Fortune Favors The Bold

Hey, is meghano a millionaire now?

Someone wrote me a very condescending reply message on a mailing list. I replied with a very, very irritated and critical response. I’m now sitting here staring at my inbox waiting for the response.

Cool life

Keep in mind that there is a pretty wide circle of people in the Tumblr user Venn Diagram who:

• Are more or less happy with Tumblr the way that it is
• Have nothing specific to fear with a change of management or ownership, or even a modest change in dashboard behavior
• May find it appropriate and pleasant to use Tumblr at no charge for the indefinite future as long as it stays online

I have my thoughts about whether or not users might “grow out of” Tumblr as a usual occurrence, but a bunch of people have been heavy daily users for 3-5 years at this point. The earliest “sunset” for a failed acquisition division has been about 3 years, minus a few outliers. And there’s little risk that Tumblr will become moribund just because Yahoo! doesn’t innovate the product - Tumblr hasn’t iterated significantly in years except for some really clunky code editor changes. Doing LESS than what Tumblr itself did might be a benefit!

So, all things considered, there’s no reason to think that doom is imminently upon us. In the worst case scenario, a huge chunk of Tumblr hasn’t even reached halftime of their tenure here, if they’d prefer to stay. 

Oh, and btw, no one gives a fuck about associating themselves with Yahoo! or any of that “hip factor” nonsense, so you can bury that notion right now.

• It’s not necessarily a given that Yahoo! will mismanage Tumblr into the ground. While I’m almost positive that there will be a shared auth system in our future (you will have to sign into Tumblr using Yahoo! credentials), I can’t say Yahoo! will muck up Tumblr in ways beyond that. There are already ads here. Also, Yahoo! is not the same company today that it was when it made its 2004-2008 acquisitions. As a matter of fact, that whole management team was purged for its incompetence. Cast in a different light: Marissa Mayer’s company just bought Tumblr. That sounds a bit better.
• $1.1b isn’t necessarily the wrong price for Tumblr as an asset. I believe that’s as good as a guess at a valuation as any… it’s not a clear bargain, surely, but you could do a lot worse on the price if looking at any of the top independently-owned private web media networks.
• We can assume the deal will fail if Tumblr doesn’t change at all; we can assume that big changes are coming to Tumblr if its new owners are serious about a successful acquisition. Why worry either way? It’s not like you have control over the situation. Now’s a good time to gain awareness of other options if you are concerned that Tumblr is now, or might be, inappropriate for your needs.
• One term of the deal is that Karp stays on for the next four years under a stable contract. Very, very curious decision there. Who wants to bet that he’s still the chief officer of the unit in 3 1/2 years?
• Question: if this deal isn’t a terminal event for Tumblr, then for whom exactly does this deal represent the end-of-the-line? Deals like this tend to answer enough quantitative questions about the industry (and take enough options off-the-table) that what was once a company’s boundless potential is now their confirmation of limits, if not their declaration of outright failure. Ceilings are just as fatal to startups as empty bank accounts.
• For consumers, this only is a further demonstration that they have no claim on ANYTHING unless they share in the equity of the business some way. (And even if they do… maybe the end result is a goose egg anyway!) The masses of the Internet may never be in the mood to pay cash for anything, but this could be another bellwether for wise consumers to consider that retail cash buys more than eyeballs do… and cooperative investments add additional power to that equation.

Hey, remember that NY Strip Steak sale? We just cooked one of them on a cast-iron skillet. Was so good that we ate it immediately and I don’t have a picture for u

“all-cash deal”

Only question is, through which startup is Fred Wilson going to launder all of it?

Still getting AllThingsD mixed up with OneDAtATime