paid for with the employee's labor, which cannot be recovered. Paying taxes on what is essentially a guaranteed gain sounds reasonable, but when it is a gain earned by putting in labor over several years, I'm not sure this is the best solution.
Yes, salary is paid for with labor, but a reduced rate that is offset with compensation in the form of stock options. You're correct that it is taxed, and the capital gains rate is lower than the salary tax rate. My comment was more an observation, but the thought hadn't been fully fleshed out.
Wouldn't the prudent thing to do be to sell at least enough stock to pay the tax? If not allowed to sell at that point- just short stock to have the equivalent effect (minus fees)?
Something else I've never understood to be rational - If you wouldn't buy $10 in yahoo stock- why would you hold it because you have it?
My uninformed but seems logical answer would be sell the stock you got, pay the tax and buy and index fund.
> Wouldn't the prudent thing to do be to sell at least enough stock to pay the tax?
It's not liquid yet, that's the issue. That's what is nice about most RSU plans -- they immediately sell to cover, so you don't receive a ton of stock with an attached tax bill.
But illiquid options are different; the capital gains tax is for the paper-wealth you just received. That same paper wealth can evaporate, but the tax bill remains.
It's the exercise and hold that gets you. If you do a same day sell, you have the money to cover the taxes immediately, since you sold. If you exercise and hold, you pay the money to exercise, and now owe taxes on the asset at fair market value of the assets when exercised, which you might not have because your bank account is actually decreasing. In the future, if the asset loses value, even if you sold all of it, you may still be left with a tax bill you can literally never repay.
.. Although it is handy to have had an education, healthcare, police service, fire service, roads, libraries etc. But other than that stuff, it's very unfortunate.
The OP said due to tax policy, not taxes. Due to perverse incentives (pandering to various classes of voters) and unintended consequences, tax policies have become byzantine horrors.
Very broadly, it seems like tax policy fails to cope (pleasantly) with anything other than totally standard earnings.
If you earn a steady wage, or simple capital gains, things go fine. Anyone dealing in options, variable hours, contract work, or anything else unconventional faces totally irrational outcomes unless they're exceedingly careful.
The prudent thing is to only do cash-positive transactions, but that's easier said than done when the majority of your net worth is tied to your company.
You're right but remember that this was happening during a period when it was really hard to not get sucked into the "irrational exuberance" with Yahoo being as much of a poster child as anyone.
I got burned in this way with my company's options but fortunately only a modest amount that I exercised and held. I had a fair number of total shared but fortunately they recovered somewhat over time and have been a good source of capital gains offsets in any case :-)
> 2) Exercise at $100 [1], spending $1 to buy. Tax on $99 short term capital gains owed, or ~$35.
This makes no sense. Simply exercising an option is not a taxable event--you're just trading a contract for shares of a stock. There's no money going into your bank account.
Furthermore, you aren't taxed short-term capital gains when you haven't realized a profit. You'd need to exercise AND sell at $100 / share for those gains to be taxable. The correct taxable amount in this scenario would be $9 / share ($1 spent, $10 earned, net gains = $9).
It may not make sense but that's the tax law. You will owe tax on unrealized gain in this scenario -- as others have said it's due to AMT. Check with your accountant.
This is why 83(b) elections are so important. If your employer allows you to early exercise stock you can purchase your options immediately, prior to vesting, and pay tax at that time. Because your option purchase price will be equal to the market value (409A) the net tax will be $0. The 83(b) election is how you declare you've paid the tax at exercise.
That's only for ISOs, which are essentially deferred compensation. Getting paid in ISOs is functionally equivalent to taking an 83(b) election in that you're trading a risk of potential loss for the upside of only needing to pay long term capital gains tax.
Exercise of incentive stock options (ISOs) is not a taxable event, although you may get hit with the AMT. Exercise of non-qualified options (NSOs) is a taxable event. For both types of options, the sale of the stocks at a later time is taxable.
Has there ever been a successful turnaround of a software company of Yahoo's scale? Mayer has been tech news' pinata for over a year now, but the company was sliding before she was even hired. Looking through a list of dead Yahoo services, it reads as an obituary of region specific social networking sites and forgettable web services[1]. Social sites are notoriously fickle, and boosting one to popularity is somewhat of a dark art. Web services are a dime a dozen, and Google or Facebook probably has a better one. Yahoo seemed like it failed to break into any enterprise offerings either.
