In a move some see as inevitable, Yahoo, Inc. has thrown in the towel on its efforts to survive independently. For $4.8 billion, Verizon Communications, Inc. acquired the seminal technology company last month. In an industry that ruthlessly throws overboard the familiar in favor of the fresh, stories like Yahoo’s are all too common.

We spoke with a man who worked for Yahoo in its early stages about what made the company great and what eventually led to its faltering. Jim McCarthy, founder of Jim McCarthy Leadership, recently wrote a blog post called, “The Hippie Values Which Made Yahoo the Coolest Company in the World.”

McCarthy told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about how David Filo and Jerry Yang accidentally founded the company by creating a tree of categories to help themselves and others find sites on the then-fledgling Internet.

“They weren’t sitting around saying, ‘God, how can we become billionaires as fast as we can?’ It was purely a hobby which became an obsession and was a passion of theirs,” McCarthy said.

How Google ate Yahoo’s lunch

With the introduction of Google, Yahoo’s relevance began waning drastically. McCarthy said the chief reason for Google’s victory is: “They cherry-picked the absolute most profitable and monetizable part of the whole value chain, which is search — because Yahoo did search, but they did a whole bunch of other stuff too.”

He explained that focusing on search allowed Google to create an extremely scalable model where companies could bid on keywords to drive coveted traffic to their sites.

Lessons learned

McCarthy doesn’t seem upset that Yahoo didn’t work much harder to be where Google is today. In fact, he takes what he’s learned and uses it in his motivational work on happiness and work-life balance. He says the 100+ hour weeks becoming more common in Silicon Valley are not sustainable.

He tells his clients that with a more moderate approach, “You could work until you’re 50, 60, 70, 80 and love what you’re doing rather than completely burning out.”

Watch the complete video interview with Jim McCarthy below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE