The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

Buy the Competitor to Buy Yourself Time

Sometimes you acquire a rival not to use what they built, but to stop the clock while you fix what you have.

3) What do you guys think about acquiring one of them? Is that like giving up before trying? I am concerned that it will take a long time to sort out the org stuff internally. One way to make sure we dont get further behind in the market is picking up the one with the most traction and parking it somewhere.

Scott and I have not talked much about this yet. I have come around to believing we should go into due diligence and probably make a buy. It does not solve a ton of problems by itself, but as you say if we bought one and parked it, it would let us solve the problems from a position of strength (market share, knowledgeable team members). Kind of like how we had time to build XFP because DFP was doing so well. The biggest problem is having two inventory pools (AdX and YM-RTB system) which if we leave it up could be confusing to buyers and to publishers deciding which to use; or if we tried to combine them fast could yield a Falk-like situation (a mix of advantages and feature gaps, and some pubs upset about what they lose).

looks like there is going to be interest in YM. if we go down that path it will become my top priority like invite was. maybe the first thing we should do is have a prelim meeting (you and i probably) with their CEO.

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Ad Tech)
1:23-cv-00108 (VAED), Trial Ex. PTX0058 — DOJ public archive
October 11, 2010
Public domain
View the primary source →