Poor leadership, and failure to attract talent. They didn't have the same culture pull as Google/Facebook/Apple in the latest tech bubble. And why work for Yahoo if you could do the same thing with VCs funneling you money? I think one of the most telling things is the lack of OSS from Yahoo. Their top repo on github has been effectively dead for around a year [2]. Yahoo hasn't been a tech company is almost a decade, and it shows in their products. Not even their numerous acquihires have netted them anything.
EDIT:
Looking at a timeline of Yahoo, they haven't launched a major product since 2006 (10 years). All new products have been bought [3]. Imagine if Google's last product was Docs. No Android, no Doubleclick, no Street View, no autocomplete in search, no Chrome.
> Imagine if Google's last product was Docs. No Android, no Doubleclick, no Street View, no autocomplete in search, no Chrome.
Android, DoubleClick, Google Maps (Where 2, ZipDash), Google Earth (Keyhole), and Google Docs (Writely, 2Web, Tonic, DocVerse, Quickoffice) were built of acquisitions, not new Google products. Chrome, too, in a sense (WebKit).
Thought experiment: what if Yahoo!, not Google, had acquired all those companies instead?
Apple turned around by moving much more heavily into consumer hardware, specifically the iPod and then the iPhone and iPad. It was not really a software turnaround, though that was a smaller part of it.
was it, though? I mean, none of the apple hardware is amazing, and today, it's not even really different, but... the software mostly works, and for computers? that's amazing.
I remember in the mid aughts, when I had been working exclusively with linux for some time, I started to see my peers, peers who wouldn't be caught dead with a windows laptop, carrying around os-x laptops.
Compared to the ThinkPad of the day, the macbooks were terrible pieces of hardware; they were obviously designed by people who believed in style over substance, and their keyboard was mush. But... OS-X? OS-X mostly worked, something that could not be said for windows or linux laptops, not without a whole lot of effort.
Pretty much all of Apple's hardware is amazing. If you try and evaluate them on specs alone then sure, they fall short - less RAM in their phones, slower clock speeds, whatever - but the vast majority of people don't buy hardware because of its technical specs, they buy hardware because it looks gorgeous, makes them feel special, and performs the tasks they need it to perform. Nobody ever lined up for a week to buy a ThinkPad.
The key part phrase there is "[c]ompared to the ThinkPad of the day". IMHO, MacBooks and ThinkPads were nowhere near comparable in build quality until the the MacBooks went to unibody aluminum construction.
I would say that it pretty clear the iPod completely turned Apple around, but importantly it was the excellent execution in the social space, on the software front and follow through with the iPhone (new hardware), this is a rare event and is what differentiates the Apple of that time from other companies which have had a breakthrough product.
I'd say Apple turned around by moving into media distribution rather than hardware. The iTunes and App stores are massive revenue generators for Apple.
Regarding OSS - Yahoo was behind Hadoop, the platform for big data and distributed computing. HBase, Spark, Storm, etc. are all built on top of Hadoop. Gotta give them credit for that one.
Sure, but Doug started that at Yahoo some 12 years ago now... I don't relish Yahoo's demise, but Hadoop isn't a great example of recent yahoo innovation....
That's harsh. There are a handful of top-notch products with great features that I would really like to see stay around in their current form. (Yahoo Finance and Flickr come to mind.)
Plus, while they are what they are now, you can't necessarily deny open-source contributions in the past. YUI is impressive in its scope, for one.
IBM has a large consulting arm (although it is shrinking IIRC), but they also still have an enormous software business that brings in many billions in profit every year. Hardware is shrinking but still pretty damn big.
Microsoft is simply alone in its class as a large, pure-play, shrinkwrap software company. Adobe might come close.
IBM, Oracle, SAS, PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, PeopleSoft, and many other firms bundled software with at the very least consulting services. IBM, along with Sun, HP, Digital, and other vendors sold (or leased) both hardware and software, along with consulting services.
Smaller software companies have existed, but have been notoriously fickle.
Novell existed as a network services company, doing well for a while, but ultimately faltering.
EDS is probably the closest thing to a precursor to today's SaaS / XaaS companies, and was ultimately in the services business and bought by HP IIRC.
I've been looking at this question for nearly two decades, and the most substantive conclusion I've come to was that Microsoft was a unicorn, a lone star, a singleton. And yet everyone's tried to emulated them. Or at least did until Google came along and cracked a different market.
