how to earn money online yahoo answers 2013

- so to begin with let'sgive a warm cs183c welcome to yahoo ceo marissa mayer. (audience applauds) so one of the great thingsabout being here at stanford is that so many of the speakers we've had actually did their undergraduate work here and you, i believe, were class of 1997? - that's right. yup. - and talk a little bitabout your time at stanford

because i know one ofthe interesting things is you studied symbolic systems, you were also part of sle, yay, and did symbolic systemsas reid did as well. so talk to me a little bitabout symbolic systems. what did it mean to you? what did you learn from it? - sure. well, so i was here,

i did my undergraduate, graduating in '97, and then did a computer sciencemasters, graduating in '99. and, i did symbolic systems. reid and i have that in common, and i did sle, so i guess all three of us have that in common. it was part of my freshman year. i absolutely loved stanford, but i really, really lovedthe symbolic systems program.

for me, i came to stanford assuming i was going to be a doctor, and i got very deep into chemistry and biology my freshman year, and i was good at it, but when i went home that summer, i realized, and i compared notes with a lot of my other pre-medfriends at other schools. i realized that we were alltaking the same classes.

we eerily all had thesame atomic, you know like construction kits,all the same flash cards, and i really wanted to havean experience here at stanford that was more unique than that. so, i started looking at things that stanford was uniquely good at and things that were unusualfor here at stanford, and obviously, you knowstanford's always had a very strong computer science department,

a really strong psychology department, and so i started learninga little bit more about symbolic systems,philosophy, psychology, linguistics and computer science and took some linguistics class, liked those too and really liked theinterdisciplinary piece of it, but i realized one of the things that had drawn me to medicine was,i really was interested in neuroscience and how brainsdevelop and how they learn.

the other interestingapplication of that, of course, is artificial intelligence,and so i ended up switching into symbolicsystems and spending my time thinking moreabout could we actually build a brain thatoperates the way ours does as opposed to how to dissect them. - and i think that you also,while you were an undergrad. not only were you majoringin symbolic systems, but you also taught atleast a couple of courses

in symbolic systems as well. can you talk about that? - sure well i did. how many people here have-- i think everyone's takenprobably 106 a and b, and i think now it's almoststandard, run for the course, but i started off as a section leader, and then i became one of the head tas, and then at the end of my time here,

i became a lecturer,so i ended up teaching 106 a, b and x a few timesat the end of my tenure. - one of the interestingthings is our faculty sponsor for the class is mehron, andyou know mehron of course, and mehron actually wasmy instructor for cs106a in the ancient days when iwas an undergraduate so-- - you may have been in my first class because mehron was the first person i was a section leader for.

he was actually unusualbecause he was the one professor at stanfordthat actually would get more people on his secondday of class than his first. maybe that was truehere for this class too. i don't know, but he was so popular, people would spread the word about mehron and get more people tocome to the next class than even to the first one. - absolutely amazing.

i still remember some of thelectures he actually gave, the snooze bar example, hesaid "you still remember that? that's amazing!" so, you were here. obviously you were very busy academically, but you probably spent your time on other stuff as well as an undergrad. you were very involved in a lot of things. talk about what you did outside of class.

- well i really, i lovedthe residential life, so i was, you know, an rcc, i was an ra, and so i did a bunch ofdifferent work in the residences. i was also on the debate team, something i started doing in high schooland continued to do here. i did some parli debate. which is a little bit lessintense than some of the national debate tournaments, because it's all extemporaneous speaking.

i just really enjoyed my time here and i'm sure i did moreactivities than that, but those are the onesthat really stand out. - and then when you finished your masters, and you went to work for what was then a pretty small company. how big was it when you joined? - i went to work forgoogle, it's interesting. i assume many peoplehere know eric roberts,

so i did a two-year masters because i was doing a co-term. because i was a head ta ibasically had a half-course load. there's a very good dealwhere if you become a head ta, they cover some of yourcredits and give you a stipend and all of that, and so i had basically a summer off between the two yearsof my masters program. so, i went to switzerlandand spent the summer

building something that looked at which websites you went to. you installed it in your browser, it watched where you went, and then would compareit to other people's paths on the web and docollaborative filtering. so if you visited site a, b and c, and someone later visited site b, they would say "well maybe youwant to visit site a and c."

and we were aggregatingall this information for the union bank in switzerland to make their traders better at finding relevant informationquickly in the morning when they first arrive at the job to see what the market conditions were. so, i came back anderic roberts hired me to teach 106b for the first time. so it was my first time lecturing.

i came back, sat down with him, he gave me some tips on teaching 106b, and then he asked a littlebit about my summer research, and i told him what i'd been working on. it was so funny because istill give eric a hard time about this because he said"oh, you know that's so funny because, you know, you werelooking at where people go on the web and trying tounderstand where traffic goes and what sites are related.

