The Boardroom Tapes

On the morning of Sunday, May 19, 2013, Yahoo's board approved the purchase of the blogging platform Tumblr for about $1.1 billion, substantially all of it in cash. The company announced the deal the…

In 1981, IBM built the personal computer that created the category, and then it published the design. Within a few years, "IBM-compatible" was the name of the entire market. By 2004, the company that…

In 1985, General Motors created a separate car company and put roughly $5 billion behind it. Saturn was built to take buyers away from small Japanese cars. It had its own plants, its own labor agreeme…

Sony saw digital portable music early. In 1999, the company launched the NW-MS7 Memory Stick Walkman around a proprietary stack: ATRAC3, MagicGate, OpenMG, and Memory Stick storage. MP3 files could be…

In January 2000, America Online and Time Warner announced a merger that was framed as a union of the internet and mass media. The deal promised broadband, interactive television, and a new way to dist…

Kodak did not overlook digital photography. Its engineers built the first self-contained digital camera in 1975, and Steven Sasson and Robert Hills produced a much more capable digital SLR in 1989. Th…

This episode explores “The print was the product” in a measured, conversational, analytical, with restrained dry wit style. It is presented as a solo narration, and the source list lets you revisit th…

This episode starts with a deceptively tidy decision: Borders, still a giant bookstore chain, decides that online retail is too expensive to keep building on its own and lets Amazon run Borders.com. T…

The teaser from last week's episode promised a different kind of boardroom mistake — one where the product worked, the market was real, and the company still managed to lose it all. WeWork is that cas…

On November 2, 1994, Quaker Oats announced it was paying $1.7 billion for Snapple — and Quaker's own stock dropped ten percent that day. Wall Street analysts called the deal defensive, overpriced, and…

In 1976, Steve Jobs walked into his former boss's office with one of the most consequential pitches in tech history: $50,000 for a third of a company called Apple Computer. Nolan Bushnell — who had fo…

In the summer of 2006, a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg verbally agreed to sell Facebook to Yahoo for a billion dollars — then watched the deal disintegrate over four weeks as Yahoo's CEO panicked after…