Yahoo Corporate Blog

Normally whenever an acquisition happens, I avoid these types of posts on HN because there are often people in the comments (and even in the posts themselves) calling out the acquired company saying “I could have done this” or “Acquirer could have built Acquired Company in a day” but, this one deserves a reply.

The reason why this deserves a reply is that the OP’s post does not really contain any facts rather, it contains assumptions (either the OP’s assumptions or others).

For instance:

“Yahoo screens the employees, and tells the founder that 2 of them passed”
AND

“Summly says dang, only 2 out of 5 passed?”

The article the OP links to, to cite this actually states[1]

“In addition, only two of Summly’s employees will go to Yahoo with D’Aloisio”

There is no mention of anyone failing a ‘test’, all it states that only that 2 of Summly’s employees will be joining Yahoo alongside the founder. Now when OMGPOP were acquired by Zynga, one of their employees didn’t join Zynga[2] and that employee chose not to join Zynga – the same may have happened to Summly’s other employees as well (something that we do not know).

Moreover, the OP calls out Yahoo for acquiring Summly for $30M and citing that,

“Summly says no, $50m is our minimum. We need to pay back our generous investors”

However, there has been no confirmation of an acquisition price – there are rumours which place the amount in that ballpark and rumours which say the price was 90% cash. Now, when startups get…

As a side note a lot of Wordpress sites do expose the wp-config-sample.php file. See for example the official Yahoo! Blog, The Wall Street Journal, Sony Blog, etc...:

http://ycorpblog.com/wp-config-sample.php

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/wp-config-sample.php

http://blog.us.playstation.com/wp-config-sample.php

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