SM: What is the strategy you arrived at? And what is the process you used to get there? JK: It is pretty simple looking back. The process started simply by getting the various constituencies lined up. There was a board constituency, a senior management constituency, and you had key movers and shakers; people who, once
Vertical Strategy eBay is the most popular auction site in the world. It also operates the hugely popular online payment software PayPal and VoIP tool Skype. We will take a look at the Company’s various businesses below. Marketplace eBay.com is still #1 in auctions, after years of competition trying to chip away at its game.
SM: How did LeapFrog miss the Internet? JK: This is an interesting question, one that I used to ask a lot. The company was, in 2001, very active with a product called MindStation which was a dial up hub where customers would subscribe and get learning applets from LeapFrog. It was a flop because it
Conclusion Yahoo! Inc. is a leading Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide with 460 million worldwide unique visitors. About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2006 came from marketing services. The largest segment of it comes from search advertising. Of late, Yahoo’s financial performance has been mediocre compared
LeapFrog Enterprises (LF) was last left off in this blog with the March 2007 analysis of a possible turnaround strategy. Unfortunately, if you compare the stock charts then and now, they are eerily similar. To understand what is going on over at its Emeryville headquarters, I sat down with CEO Jeff Katz (great guy) last
Vertical Strategy Yahoo! is the most popular portal in the world and is present in almost all the important verticals. We will take a look at the Company’s various online verticals below. Finance Yahoo! Finance provides financial information, tools and advice on personal financial management. The site is among the top five finance sites. The
SM: How much money did you raise? ZR: We raised about $42M from Accel and Accel KKR in June of 2000. We also had a couple of private Silicon Valley luminaries who invested in the Company. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google is an investor. Mark Andreesen, who co-founded Netscape, is also an investor. The
SM: What is Elevation’s investment thesis regarding positioning? Is it still a prosumer play? EB: The Elevation thesis is pretty simple. It basically says that smartphone market is at its very infancy, and the arrival of the iPhone is expanding the opportunity, making it more real to more people. It is very clear that it