Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Yahoo announced that it will sell its core assets to Verizon for a mere $4.8 billion. This is only slightly more than Verizon paid for AOL — another washed up dot-com-era company — last year. Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $125 billion in 2000. Over the next 16 years, it steadily tumbled — mostly due to inaction and missed opportunities. You could fill an entire MBA course with case studies of all the strategic blunders Yahoo has made. I’ll save you some student debt and give you the skinny right here, in just 5 minutes. Mistake #1: Yahoo confused being in the right place — at the right time — with being smart. If Yahoo had launched a year or two later, they probably would have been irrelevant. They rose to dominance in large part by benefitting from what Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham — who worked there —  called a “de facto ponzi scheme”: “Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo’s revenue growth. So they invested in new ...

If you’ve been on the internet — or, um, outside — lately, you may have noticed that a game called Pokémon Go is suddenly taking the world by storm. It may have you wondering, especially if you were born before 1984, just what the hell is going on. Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise that launched in the 1990s. In its world, "trainers" travel the world to catch varied monsters called Pokémon — rats, dragons, swordlike creatures, and more — and use these critters to fight each other. The trainer’s goal is to "catch ’em all," as the franchise’s slogan suggests, and become a Pokémon master by defeating prestigious trainers known as gym leaders and Elite Four. So what is Pokémon Go? Unlike previous Pokémon games, it’s not for Nintendo’s handheld consoles; it’s a free download for Android and iOS devices. It also doesn’t play at all like previous Pokémon games: Although the goal is still to catch ’em all, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game — it mixes real-wo...