Once upon a time, Yahoo was one of the largest tech companies in the world with a market cap of $125 billion.
They dominated everything from search and email to financial news and maps. But, since then, Yahoo has pretty much lost everything.
In fact, Yahoo was recently sold to Apollo Funds along with AOL for just $5 billion. It’s easy to see this and think that this was primarily because of Google.
After all, it was Google that displaced Yahoo in all of their dominant industries, but I would argue that Yahoo’s demise has more to do with their own poor choices. Yahoo actually had several opportunities to acquire not just winning companies but straight-up FAANG companies.
They had 2 opportunities to buy Google, 1 opportunity to buy Facebook, 1 opportunity to buy Netflix, and 1 opportunity to sell themselves to Microsoft at a generous valuation but they turned down each and every one of these opportunities.
This video explains the story of Yahoo and all of the opportunities they squandered along the way leading to the current sad state.