Hoffman: Renovate Yahoo, Don't Sell It

In the “sale” or “no sale” camps when it comes to Yahoo, count LinkedIn founder, angel investor, and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman among the stay-put bunch.

“One of the, I think, delights about being a longtime [Silicon] Valley person and watching Apple is I think it’s possible to revive companies. Now sometimes it may take an act of complete focus and genius in terms of iPods, the music player, and then the iPhone as a way of doing it. But I don’t think it always requires that. So I think actually renovation and rebirth is possible, and I think that’s the play that you make,” he said Monday.

Hoffman, after complimenting TechCrunch founder and now-ex-editor Michael Arrington on his green “unpaid blogger” T-shirt, opened the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco conference by talking with Arrington about how he’d fix Yahoo. Yahoo’s board canned CEO Carol Bartz last week, leading to speculation that the company might sell part or all of itself.

Hoffman, who as an angel invested in Facebook and Zynga among other hot Internet properties and who is now a partner at Greylock Partners, said he’d have a different strategy if he took over the seemingly moribund Internet portal.

First, he’d apply an innovation strategy to push forward such core portions of Yahoo as Messenger, YahooFinance, and Groups. Then, he’d get away from display advertising as the dominant source of revenue for the company and mix in newer ideas such as virtual goods, which have been a rousing success for Zynga.

“There are other kinds of business models that I think we have yet to invent on the consumer Internet,” Hoffman said.

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