AFAIK the vast bulk of Microsoft's revenue continues to come from software: OS, Office, and Server products. I've not seen a breakdown for some time.
Microsoft have been trying to get out of this for quite some time. Back when I worked for a very large revolving credit transactions processor, the stated goal was to get into the online payments game (this nearly 20 years ago now). Microsoft Passport was among the products aimed at this effort, which ultimately failed, attributed by many at the time with the lack of trust any other business had at getting in bed with Microsoft standing on their revenue stream.
This list of billion dollar lines of business at Microsoft was generated in 2013 but let's go with the safe assumption that from 2013 they doubled down on the software components (which they did) and kind of lukewarm accepted the other parts of the business:
Windows (which also, up until now, included Surface, which contributed $853 million to the total in fiscal 2013)
Windows Server
Windows Azure
Office (client)
Xbox
SQL Server
System Center (client and server both, so includes Windows
Intune)
SharePoint
Visual Studio
Dynamics (CRM and ERP)
Online Advertising (search and display both)
Office 365
Client-access license (CAL) suites (formerly known as desktop access)
Enterprise Services (including consulting)
Enterprise communication business (Exchange plus Lync)
Azure and Office 365 have to be an even bigger portion of this now than then. The number of companies moving to Office 365 for their Exchange and Office usage is enormous. Millions and millions of seats, at $5-10 per month per seat (or more), adds up quickly.
Google generate revenue through advertising, and more of that by locking up the advertising networks and market than through user data.
They also have exceptionally good technical execution on backbone infrastructure. I'm impressed by how good they are, I really am. As well as at not fucking up upgrades to software that runs on top of that.
But their understanding of, and attitudes toward, end users really, really, really stinks. Perhaps not massively worse than the rest of the industry, but certainly no better.
No, but software companies of Yahoo's scale are either established within the past 20 years or Microsoft. That doesn't give a lot of time for things to go great, then get well and truly fucked, and then come back from the brink.
Red Hat has been consistently successful since it's been a company of any appreciable scale so it's not an example of a turnaround of a (moderately) big software company.
Being first to market is rarely a long term advantage, it's more like a shot of adrenaline. Over time you build up technical, and structural debt. As the front runner you have to make all the mistakes, after you've made them a competitor can swoop in, avoid your mistakes, and outperform. You may not pivot because hey what you're doing seems to work, or you may avoid a pivot because you have too much technical debt. But it seems to prove itself over and over again to be a very weak advantage.
Yahoo finance sucks compared to google finance, yahoo search sucks to google search, yahoo content sucks. Yahoo mail sucks, yahoo shopping sucks. Everything they do is not as good, but they were one of the first to do it all.
The valley is very sensitive towards women running companies with large valuations, that company's woes would otherwise have flown completely under the radar. The next one on the "overhyped but disappointing and in the valley list" would be Clinkle and its now 24 year old CEO. No women there but as you will see the valuations drop off a cliff pretty quickly in this list.
Why is the primary factor behind Theranos's bubble the fact that its founder was a woman? That is a notable aspect but Elizabeth Holmes also leveraged powerful connections and a TED-friendly dream to get that hype. There are plenty of female-led startups that did not reach any notable status despite having a woman at the helm.
I'd like to see a woman hired as CEO for whom the principle talking point isn't that she's female.
I don't fucking care.
Be competent. Be a decent person.
Meg Whitman is a horrible person from everything I've seen. She's managed not to kill what's left with HP after Carly Fiorina drove it into the ground.
I meant to search for "most notable (female|woman) tech ceo", but left out the gender qualification.
A slideshow item I refuse to link on principle lists Alibaba, HP, Oracle (co-CEO), IBM, Xerox, Yahoo, YouTube, and ... um, one other I've now forgotten, fuck the slideshow very much. Oh, AMD. None of which are startups.
Women hold 23 CEO positions (4.3%) of the S&P 500, four of which I've already mentioned:
I think we'd all love to see the day when a woman reaching the position of Fortune 500 isn't news. As much as we might argue how much of Mayer's meteoric rise was because of her being a woman, I think it's outweighed by the fact that when she fucks up, she has to bear the burden of being the latest face of female inferiority.
The bubble and valuation? Thats not the real discussion here. The meltdown of a company that has no consumer product would never have drawn clicks. Fidelity could have marked it down 50 times and never made the news. There are tons of biotech startups with lofty valuations.
