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Dear Yahoos,<\/p>\n
Moments ago, we announced an agreement with Verizon to acquire Yahoo\u2019s operating business. This culminates a rigorous, thorough process over many months, and yields a great outcome for the company. Today\u2019s announcement not only brings us an important step toward separating Yahoo\u2019s operating business from our Asian asset equity stakes, it also presents exciting opportunities to accelerate Yahoo\u2019s transformation. Among the many entities that showed interest in Yahoo, Verizon believed most in the immense value we\u2019ve created, and in what a combination could bring our users, our advertisers, and our partners.<\/p>\n
This is a good moment to reflect on Yahoo\u2019s journey to date.<\/p>\n
Yahoo is a company that changed the world. \u00a0Before Yahoo, the Internet was a government research project. Yahoo humanized and popularized the web, email, search, real-time media, and more.<\/p>\n
What really sets Yahoo apart is the shared passion to create great products for our 1B+ users, and in doing so, transforming the world for the better. You can clearly see that spirit, that commitment, that fight in the work we\u2019ve done together over the past few years. We set out to transform this company \u2013 and we\u2019ve made incredible progress. We counteracted many of the tectonic shifts of declining legacy businesses, and built a Yahoo that is unequivocally stronger, nimbler, and more modern. We tripled our mobile base to over 600 million monthly users, we invested in and built Mavens from basically zero in 2011 into $1.6B of GAAP Revenue in 2015, we streamlined and modernized every aspect of our consumer products, and, with Gemini and BrightRoll, we dramatically improved our advertiser products. This only scratches the surface of what we\u2019ve achieved\u2026 and we all know how much hard work it took to get here.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s because of that hard work and resilience, that Yahoo will realize amazing opportunities in its next chapter.<\/p>\n
This sale is not only an important step in our plan to unlock shareholder value for Yahoo, it is also a great opportunity for Yahoo to build further distribution and accelerate our work in mobile, video, native advertising, and social. As one of the largest wireless and cable companies in the world, Verizon opens the door to extensive distribution opportunities. With more than 100 million wireless customers, a shared view of the importance of mobile and video ad tech, a deep content focus through AOL, Verizon brings clear synergies to the table. And with their aggressive aims to grow global audience to 2B users and $20B in revenue within the mobile-media business by 2020, Yahoo\u2019s products and brand will be central to achieving these goals. Joining forces with AOL and Verizon will help us achieve tremendous scale on mobile. Imagine the distribution challenges we will solve, the scale we will achieve, the products we will build, and the advertisers we will reach now with Mavens \u2013 it\u2019s incredibly compelling.<\/p>\n
The strategic process has created a lot of uncertainty, but our incredibly loyal and dedicated employee base has stepped up to every challenge along the way. Through the first half of the year, we met our operational goals and overachieved on plan. But, further, there are things that you cannot measure, like the passion of the people behind the products. The teams here have not only built incredible products and technologies, but have built Yahoo into one of the most iconic, and universally well-liked companies in the world. One that continues to impact the lives of more than a billion people. I\u2019m incredibly proud of everything that we\u2019ve achieved, and I\u2019m incredibly proud of our team. For me personally, I\u2019m planning to stay. I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It\u2019s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter.
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