IMO yahoo needs to exit more bad people than bring in new good people. I wouldn't sell to them (well, I would, but only for FY money for both me and everyone on the team, with a 2y earn-out) until it is clear they've liquidated all the dead wood. (although I'd love to get to be the liquidator-of-dead-wood... the Romney quote would be appropriate.)
>yahoo needs to exit more bad people than bring in new good people.
Totally agree that they really need to shake things up, and whilst they sit on their laurels, the valley keeps moving and every day we see salesforce, google and facebook churning through the acquisitions that either bring in good tech or good people removing them from the pool completely.
On "what to do with service on acquisition", I've been thinking about that a lot -- basically as we set it up, we've got a plan to maintain service even if we moved on to something else, by charging enough to make the service self-sustaining from the start.
I'd make an acquisition contingent upon allowing the product to live on (either with the acquirer or an independent entity or a non profit); this doesn't impair our enterprise value much, since the product doesn't compete with any potential acquirer. I'm looking at putting this into contracts with customers. (a product could still eventually get sunset, but I think a year or two is a reasonable period post-EOL announcement, not a month...)
Actually the only people I'd "FY" to are landlords in Palo Alto (if I had $100mm, I'd buy a house in PA for $3-5mm, even if it wasn't a great financial decision...), and gas stations (Tesla Model S...)