There was a consumer product. They performed thousands of blood tests, which were available in Palo Alto and Arizona.
But it's false that companies that don't have a consumer product don't draw intense interest. Ask Enron. Or WorldCom. Or Blackwater. Or Lehman Brothers. Or the folks behind the AOL and Time Warner merger
You have a point, but it operates under the assumption that there is an interest in disproving a role her gender had in the attention. An assumption I can't empirically prove, nor one you can empirically prove.
I would like to think the blood test product scandal was interesting on its own merits, amongst all of the other frauds going on in this country, but I don't think it really was elevated to the collective conscious because of that.
Holmes represents something inspirational to a marginalized demographic.
> but I don't think it really was elevated to the collective conscious because of that.
It was elevated because of the massive PR push by Theranos itself. I never even heard of Theranos until they did a massive PR push in 2013 or 2014. That, combined with the fact the company is valued at $9 billion, apparently has no actual working product and numerious other interesting facts about the company including it's well-connected-to-Gov (and large) [former?] Board of Directors, co-founder who committed suicide, at least two-large corporate partnerships that blew up (Safeway, Walgreens), etc., etc.
Yahoo was dead man walking before Mayer came on. She wasn't the right hire to save it, but she wasn't the hire that killed it.
Fiorina drove HP into the ground hard. It's survived, only barely, but no thanks to her.
And while both are women, I'd keep an eye on both Nadella (Microsoft) and Pichai (Google). Nadella's got a turn-around job. Pichai's starting from a better position, but with a company that's grown fat, lazy, distracted, and manifestly evil. I'd actually say Pichai's got the harder job, and I've not been particularly impressed.
(The fact that I had to look up each of their names to confirm spelling says something about the lack of billing either's getting.)
I'd argue too that Sculley at Apple was quite possibly Worst Hire Ever, in terms of total impact and lost potential. Latter proven by Job's return.
(That said as someone who's not particularly a fan of Apple or Jobs.)
Gil Amelio at SGI did spectacularly bad things rapidly as well.
From a purely outcome-based view, I'd say firing Jobs was the best thing for Apple's long-term success. NeXT software was critical to the turnaround, and Steve apparently learned quite a bit (even some humility) during his time in the wilderness.
Fiorina certainly wins that matchup at least. Mayer arguably took over a no-win kobayashi maru situation and managed to at least not have it go up in a fireball. But, personally, I'd settle for a significantly smaller payday than Mayer simply to not make a further mess of a company going down the tubes.
Fiorina, on the other hand, caused active damage to HP and had at least some role in the evolution of what at least became probably the most dysfunctional board in a large tech company ever.
I don't know about hyped, but Carol Bartz (also at Yahoo) was the most disappointing. She single-handedly killed Yahoo faster than anyone else. Compared to her, Mayer is a genius.
If you're a Yahoo shareholder, you're probably not all that disappointed. I believe their stock price has roughly doubled. Regardless of whether that was purely due to Alibaba or not, with her at the top spot the investors have done quite well.
I'm still puzzled by Yahoo's hiring Semel, more than any other executive mentioned in this thread. (e.g. hiring Fiorina for HP made sense at the time).
Yahoo was always trying to position itself as a media company rather than a tech company. It was a strategic decision to fend off Microsoft -- who was a very very real threat in late 90s. Also, keep in mind that AOL was huge and actually bought Time Warner in an attempt at vertical integration (cable modems, Internet, and content). These decision made lots of sense at the time.
Portals were a big deal. Providing content and being a destination were considered important. They're still important, but apparently being a site that sells classified ads on URL redirects turns out to be a better deal.
He was from hollywood, right? No "tech" experience? In some ways he was right. A lot of "tech companies" are media companies now. Was he ahead of his time? A poor exec?
Yes on the two questions, but for as to exactly why the idea failed, I don't know. I'm an outsider to Yahoo, maybe someone who was there at the time has more perspective. [1]
I just remember thinking at the time they hired him (and still think): "I use Yahoo for products like Groups, Mail, Messenger, and so on, why are they hiring the guy who greenlit Batman?"
It was Jerry's idea that tech was becoming immaterial and that the web would be just another media conduit. Terry was approached based on this. It was a mistake.