there's these two guyson the fourth floor. they're building a search engine. they're not looking atwhere people go on the web, but they're looking at linksstructures between sites to kind of do something similar. you'd probably be really interested in what they're working on." and he's like "but ican't remember the name." he's like "it's larry page, sergey brin,

but i can't remember the name." and i was like "well, youknow eric, i just got back from switzerland, i'mteaching for the first time, i'm really overwhelmed." - i don't have time tomeet with those guys. - and i was like "i don't havetime to meet with a start-up or get involved in thestart-up right now." and so i kind of puntedand it was actually good because that was--

i mean, they had literally formed google about the week before. google started about middleof september of 1998, and i had gotten back aroundthe 20th or so of september. and at that point, theyweren't really hiring and looking at how to scale up at all, and then fast forward to the spring, i got an email from one ofthe first employees at google asking "would you considercoming over to interview?"

and it was funny because atthe time it was quite late. i had really procrastinatedon picking my first job, and so i said i would consider it, but i need you to interview me on tuesday because i've absolutely committed, i'm going to make a decision by may 1st. and so it was funny because i went over to interview for the job, and then larry and sergeycame in and interviewed me,

and then afterwards they walked out and i heard them say "hey guys," i think they said "we'regoing to kleiner." so they were basically goingto give the big vc pitch that ultimately led to oneof their big funding rounds. and then everyone in thecompany went with them, because it was such asmall company at the time. everyone went with them, and i remember the officemanager came back in,

heather, and she said "i'm sorry, i know it was very important for you to complete your interviews today because you were hoping to make a decision in the next week or so, but everyone just leftto go to this vc pitch, so there's no one here to interview you. would you mind coming back tomorrow?" so, i had to go home and then

come back the next day and finish my interviews the next day, and then ultimately decided to go there. it was a fun time. - i think it ended up being 25 million split by kleiner and sequoia. - that's right. - not bad. - i remember they actuallydid their press conference

over on the second or thirdfloor of the gates building. because i remember i hadjust signed my offer, and then i had seen the word google handwritten on a note saying "google press conference this way" one morning when i was walking into gates. that's when i found out theygot their funding. (laughter) - now you joined google as an engineer, but i think over time things evolved,

and you became reallyfocused as a product person. can you talk a littlebit about that evolution? - yeah. i mean it was very gradual. so what happened was, icame in as an engineer, and i started workingon a lot of different artificial intelligencealgorithms at first to suggest things like relatedqueries or related websites, later to match ads to queries. so we basically were doingsort of a fuzzy matching

and broadening algorithm to basically match up some of our early ads. and then along the way werealized we had a really hard time finding someone to makeuser interface changes. and so i helped with trying to recruit one of my friends from stanford who ultimately turned down the job. he went on to do his phd instead. - i'm sure he has no regrets whatsoever.

(laughter) - and so then they said ok, and we kept interviewingfor about four months we interviewed people because the idea was we didn't have the much ui work to do at google at the time, so we were looking for a strong systems coder who was willing to do ui work one day a week.

it's almost impossibleto find such a person. it was kind of this crazy job description. so after about four months of trying, my boss pulled me aside and said "hey, i really appreciateall your help in trying to find the ui/systems engineer. doesn't seem like it's working out. you had this interestingthing in your background, symbolic systems, there's some philosophy

and psychology in there. would you mind spending one day a week making some of the ui changes that we need to make to the site?" and i said "okay, sure." and then as i took theassignment and walked away, i remember he stopped me andsaid "oh, and by the way, what we don't need is more opinions. we just need data."

and it was like don't try and think about what the site should look like. just implement what thedata says to implement. and so it was sort of interesting because in that role then every time we would roll out a new feature at google, i would go and meet with a team and say "okay, well what does the feature do? how do you want it to look?

how do you want it to work?" and then i would go back and i would code it into the front end,into the web server of google, exposing the feature. and i did that for a fewyears in addition to some of the ai work i was doing on the side, so i did ai for most of the time and then did this uithing and it was funny because then about two tothree years into google,

larry and sergey went and toured other silicon valley companies. they came back and thensaid "you know, all these other companies are kind of like ours, and they're structured like ours. but all these other companies have this role called product management. and we don't have that, but we have marissa, susan and salar,

and the three of them kind of do this. they go around and they meet with people, and they look at how things should work and look and specify features, and none of them, none of us-- it's funny because i think salar is still there at google ventures, susan obviously runs youtube today. but they were like "but none of you

actually do what yourjob descriptions say." because it was true; eventhough i was an engineer, i was spending more than half my time meeting with teams, working on specifications and ui design. i think susan was in marketing, but she was spending most of her time actually recruiting on partners, figuring out the features that they needed

to be able to use google search, etc. and so, he rounded us up and started the product managementdiscipline at google, but as i said, for me it felt very gradual because i was kind of already doing that work and that function. - yeah, and it reallyties in with something that we talk a lot about in this class. which is, especially at the early stages

of these companies, it's really important to bring in generalists, people who are not just going to say "well, this is my jobdescription. that's all i do." but people who are going to do whatever needs to be done. one of the interesting thingsabout google obviously, is that it grew incredibly rapidly. it's what we call blitzscaling,

so companies that aregrowing incredibly rapidly, doubling, tripling every year. what were some of the things that happened at google that sort of reflected that, and what were some ofthe inflection points where maybe you had todo things differently, you had to change your processes or change the organization to accommodate this incredible growth?

