What went wrong at Yahoo?

Paul Graham writes about what he felt went wrong at Yahoo. He has first-hand experience – his company, Viaweb, was bought by Yahoo and he worked there for a while.

In a nutshell, he felt that Yahoo was too conflicted about whether or not they were a technology company or a media company. This is part led to hiring bad programmers, or at least not going after the very best one.  They also lacked the ‘hacker’ culture that Google and Facebook still seem to have, and that is found in many startup tech companies.

This is a very good read, along with many of Paul’s other essays, which are worth bookmarking as most are quite long.