Jacqueline Reses, chief development officer for internet company Yahoo, has confirmed the company has no plans to form a corporate venturing unit, Business Insider reported on Wednesday.
Although Yahoo has acquired more than 40 companies over the past two years and invested in companies including big data platform Hortonworks, Reses explained at the Fortune Brainstorm conference earlier this week that it has no plans to follow rivals such as Google into corporate venturing, despite it being in line for a big influx of cash from the forthcoming Alibaba flotation.
“We don’t have a venture arm,” Reses said. “I worked in private equity for decade, so it wouldn’t be foreign. But Yahoo is in a transformation right now. We need to, as an executive team, focus on that. We need 100% of our attention on our core business.
“Venture investing is a hobby … it would be nice if we had time to have a hobby. But [we don’t want to] take up the time of executives to think through if a [startup] investment opportunity is great. We’ll focus on acquisitions that are great as opposed to small investments.”
In addition to the company’s key strategic focus, Yahoo is also suspicious of IT and internet corporates that invest in startups and are willing to exit to a rival rather than acquire the business themselves.
With regard to acquisitions, Reses said most of Yahoo’s have been in the $10m to $20m range, though it acquired five companies in the first quarter of 2014 for a total of $23m.
Outliers such as its $1.1bn purchase of microblogging site Tumblr in May 2013 are generally made for strategic reasons and are seen as “transformational”.