Even before the news was confirmed on Monday, critics with long memories were reminding anyone who would listen about Yahoo’s track record with acquisitions, which has some rather notorious bumps in it, including two major ones known as GeoCities and Flickr. Those two deals alone have made many question whether Yahoo will be able to do the right thing with Tumblr — and while it may be unfair to lay the blame for these at Marissa Mayer’s feet, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the future of this latest acquisition.

How long will it take yahoo to ruin tumblr?—
Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) May 19, 2013

GeoCities + Flickr: billions in missed opportunities

In 1999, Yahoo bought GeoCities for about $3.5 billion, which even at the time was an eye-popping amount. Although it was over a decade ago, which is eons in internet time, there are some broad similarities between what GeoCities was then and what Tumblr is now: both were distinctive and somewhat chaotic communities, focused on allowing individuals to create their own space. Yahoo did a number of things that arguably accelerated the demise of its high-priced acquisition, including trying to monetize it through hosting fees and cheesy banner ads.

The other stick that many anti-Yahoo types use when they want to beat the company up about its acquisition strategy is Flickr, the pioneering photo community that languished under Yahoo’s ownership until relatively recently. As many of its hard-core fans (including me) have argued in the past, Flickr was — or at least could have been — Instagram before Instagram.

There have been a number of post-mortems on what happened with Flickr, but in a nutshell Yahoo did almost everything wrong: the larger company took away or smothered much of the photo-sharing community’s most important features, prevented its employees from innovating or growing, and forced all kinds of integration between the two platforms that did nothing to benefit users — in fact, precisely the opposite. It was like the trifecta of failure, and a perfect example of why most large-scale acquisitions don’t work.

“All Yahoo cared about was the database its users had built and tagged. It didn’t care about the community that had created it or (more importantly) continuing to grow that community by introducing new features.”

Successful mergers are exceedingly rare

It’s certainly reasonable to argue — as many of her fans in Silicon Valley have since the Tumblr deal was announced — that Marissa Mayer shouldn’t be held to account for these lapses, since she had nothing to do with them and the internet has changed a lot since then. Yahoo is also substantially more desperate than it used to be (if that’s possible), and that has arguably made Mayer more cautious about potential screw-ups.

But the bottom line is that just because Mayer is a new CEO doesn’t mean she or the company won’t screw Tumblr up somehow anyway — either deliberately or by accident. That’s because large companies like Yahoo have a way of destroying the value of the things they acquire even if they don’t mean to do so, especially when the thing they have acquired is a somewhat unique community with special characteristics, which Tumblr arguably is.

This is why successful large acquisitions of web communities or services are so rare — rare enough that almost everyone can only point to a single example: namely, Google buying YouTube (although Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram is looking like it may be another one). The question for Yahoo and Mayer is whether Tumblr can be kept as a distinct entity and yet still monetized, as YouTube has been, or whether the process of monetization will inevitably turn Tumblr into the latest example of a MySpace-style failure.

Can Yahoo do what Google did with YouTube?

Former YouTube exec Hunter Walk took a look at what Google did right in the case of YouTube, and boiled it down to five factors, including keeping the product from getting too intertwined with the parent company and maintaining a separate physical identity. But to me the most important ones were:

Protect Tumblr from “helpful” Yahoos: This is where the accidental destruction of acquisitions often comes from — people who just want to help, but whose requests for features and other attempts at integration wound up almost “hugging us to death,” as Walk puts it. There is a powerful desire to get efficiencies out of acquisitions, but many of those attempts fail badly and ruin the thing they were trying to monetize or grow in the first place.

Stop short-term monetization that won’t scale: Walk talks about how YouTube managed to avoid the natural desire to build all sorts of easy-win monetization methods into the platform, and focused instead on longer-term approaches that were harder to sell in the early going but built more value. If Yahoo sees Tumblr as a way to bulk up its banner ad or other programs, it could wind up making the exact same mistake that YouTube was able to avoid.

In the end, much of the answer to the question about Yahoo screwing up Tumblr rests on Marissa Mayer, and her ability to stave off the desires of both the board of directors and the other senior managers who see Tumblr as either a distraction or a digital cow to be milked and then sent to the abattoir.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr / Stephen Brace and Getty Images / Chris Jackson and Pamuk Sekerli Tardis

Flickr is getting three big updates. All users will get 1 terabyte of photo storage for free. The site’s interface is also being redesigned to focus on full-resolution photos — both in photo browsing and in search — rather than words and links. Users will be able to share the full-resolution photos by email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. And, in addition to the iOS app Flickr launched last December, Yahoo is launching an Android app.

