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Yahoo! sold for less than $5B

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve recently seen this news:

Yahoo and AOL, kings of the early internet, saw their fortunes decline as Silicon Valley raced ahead to create new digital platforms. Google replaced Yahoo. AOL was supplanted by cable giants.

Now they will become the property of private equity. Verizon, their current owner, agreed to sell them to Apollo Global Management in a deal worth $5 billion, the companies announced Monday.

The business housing the two brands, Verizon Media, is to be renamed (yet again) to Yahoo (sans the brand’s stylized exclamation point), and the sale will also include its advertising technology business. Verizon will retain a 10 percent stake in the newly formed media group, the company said in a statement.

From here: Verizon Sells AOL and Yahoo to Apollo for $5 Billion – The New York Times.

In 2008 I was working for Yahoo! in Romania. I was there for a year, until early 2009.

Around the time they hired me, Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo! for $33 per share, at an effective price of about $46B. Jarry Yang, the Yahoo! co-founder and then-CEO, said he wanted at least $37 per share. Microsoft ended the bid around May 2008. Then the 2008 crash came and Yahoo! never quite got to the value it had again (except a short period in 2013).

Jerry Yang got sacked soon and this actually impacted me, because the new CEO (Carol Bartz) decided to close the push to extend the company in Eastern Europe and, by extension, they didn’t need me there anymore. Which was actually a good thing for me at that time, since I was kinda disenchanted with working in a big corporation, I had my own projects, and I wanted to just leave. But I might have stayed longer, because being the “Yahoo! representative in Romania” was a big thing then in a country where Yahoo! Messenger reigned supreme.

Well, what goes up, must come down.

htaccess 301 redirects

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve moved a lot of the sites over years from one domain to another, but I never remembered the htaccess redirect rules to do it. I always needed to search for them, sometimes finding different solutions that were never perfect.

Anyway, here are some of them, in case I need them again. I took them from this site, which has a lot more situations sorted out through redirects.

How do you redirect an entire site or domain to a new one?

Redirect 301 / http://www.domain.com/

How do you use rewriting to redirect from an old domain to a new domain?

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

How do you use rewriting to redirect from a non-www to a www subdomain?

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

From here: Common Htaccess 301 Redirect Rules.

Interviewing

By Bobby Voicu

In 2006 I started a radio show called Internet Links. The radio station was an online radio in Romania, called Radio Lynx, so this is where the name comes from.

What started as a weekly 30 minutes show with interesting stuff happening online, from news to howtos, ended 6 years later with more than 100 episodes of 2 hours interviews. About 3-4 shows in I realised it was much more interesting to talk to people about their online projects. After that, about 10 shows in I understood that I needed more than 1 hour and I cut all the music I had from time to time. The guys at Radio Lynx were really nice and understanding and adjusted their Wednesday evening schedules (8pm) to give me those 2 hours.

That show connected me to most of the people doing anything relevant online at that point in Romania and even outside of it. But more than this, I loved talking to my guests. I loved finding out more about their projects, I loved asking “stupid” questions and getting unexpected answers.

I was always a curious person and these interviews fulfilled that need.

Today I just interviewed someone again. Not about business online this time, but about something I was interesting in finding out more since hearing about the concept the first time. I won’t tell you what yet, because I will publish that interview some time soon.

I was just thinking that after about 1h30’ of talking, I finished the interview energized, smiling and remembering how much I loved this. Amazing!

Bitclout

By Bobby Voicu

I’ve just created an account on Bitclout.

I didn’t hear too many things about this crypto based social network before, but I’ve recently read an article on AVC about it so I thought it’s worth creating an account just to test it.

I don’t know if Mirror is the new WordPress or if Bitclout is the new Twitter. We will see. But it sure feels like we are back in the early 2000s again, experimenting with decentralizing media. I have the same feeling of excitement I had back then.

From here: Decentralized Media – AVC.

It really is worth “experimenting with decentralizing media”. It reminds me of the early days of Social Media, as well.

BTC down 40% or something

By Bobby Voicu

I swear, not knowing about the price of crypto is bliss (even if you own a small amount, or maybe because it’s just a small amount).

I also bought some GME on a lark in January or February and, after watching it like a hawk for a week, I just don’t do it anymore. And I’m a lot better mentally. That’s not really saying much, right?

Also, how the hell is the pump and dump that Elon Musk is doing with crypto can be legal is beyond me. And that’s coming from an Elon fan, but come on!

What if UFOs are real?

By Bobby Voicu

When I was a kid I read as much as I could about UFOs and unresolved mysteries of the past and the present. Of course, as I grew up, I kinda forgot about UFOs and it became this funny thing from childhood and the interesting part of some SciFi TV series I watched.

Today, though, I found an “>interesting article in New York Times asking the reader to make an effort and imagine that UFOs are actually real and that governments around the world hid this from everyone for a long time. What happens then?

One immediate effect, I suspect, would be a collapse in public trust. Decades of U.F.O. reports and conspiracies would take on a different cast. Governments would be seen as having withheld a profound truth from the public, whether or not they actually did. We already live in an age of conspiracy theories. Now the guardrails would truly shatter, because if U.F.O.s were real, despite decades of dismissals, who would remain trusted to say anything else was false? Certainly not the academics who’d laughed them off as nonsense, or the governments who would now be seen as liars.