Yahoo's problem was that it was masquerading as a tech company when the only valuable asset it had in its books was its media side of the business. Yahoo had many media agreements, and it had developed much negotiating strength in that business.
Unfortunately, Yahoo also had these random properties like mail and games that made it difficult to forge one path.
Further, Mayer was someone who had reputation as a tech leader. She saw everything from a tech angle which made it difficult for her to direct the company in another direction apart from tech.
This was the reason why Flickr and Delicious were being shutdown.
When reading the article I was remembering the words of Dominique Vidal, former Yahoo MD Europe, quoted by Criteo's cofounder Rudelle in his book: "Yahoo had everything to be Google. But when we reached a peak of users, we stopped investing in R&D to focus on other expenses. That is the most terrible mistake we did". When you look at Google or Facebook and their R&D investments in non core-business projects, I am definitely thinking that someone got Yahoo's lessons right
I thought she was the most qualified CEO they had in a very long time.
Yahoo Mail has been a huge driver of their user retention, webmail usage has almost fully shifted to mobile. Facebook has gobbled up a big chunk of display ad revenue along with Youtube and video ads in general. Pretty much everything they can't control sucks for Yahoo.
She had one job. And that was in the company she was with from the beginning.
So she had zero experience working anyplace that is not Google, and zero experience as a CEO.
So she is not qualified and it shows.
Example 2: Robert Nardelli. He was such a great leader at GE. Then went to Home Depot as a superstar and managed to fuck everything up.
He also never had a job outside GE, the place where he became superstar.
Anyways why anyone thinks that hiring a CEO that had a total of one jobs, is a good idea, I just can't figure out.
I still remember when some were attempting to portray Mayers' demotion from the exec ranks at Google as sexism. In reality, Google had probably already recognized certain issues in her managerial style.
Agreed. If Mayer was awesome, she would have been CEO of Google, infact she was best positioned to be one at some point. All the people she hired were getting promoted over her. She was pissed, obviously could never show it. Bided time and took up the CEO position at Yahoo. Anyone with big ego would. I wouldn't blame her. She did what is best for her. Just like any other economic actor. What I really felt bad for - Yahoo's employees and customers. Only qualified person who was willing to take up the job was Marissa. Rest were no-name hacks who had no idea how to build products. Board had no choice but to hire her. Hailing her as Obama with Obama change posters, I felt was a little over the top. Yahoo's employees were desperate. She improved morale initially. Had she shown results, she would have won huge loyalty from employees and board. She tried. Made some bold moves and failed. Not bad in my opinion. I wonder, if any other CEO would have made such bold product moves. Acquisitions - lots of them, mail, home page improvements, new redesigned apps, attempting to build an internal product for search. She at least tried. RIP yahoo.
Whatever the price will be, it won't be the $44.6 billion MS offered back in the days. Shareholders are probably furious at Yang for turning that offer down.
With the right products, I'm of the opinion that you can name your company just about anything and be successful. I mean is Google's name any better if you don't keep their products in mind?
Let's also not forget about GoDaddy, which for a time was successful with that name and hobbles along (operating at a loss) even today.
I don't think there is a major problem with Yahoo products. I tried Yahoo mail yesterday and the signup process was nice. It looks like a viable alternative to gmail.
Google is a nicer name, it comes from googol which gives it some math meaning beyond the sound. Yahoo is only an onomatopoeia that sounds dumb to me (I am not a native English speaker though). Also, if you look in the dictionnary (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/yahoo):
yahoo:
a rude, loud, unpleasant person, especially one who has little education
This is probably a really dumb question - but I have 17 years worth of Yahoo email. Most of it is for nostalgia, but how likely is it that this would be wiped away if/when Yahoo goes under?
The same question, from a different perspective: How likely is it that your mail would be kept (and remain accessible to you) if/when Yahoo! goes under?
I think I'd start making a local backup/copy of it.
Can you access it via IMAP? I'd recommend offlineimap or imapsync as starting points.
I had a lot of discussion going back years on the Yahoo finance stock boards which used to be a bit like HN and they arbitrarily decided to delete them. I kind of gave up on Yahoo as a user after that.
How so? They put themselves up for sale and the deadline for final bids was today. They also missed profit and revenue forecasts, it was another ugly quarter for a quickly shrinking company.
Dramatic? Yea. Click bait? Only for those who didn't know it was coming. Yahoo has a very meagre future as a company hoping to retain their revenue (let alone profit)