Flickr Pro, which had allowed users to pay for more storage space, is going away. “There’s no such thing as Flickr Pro today because [with so many people taking photographs] there’s really no such thing as professional photographers anymore,” Mayer said (though she acknowledged that there are “different skill levels”). There are still a couple of paid options: Users can pay $49.99 a year for an ad-free interface, and can add a second terabyte of data for $499.99 per year. It’s unclear what will happen with existing Flickr Pro memberships that users have already paid for.

On an investor call on Monday morning, Mayer had noted that there are “obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr,” but that it’s too early to say what those opportunities will be.

The choice of location for the press conference — a hotel in Times Square — became clear as Mayer announced that Yahoo has taken out a lease for office space at 229 West 43rd Street — the old New York Times building — and will be moving all 500 of its New York-based employees there. Tumblr’s employees, however, will stay downtown at their Union Square office.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg took the stage to say the move reflects “what a big player New York has become in the tech industry,” with Yahoo becoming “one of the largest tech presences in the city.” He noted that Tumblr is a “New York-grown company” and that NYC was the first city government to have its own Tumblr.

“Twenty years ago, if you looked out the window, there were plenty of yahoos in Times Square,” he said. “Now the Yahoos here will make an honest living … and help us grow and make our economy stronger.”

“Part of our strategy here is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” Mayer said. In fact, Tumblr CEO David Karp wasn’t on the morning’s call: He was at an all-team meeting. (“Instead of calling his all-company meetings ‘all-hands,’ he calls them ‘all-team,’”Mayer noted. “I think in the future we’ll call meetings at Yahoo ‘all-team’ meetings.”)

“When you look at the best and most-successful billion-dollar acquisitions in the tech space — eBay and Paypal, Google and YouTube — there’s a meme that emerges,” Mayer said. “The best acquisitions…allow the two brands and the two products and services to evolve somewhat separately.”

Yahoo has “well over” 700 million users, Mayer said, while Tumblr has 300 million — but these audiences overlap so little that the companies can count their combined user base at over a billion.

The difference in user demographics, Mayer acknowledged, means there’s “a type of user that will always prefer Tumblr and may never come to Yahoo” — and that’s fine. Yahoo can “provide search seamlessly in the background” for Tumblr, but it could be existing and future Yahoo users that benefit most from the Tumblr acquisition: “As we pull Tumblr content into our news feeds and our media experiences, it will cause the core Yahoo properties to become that much more interesting and that much richer,” leading more users to the site even if they are from “very different [demographic] profiles from people coming to Tumblr.”

Tumblr users should get ready for more ads

Tumblr will remain a separate site, but that doesn’t mean its users won’t notice a few changes — particularly on the advertising front. “There’s a number of different places where we think we can monetize in a way that’s meaningful and really additive to the user experience,” Mayer said. Tumblr is already including a few ads in its dashboard, but ”we would like to look at that and understand how we can introduce ads — a very light ad load where the impact is really created because the ads fit the user’s expectation and follow the form and function of the dashboard.”

In addition, Mayer said that Yahoo might allow individual Tumblr users to enable ads on their blogs, “but that would always be done with the blogger’s permission.”

So what about Tumblr CEO Karp’s well-known dislike of advertising? “David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change…we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

So, uh, what about Flickr?

In 2005, Yahoo acquired photo-sharing service Flickr. That acquisition, long before Mayer’s time, is widely viewed as a big failure — one that ruined the Flickr experience because Yahoo tried to integrate it, then largely abandoned it.

On Monday afternoon, though, Yahoo is expected to announce updates to Flickr. Could we see a resurgence in that platform, as part of Yahoo’s new “don’t-screw-it-up” acquisition philosophy? Mayer was cautious: “In terms of how Tumblr evolves, it really depends on the creators,” she said. But when it comes to Flickr, “I think it is noteworthy that a lot of the posts on Tumblr are graphical. There’s some obvious synergies between Flickr and Tumblr, in that regard,” and it’s “probably something we’ll turn our attention to in the future. Flickr could provide great storage for albums or slideshows, things like that. We’ll see.”