“I’ve always resisted the conspiracy narrative around U.F.O.s,” Alexander Wendt, a professor of international security at Ohio State University who has written about U.F.O.s, told me. “I assume the governments have no clue what any of this is and they’re covering up their ignorance, if anything. That’s why you have all the secrecy, but people may think they were being lied to all along.”

The article is worth reading since it’s really thought provoking: Even if You Think Discussing Aliens Is Ridiculous, Just Hear Me Out.

Photo from The National Archives UK – Close up of light in sky, Sri Lanka Uploaded by PDTillman

The wave of European VCs

By Bobby Voicu

Dragos Novac, at Sunday CET, wrote an interesting piece on the new wave of European VCs.

I’m raising money right now for a new project and I can see the difference in people I’m talking to comparing to 2012-2013, when I raised money for MavenHut. The people I talk to now in Europe are a lot more similar to the people I was used to meet in the US. Not bad at all!

Who are those new people trying out new things? I am seeing three types:

i) former entrepreneurs – more and more founders decided to start investing, either on the side or as their main job.

ii) young people in their late 20s-early 30s, who decided to take their destiny in their hands and run their own show rather than working for traditional investment shops run by old school people.

iii) veterans who also decided to raise their own fund and become startup VCs rather than retiring as employees for traditional shops.

All those guys have energy, are knowledgeable and risk takers. They understand the value creation process and are trying their best to be a positive part of it. Some of them are idealistic, which is a good ingredient in a business where the KPI is a number which is usually correlated with the ego size.

And those guys, combined with a lot of outside competition, are the future of this VC-backed ecosystem, which is still an insignificant bubble in the grand economic scheme of things from Europe.

Read the entire newsletter/post from Dragos here and subscribe to Sunday CET. It’s the best newsletter I’ve found on VC and startup investment in Europe.

Fighting the fear of rejection

By Bobby Voicu

I found this Ted Talk video today: What I learned from 100 days of rejection.

While the talk and its conclusion are interesting, the stories of this guy’s rejection are so funny and the reason for my recommendation. Especially when he went to a stranger’s house with a flower in hand and asked permission to plant the flower in that guy’s yard. I can only imagine what my reaction would be if someone asked me that.

Below’s the full video. You can also visit Jia Jiang’s blog where he has the list of all the rejections he got in 100 days here.

Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash

The Great Online Game

By Bobby Voicu

About 15 years ago or so a friend asked me why I didn’t play World of Warcraft. I didn’t know too much about the game, so I asked why she did. She answered something like “you can be part of groups, you meet online, you talk, you make money, you fight”. And I said, without trying to be an ass, even though I probably sounded like one: “Oh, but I do that in real life!”

Assholery aside, I always felt that life, in general, can feel like a game sometimes.

Well, Packy McCormick from Not Boring actually wrote an article on it and it’s pretty good.

But crypto itself is not the game. It’s just the in-game currency for a much bigger game, played across the internet, that involves CEOs, influencers, artists, researchers, investors, and regular people, like you and me. That’s a much more fun topic to explore than which asset class is outperforming which. This is bigger, more permanent than day-to-day market fluctuations.

We’re all playing a Great Online Game. How well we play determines the rewards we get, online and offline.

The Great Online Game is played concurrently by billions of people, online, as themselves, with real-world consequences. Your financial and psychological wellbeing is at stake, but the downside is limited. The upside, on the other hand, is infinite.

Social media is the clearest manifestation of this meta-game. Beginner-level Twitter feels weird, like a bunch of people exposing their personal thoughts to the world. Medium-level Twitter is Threads and engagement hacks. Twitter Mastery is indistinguishable from an ongoing game. This is also true for Reddit, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social networks.

Read it all here: The Great Online Game – Not Boring by Packy McCormick.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition – Nostalgia in effect

By Bobby Voicu

I played Mass Effect a long time after they launched it. I don’t know why, but I didn’t hear about the series until the second title. Which I LOVED. It is, even now, the best SF franchise in gaming, in my opinion.

I have a post (in Romanian) from 2012 when I was impatiently waiting for Mass Effect 3. Which I enjoyed, but nothing compared to the 2nd one.

Well, I’m actually quite happy now because I just started playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the remastered version of all 3 games. I’m playing it on the PS5, but it’s also available on the PS4 as well. And on PC and XBox.

I wanted to replay the game for a long time now, but it wasn’t available anymore on the PlayStation consoles (even on PS Now) and once I heard they are remastering it, I said I would wait. And the wait is over!

I’ve put one hour in the game already and it’s almost as amazing feeling as I remember. But I started with the first one, of course. And I still don’t feel the nostalgia hitting me. I thing the beginning of the second one, with The Illusive Man looking at a sun from close range, being voiced by Martin Sheen, will manage to do that.

Buuuuut… it’s gonna take a while. The 3 games are more than 100 hours gameplay in length and I don’t have that kind of time now, unfortunately. So I will play it over the next months, especially since I don’t expect any new games any time soon.

If you’ve never played the games, you should. The graphics is showing its age a little bit, but the story is as good as I remember it being. And you actually play it in 4K and 60fps on the PS5. I think you can actually play it in 120fps on PC. So it’s worth trying it again.

Here’s the trailer:

Image from EA