It's funny, I didn't have anything to do with the Flickr acquisition and found out about it from a friend who pointed me to the USA Today article. It was all Don. But it sprinkled fairy dust on me here at Tribeca as people said admiringly, "congratulations!" One exec from Google said she tried to buy Flickr on 3 separate occasions.
I don't know if this is a coincidence, but Caterina Fake, the cofounder of Flickr and somone I have long admired, did a great interview with Reid Hoffman just before the announcement where she said:
These products have come to be called ‘social media,’ but that’s not what Flickr was. Flickr was an online community. The reason they started calling it social media is because you can sell media. You can sell column inches, you can sell broadcast hours, you can advertise against it. But Flickr was not social media. Flickr was an online community. The people there were not marketing; they were having conversations. They were known to each other, and they were being part of the community. And so, that is the spirit under which Flickr had been conceived.
I don't know any details about purchase price, how Flickr is doing, tech, team, etc., but I did watch Reddit rise from the dead when the founders returned a couple years ago. I saw that Caterina tweeted to Don offering help with Flickr, so who knows? It's crazy but after that interview and before I heard about the Flickr acquisition, I thought about reaching out to Caterina to help with Cake.