In the release, the companies noted that “Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer also announced the acquisition on her own Tumblr, while Tumblr CEO David Karp wrote about it on Tumblr’s staff blog.

Tumblr has over 300 million monthly unique visitors, according to the release. (comScore had pegged the site’s April traffic at 124 million uniques.) The companies say that half of Tumblr’s users use its mobile app, and reiterated one of the reasons that Yahoo was willing to shell out over a billion dollars for a company whose revenues were less than $15 million last year: “The combination of Tumblr+Yahoo is expected to grow Yahoo’s audience by 50 percent to more than a billion monthly visitors, and to grow traffic by approximately 20 percent.”

“Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission — to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve — certainly isn’t changing,” Tumblr CEO David Karp said in a statement. “But we’re elated to have the support of Yahoo and their team who share our dream to make the internet the ultimate creative canvas. Tumblr gets better faster with more resources to draw from.”

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” Yahoo’s Mayer said. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy. Both companies are homes for brands — established and emerging. And, fundamentally, Tumblr and Yahoo! are both all about users, design, and finding surprise and inspiration amidst the everyday.”

Yahoo and Tumblr are holding a conference call at 9 AM ET and we will be on the call.

Tumblr founder David Karp, who owns at least 25 percent of the company, has agreed to stay on for at least four years, according to ATD. The WSJ says Tumblr would remain an independent company.

comScore pegged Tumblr’s worldwide traffic at 117 million visitors in April. The site has raised about $125 million in funding, putting its valuation at $800 million. As my colleague Mathew Ingram points out, the company’s revenues were less than $15 million in 2012, though Karp has estimated they will hit $100 million this year.

Yahoo is holding a press event on Monday afternoon in New York, but hasn’t specified what the event will be about. We’ll be there.

Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board of directors has approved a $1.1-billion all-cash bid to acquire Tumblr.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

After reporting Thursday that Yahoo was considering a number of options for Tumblr, including partnerships or strategic investments, ATD reported Friday that Mayer had decided to go all in. Om reported Thursday that Yahoo was worried about counteroffers from Facebook, much how Facebook stole Instagram from Twitter after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s courtship of the photo-sharing site. Now the board plans to meet Sunday to consider giving final approval to the offer.

Tumblr’s backers will likely be pleased with a $1.1 billion price tag, especially if, as reported, it involves cash However, it’s far from certain that such an outlay would do anything to revive Yahoo’s fortunes. Mayer certainly has been trying to bring new blood into the company of late, snapping up a number of smaller mobile startups before focusing on Tumblr over the last month.

Yahoo has scheduled a press event for Monday evening in New York to discuss “something special,” but it wouldn’t hint at anything else. We’ll be there to cover the event, but in the meantime, here’s Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp’s appearance at our paidContent Live conference in April, discussing his company’s fortunes:

“We want to have a portfolio approach — no one is going to use the whole suite of products,” said Mayer, adding that Yahoo is fine with an à la carte approach where different users pull up two or three of what the company calls its “daily dozen” tools such as stocks or weather.

Speaking with Wired’s senior writer Stephen Levy, Mayer also addressed the role of video; the company has earned some buzz in this area with announcements that it acquired the rights to Saturday Night Live clips and that it will be putting out original shows like “Losing Your Virginity with John Stamos.”

This appears to be part of what Mayer calls a “tiered approach” in which Yahoo will put out a small tier of original content alongside a larger tranche of curated content from across the web, as well as encouraging user-generated fare on Flickr.

The CEO also addressed, once again, her diktat to curtail working from home — a controversial decision that’s provided nearly endless grist for debates over gender and workplace.

“I didn’t mean for it to be an industry narrative,” she said. “We were just saying it wasn’t right for us right now … Everyone at Yahoo works in teams [and] stopping “causes drag.”

She added that the policy has lots of exceptions and been really well-received inside the company, and argued that it has produced a “Reese’s peanut butter effect” that can only happen when disparate people run into each other on the job.

In response to Levy’s question about search, Mayer said she “believed in it” and “understands it” (which is no doubt true after her long tenure at Google) but that the company will continue to hitch its wagon with Microsoft on the search front for the time being.

