Ah nostalgia. I think if we wish to avoid any bubble 2.0, we need to print this out and stick it on our doors, windows, pillows, mirrors, etc.
Re:
Broadcast.com - acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $5 billion. Yahoo! paid a mind-boggling $710 per user back in the hey day of the bubble. But why does this rank higher than the AOL boondoggle? Two words: Mark Cuban. Yahoo’s ludicrous overpayment for Broadcast.com gave Cuban the money to go out and buy the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and permanently implant himself on the American psyche. Unforgivable.
Although a footnote on #1 is necessary. Listen, being a Lakers fan (until the Kobe-era, anyway) notwithstanding, Mark Cuban is not so bad. He represents a lot of what is good about business and life, but also some of what is bad (but don’t we all?). Anyway, my point is: it’s not the Yahoo! acquisition of Broadcast itself that what made Cuban able to go out and be Mark, it’s that he sold Yahoo! stock unlike all of the other yahoo’s who made paper billions but did not see the writing on the wall. For what it’s worth, he gets props for that.
Didn’t JFK’s dad sell his stock portfolio right before the 1929 Crash because some shoeshiner gave him stock advice (suggesting that the market was getting way too ahead of itself?). You know what they say in stock investing: buying is half the equation… well, Mark sold twice, one Broadcast, then Yahoo stock.
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