EightBlack.

I bet there are some pissed off people at Microsoft and Yahoo!

The recent announcement by Google regarding it’s new toy - YouTube would have caused a lot of heated arguments.

This deal unfolded rapidly.

Story goes that Eric Schmidt and Larry Page from Google met with the 2 owners of YouTube (Stephen Chen and Chad Hurley) at the local Denny’s Restuarant near the You Tube offices.

They casually thew an offer of US$1.6 billion on the table (as you do).

None of us know if the two 28 year olds from YouTube were entertaining other offers, but you can bet if Sequioa Capital Partners had anything to do with it, they had put their toe in the water so to speak.

(Sequioa were one of the original venture capital companies behind Google and they backed YouTube with US$11.5 million when they started)

A lot of people are probably baffled at this deal. I’m not. It makes sense.

And it should prove something to us all.

The internet juggernaut will continue at this clip.

While the dot com boom and bust (Web 1.0) is still fresh in people’s minds, it won’t prevent the multi-nationals appetite from being satisified.

Murdoch is laughing all the way to his Swiss bank after buying MySpace for US$580 million (some thought he was crazy). The crafty old bugger then turns around and does a syndicated ad deal with Google for US$900 million and pays back the entire purchase price in one foul swoop (and gives him $320 million in change).

Closer to home, there are deals to be done.

News Corp are putting a mountain of money behind their new digital business - News Digital Media. They’ve even brought one of their top execs home from London to head it up - Richard Freudenstein.

PBL is wading in, buying up more of Seek and getting involved in the online car space. The activity and deal making will not slow down.

I remember when I had a real corporate job, my US boss gave me a $1 million Aussie to go and buy a small player in our market.

I thought he was mad.

After all, I had just relocated back to Sydney from the US, we had just set up the business and now this pushy American was wanting me to go and chuck a million bucks at a company run by 3 guys, who I thought were closely related to Fidel Castro.

He kept calling me.

“Simon, have you done the deal yet?”

“No boss, we’re still doing due diligence”

“Screw the due diligence, don’t get beaten by one of our competitors - I want their customer base”

And that was the point. The million bucks was nothing to him. He knew the company, had met the owners on a previous trip and could see it had assets.

The Asian blood in me was wanting to negotiate the sale price.

But he had bigger fish to fry than haggling over $50 or $100 grand.

So we got the deal done. And it made sense.

My question to you is this. If you’re connected to the online world in anyway (and even if you’re not) are you putting off making decisions that need to be made?

Are you not hiring quickly enough? Are you not doing that JV or getting into a partnership for whatever reason.

Google won the YouTube gig because they acted. And got the deal done.

After all, the job of the business leader in this day and age is to execute.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 7:33 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.