As for a description of the company’s “moonshot,” Mayer said it was to be on billions of screens. And, in a note that may give hope to exasperated investors, she added that she wants the company to return to faster-than-market growth.

Yahoo 

Celebrity Presence: John Stamos, Ed Helms, Morgan Spurlock, Cheryl Hines, Rachael Harris, The Lumineers (who performed live).

New Shows Presented: A mix of comedy and lifestyle programming, including Helms’s Tiny Commando, a show about the intersection of food and film, and a Spurlock-produced series where celebrities tell Stamos about the first time they had sex.

Biggest News Announced: For wrestling fans, it was probably the announcement that Yahoo and the WWE will be “tag-teaming” video distribution. But Yahoo also announced plans to partner with Condé Nast and CNBC for shows.

Money Quote: From Sam Gutelle at Tubefilter’s coverage, based off a comment by Yahoo COO Henrique de Castro:

De Castro asked advertisers to sink 5% of their TV budget of just one brand into Yahoo. Clearly, he understands that while the online video space is growing in popularity, it is still an area meant to complement TV, not overtake it. Yahoo’s new shows should do just that by providing solid, accessible entertainment.

My Take: None of the announced partnerships are as high-profile as Yahoo getting the exclusive rights to Saturday Night Live clips. That said, of all the new shows announced this week, I might be the most intrigued by Losing Your Virginity with John Stamos: It sounds like a lot of fun.

AOL 

Celebrity Presence: Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Richie, Baratunde Thurston, iJustine.

New Shows Presented: A wide range of largely lifestyle-oriented programming, including the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring Second Chances, Hank Azaria’s Fatherhood, Webby co-founder Tiffany Shlain’s The Future Starts Here, and a show about ballet executive-produced by Parker.

Biggest News Announced: To track who’s actually watching all that programming, AOL will be collaborating with Nielsen on a system that will “express audience measurement in the language of TV, enabling comparisons between the audience of AOL’s high-quality original programming and curated premium partner content to TV viewership” (according to the press release).

Money Quote: From Video Ink’s coverage of the Nielsen deal, an interview with Nielsen SVP of Strategic Partnerships John Burbank:

Ultimately, it’s not up to the Comscores and Nielsens of the world. “It’s really the market that has to decide, and we’re doing our best to make the measurement as robust and as fair for everybody so the buyer and the seller have to agree to transact on the data,” Burbank added.

My Take: Some of AOL’s original programming sounds potentially interesting, but relying on celebrities and brands to drive web content is far from a fresh business model, and oftentimes doesn’t have much staying power. However, if the audience for that content finally gets properly measured, it could help advertisers better understand the potential impact of online video.

Hulu

Celebrity Presence: SNL‘s Seth Meyers (who hosted the event), Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria, professional wrestlers Sergeant Slaughter and Rey Mysterio.

New Shows Presented: Two new exclusives include Quick Draw, a comedy western, and high school drama East Los Angeles. Plenty of other series are on their way, and Hulu made note of One Life to Live and All My Children, which have performed well in their new digital iteration.

Biggest News Announced: Hulu had some exciting numbers to report, most importantly that Hulu Plus has topped four million subscribers, and according to comScore, it’s number one in engagement among top ad-supported sites.

Money Quote: From Variety’s coverage, a snippet from Meyers:

“‘You might be wondering why someone who works for a traditional network like NBC is at the Hulu upfront,’ he said. ‘Simply put, I’m hedging my bets. I don’t want to be working for the steam-engine company and wondering if cars are going to work.’”

My Take: It would have been interesting to see bigger-name content presented by Hulu this week, but with subscribers on the rise and the site bringing in more original series, things seem to be going well for the site.

Blip

Celebrity Presence: Rob Huebel (who hosted the event), Grace Helbig, Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns.

New Shows Presented: The Huebel-starring comedy Mainly Murder, unscripted competition series Jewelry Star, The Great S. Cape!, created by Dark Knight producer Michael Uslan. (Full details presented on Blip’s site.)

Biggest News Announced: Not only has Blip already announced a partnership with My Damn Channel to distribute original content, but on Wednesday they announced a production deal with hugely popular (and outspoken) YouTuber Ray William Johnson.

Money Quote: From AdWeek’s coverage of the event:

“‘Blip is the future of TV,’ said CEO Kelly Day. ‘We have the largest library of Web originals anywhere. And we are not a platform.’”

My Take: Blip is currently in the midst of a massive sea change — so it was inevitable that this week’s news is a bit underwhelming in comparison to earlier shakeups. However, it’ll be exciting to see how the talent Blip’s brought in meshes together.

Crackle 

Celebrity Presence: Jerry Seinfeld, David Arquette, Missi Pyle.

New Shows Presented: Plenty of them, including Extraction, a feature-length thriller starring Danny Glover and Vinnie Jones, Cleaners, an assassin action series with a cast including Arquette and Gina Gershon, and Strand Street, directed and produced by Milo Ventimiglia.

Biggest News Announced: As previously announced, there will be a second season of Jerry Seinfeld’s extremely successful Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, but more importantly the landmark 2010 web series The Bannen Way will return in 2013 for six new half-hour episodes.

Money Quote: From the Hollywood Reporter’s coverage:

“Crackle is for the new living room,” Eric Berger, executive vice president of digital networks at Sony Pictures Television and GM of Crackle. “It’s programmed, it’s everywhere and its easily accessible. We’re not a content aggregator but a programmer much like a cable network.”

My Take: Anecdotal evidence suggests that Comedians In Cars has been huge for Crackle, introducing a whole new audience to the service, and the emphasis on thriller and drama programming is a positive step forward for those looking to see web original content mature.

But there’s this line from the press release: “The long-awaited sequel to the cult favorite David Spade comedy Joe Dirt will break new ground as the first made for digital movie that is a sequel to a hit motion picture.” We might be looking at two steps forward, one step back.

The young Brit created Summly to try and help solve the problem of consuming news content on a mobile device (something a number of others are focusing on as well, including San Francisco-based Circa). The app created machine-generated summaries of news articles, and D’Aloisio said in a phone call from London that he wants to see what Yahoo can do by applying the same kind of algorithmic approach to some of the company’s other news and entertainment content:

“It’s going to be a really fun journey. To see where we can take our technology with Yahoo’s focus on mobile under Marissa Mayer will be really exciting… there is so much opportunity to take these daily habits like weather, news, stocks and sports and use technologies like Summly to really turn them into an A-star experience. And I want to be there for as long as I feel is necessary to get Summly and Yahoo really doing well with mobile.”

Yahoo has a chance, D’Aloisio says

Although Yahoo has been criticized by many (including us) for being too large and slow to adapt to the new age of digital content, D’Aloisio said that he is excited about joining the company, and thinks that Yahoo under Marissa Mayer has a chance to be great again:

“Definitely with the approach they are taking at the moment — they’re moving at light speed, and it’s really exciting to be joining the company at this stage, because there’s so much opportunity in the next 12 to 24 months to take technologies like Summly and the other assets they have, like the newsroom and all of this content, and take it to the larger mainstream.”

The Summly founder said that while many see Yahoo as an also-ran, he thinks the company still has a chance to take advantage of the millions of users it has:

“Yahoo to me, as the founder of a company, is one of the biggest opportunities you could have — it’s one of those classic internet companies… the fact is that they have massive leverage in the industry, they have hundreds of millions of people coming to their content every month, and it’s really exciting to be building for that scale. That’s the exciting thing — it’s the scale that Yahoo brings, and that user base, that I really want to build products for.”

A “surreal journey” at times

D’Aloisio also admitted that he was surprised at how something that began as a hobby has turned out, and how much he has accomplished at such a young age:

“It’s a surreal journey. I guess I always saw this as a hobby — it’s just a passion of mine. And the fact that it’s [resulted in] an acquisition is something I never expected… and it wouldn’t have been possible without Horizon Ventures and Li Ka-shing, who took a gamble on me as a teenager. I really owe it to them and to everyone who has been by my side supporting me.”

The young entrepreneur said he has had a number of learning experiences along the way — including one described in a Gizmodo post from 2011 entitled “How I Made a 15-Year-Old App Developer Cry” — but added that it has been “a really incredible journey,” and he is looking forward to the next chapter with Marissa Mayer and Yahoo. One thing is for sure: If everyone at the company was as eager as D’Aloisio seems to be, the company would have no reason to fear the future.