July 10th, 2008
Jerry Yang: Listen to … Jerry Yang
Jerry Yang, poker player, AP News
It’s been a bad year for Jerry Yangs.
The one everyone knows, the Stanford student who is a co-founder of Yahoo, is getting pistol-whipped by Google, founded by other Stanford students. Yet he refuses to accept that he has no cards to play. He gets an solicited offer from a company with bucks to burn, Microsoft, long ago proposed a 62 percent premium above what his company’s shares were trading at. Then he tells them (1) to go take a hike (2) that he’ll listen to any further (higher) offer but (3) doesn’t give any clear reason why Yahoo is worth any more than what it traded at, in the first place.
What exactly is Yahoo’s contribution to the Web marketplace at this point? Yahoo! Finance? Flickr? Nice. But not irreplaceable.
Still, Jerry Yang, the Yahoo! Chieftain, is worth $2.3 billion. Probably enough to set yourself up for the rest of your life. If you husband your resources. If you just cash in your chips. And accept that you’re not going to be playing for the championship of “who’s the most important player in the Web, now and for the foreseeable future.”
Take the money and run, Yahoo!
Find something else to do with the rest of your life, Jerry. What’s wrong with taking the fruit of one great idea and then looking for another, before your 40th birthday? A million people out of one million one would not second-guess themselves.
You might even want to listen to Jerry Yang. The other one. The one who won the World Series of Poker (and $8.25 million) last year. He is already out, this year.
He says,
Have the discipline to fold when you need to, have the courage to make calls when you need to, have faith in your reads, and also have the patience to wait for good cards. I think if you have those four you will do fine. Play position, and take your time, and study your opponents, and you should be okay.
Jerry, Mr. Yahoo: You need to fold.
And your next life will be okay.
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld is a journalist who has constantly looked at what media could become, rather than what they currently constitute. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
