I guess the question is how many other companies did they correctly identify as not being trillion dollar companies. They will be optimizing for different things than VCs. Also, it is very possible they would have run one or both into the ground, making them bad investments anyways. We like to dunk on Yahoo with our perfect hindsight, but they were probably reasonable decisions at the time. So yes I agree with this comment.

The truth is that bad leadership and no clear vision led to Yahoo's decline. They went through over half a dozen CEOs in a short span and each had a different strategy.

They failed to buy Google and Facebook, instead they bought GeoCities, Tumblr, and Broadcast for billions and ran them into the ground.