Terry Semel on acquisitions

Martha Lagace of HBS Working Knowledge summarized some of Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Terry S. Semel’s experience with acquisitions. He talked about Yahoo!’s acquisitions of Overture and Inktomi, differing methods of negotiation, and knowing when to walk away when the deal gets too expensive. Semel spoke to members of the Harvard Business School Negotiation Club on September 20, 2004.

[Inktomi] was scalable, and we also thought we could make it better by putting our engineering talent behind it. I knew as a negotiator—and my team knew—that we had to have this.