Skip to main content

Terry Semel (Yahoo CEO) says he missed the opportunity to buy Google

In a talk with The New Yorker writer Ken Auletta as part of a Newhouse School lecture series, Semel was asked what his dumbest decision was after taking the job at the Net media company in 2001.

Shortly after joining Yahoo, Semel said, company founders Jerry Yang and David Filo suggested he look at buying up-and-comer Google, whose Stanford grad founders looked up Yahoo's inventors. So Semel said he had dinner with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them what their business was with Yahoo paying only $7 million annually as its biggest licensor of Google search technology.

"They had no thought process on the subject," Semel said.

So Semel nevertheless asked to buy Google. They replied that they wanted $1 billion and didn't want to sell. Semel said he'd think about the price.

Another dinner and Semel agreed to the $1 billion. Larry and Sergey replied that they wanted $3 billion and didn't want to sell. "I couldn't and didn't buy this company and the rest is history," Semel said

Check the full Video here

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Script table as - ALTER TO is greyed out - SQL SERVER

One of my office colleague recently asked me why we are not able to generate ALTER Table script from SSMS. If we right click on the table and choose "Script Table As"  ALTER To option would be disabled or Greyed out. Is it a bug? No it isn't a bug. ALTER To is there to be used for generating modified script of Stored Procedure, Functions, Views, Triggers etc., and NOT for Tables. For generating ALTER Table script there is an work around. Right click on the table, choose "Modify" and enter into the design mode. Make what ever changes you want to make and WITHOUT saving it right click anywhere on the top half of the window (above Column properties) and choose "Generate Change Script". Please be advised that SQL Server would drop actually create a new table with modifications, move the data from the old table into it and then drop the old table. Sounds simple but assume you have a very large table for which you want to do this! Then it woul

AWS fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request

While using AWS and trying to copy a file from a S3 bucket to my EC2 instance ended up with this error message. Command Used: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ Error: fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request The error goes off if we add the region information to the command statement. I am using Asia Pacific (Mumbai) so used ap-south-1 as the region name. Modified Command: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ --region ap-south-1

[Non Tech] Want to know the recipe for Omelette :)

Fed up with Bread - Jam and Curd Rice, today i wanted to eat Omelette. Interesting part is I wanted to cook it myself :) So in the first picture you see all the items which are needed for preparing an Omelette. When I had a closer look at the eggs I see that almost all the eggs are broken. But believe me when I bought it couple of days back it was in perfect condition! I was wondering whether the eggs have become rotten or pretty old to consume! I tried taking an egg and break it but couldn't break it at all :) Since I have kept in the freezer all the eggs have frozen and looked like a iron ball :) After trying for few minutes of trying i removed the shell of the egg and then kept that iron ball :) into a bowl and placed it within Oven. I heated it for 1 minute and checked. It melted only to a limit. So i just set it for another 2 minutes and checked it later. It has melted but the part of the egg white has become a Omelette :( I didn't leave it there. I took the bowl out of