Marissa Mayer has made her first buy as Yahoo’s CEO, and it’s a company with strong Google connections.
Yahoo announced its acquisition of Stamped, a mobile/social recommendations service. And Mayer herself shared the image above on Instagram.
The acquisition is more about the “who” than the “what.” Stamped launched in 2011 as the brainchild of a few ex-Googlers: Robby Stein worked at Google for four years. Bart Stein (not related) was involved in Google’s Creative Lab. Paul Eastlund worked at Google for five years. The company’s about us page lists 11 employees (including an intern), five of whom have spent time at Google. In its own announcement, Stamped says:
“As a team of mostly former Googlers, we’ve all worked with and are big fans of Marissa. So when an opportunity arose to become a part of the team at Yahoo!, we jumped. As entrepreneurs, it’s never easy to walk away from something you built from the ground up, but the folks we met with at Yahoo! are simply top-notch and we’re thrilled to be joining them!”
The Stamped app will be discontinued by the end of the year. Users will soon have a tool to export their stamps and related data.
Yahoo also positioned this as an acqui-hire of talent in its announcement:
“…we’re accelerating our efforts to build a world-class team of mobile engineers, product managers and designers. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we’ve acquired a very talented team based in New York City to help us create a new center of mobile product development for Yahoo!. Robby, Kevin, Paul, Bart and the entire Stamped team are a natural fit for us.”
During Yahoo’s earnings call this week, Mayer spoke about her plans to emphasize Yahoo’s mobile efforts. She also discussed the potential for smaller acquisitions in the sub-$100 million price range. No word yet on the actual price, but TechCrunch is calling it “double-digit millions.”
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