- well, i think there were so many interesting scaling lessons at google. i think that there are a few of them. so, one thing that happened and happened a little bit later, butwhen eric schmidt came, he really-- i remember we would always have to be reinventing our processes. just when you would sort of feel like

ok, we got it down. we know what the hiring process should be, or we know what the process for promotion should be or deploying code on the site should be, we would go one step further, and then everything would break, and we'd have site outages, or, you know, people wouldbe getting really frustrated.

and one of the things thathe talked about a lot, which i understand is one ofthe principals of this class, is that at every-- he was like "look, atevery order of magnitude, you should expect every process to break, and you should expect to completely have to reinvent it." so, he's like, it's very different to deal with tens of people versus

hundreds of people versusthousands of people, managing tens, hundreds, thousands. and each time you crossover one of those barriers, it's very likely thatthe system that you used very successfully for the previous stage is going to break, and you're going to have to rethink how do we do this, how do we train people up to deploy code on this site safely, how do we want to

scale our hiring process to make sure we keep our quality bar where it is. but it's also important to recognize, one of the things i thinkthat eric did at first, and it really frustratedus, but when eric-- eric came in aroundmarch, and we had a plan. we had to close the previousyear at about 200 people, and we had a plan to get to 400 people, so basically doublethe size of the company

over the coming year. eric showed up in march,and he looked at the plan. he just said "there'sjust no way you guys are going to be able to doublethe number of employees. obviously, we were going tomore than double traffic, more than double revenues;there's no way you're going to be able to doublethe number of employees and really keep the quality, the culture, the way that you want the company to be,

so i'm going to let thecompany collectively hire 50 people this year." so, he basically took our hiring plan and scaled it down by about a factor of four. it was actually quite funny. he created these like little dollar bills with larry and sergey's faces on them, and he called them larrys and sergeys, and he laminated them.

he had his assistant laminate them. so, he had these cards and he said "look for me, and every time you want to hire someone you have to present a hiring packet and a resume, and you have to hand it in witha larry and sergey." and so he took the larrys and sergeys, and he distributed themout to the different vps, and then of course there became

a black market for larrys and sergeys, which actually becamesurprisingly efficient. because what would happen is, the head of sales would have one, and he really would need,in order to make a sale, he would need an engineerto build something for him, so he'd be like "look.i'm going to give you this larry and sergey, but you have to promise you're going to use it to hire someone

who's going to build this feature to secure this revenue etc." and so it actually becamereally interesting, and i think, as painful as it was because we were just like"wait, there's just way too much work here to slow downour hiring like this." it was actually a reallygood moment for the company because it made us bereally thoughtful about how we were scaling, where wewere putting our resources.

we had to be that much more thoughtful about where to prioritize, andwhere the opportunities were. and so, yes hyper growth is really fun, but you also want to realize when you want that hyper growth to happenin terms of users and revenue, and not necessarily in termsof the size of the company. - [chris] one of theinteresting things is, you institute somethinglike the larry and sergey black market system, butthen at some point in time

you decide, presumably you guysdecided to stop doing that. i assume there aren'tstill laminated larrys and sergeys being handedout, so how did that happen? - eric was always very principled, and we did annual planning cycles, and so we ran that way throughthe remainder of the year. so, i think the last larryand sergey got turned in right around christmas or new years, and then the next year wewent with a formal hiring plan

that we had all agreed to as part of our overall strategic process. it was sort of an interestingway for him to come and add his own bit to google'sculture that very first year. - right, and so there'salso a natural expiration of the program as well. now, speaking of programs at google, one of the most successfulprograms at google is the apm program which you launched.

it's now become probablyone of the most incredible sources of talent in silicon valley, and i think a lot of thestudents in the classroom are interested in that program. can you talk about wherethat program came from? why hadn't somebody donesomething like that before, and what made it so special? - again, it was one of these things where it was just sort of organic.

so, what happened wasin, i think it was 2002, jonathan rosenberg joined, so we had just formed theproduct management group the previous summer, and jonathan joined eight or nine months later. so this product managementgroup was really small. it was me doing various consumer work, basically everythingyou saw in google.com, susan doing work with partners,

and salar doing work with advertisers. so each of us had our owndifferent constituent group that we were designingproducts and features for. and at the time we had morethan 100 engineers etc., and jonathan was hired asthe vp of product management, so he became all of ourboss, and we started working with him to try and recruitnew product managers in. and we just had thisvery interesting issue that we needed people whowere really technical,

because the google engineersreally pride themselves on being very technicaland not really wanting to interact with people who didn't deeply understand the technology. jonathan, of course, was a really experienced productmanager and had his view of who makes a good product manager. but the end game of it was that jonathan had been therefor about four months,

and we had hired two peopleinto product management. we had hired john piscitelloand pearl renaker, so there was basicallya team of five of us. at the same time, wayne rosingwho was running engineering, had hired eight people a weekfor the last eight weeks. so he had hired like 64 people, and one of the things youlearn is that you actually want to scale engineeringand product management in a certain ratio.

it basically ends up,depending on how complicated the products are, you want to kind of hold product management at an eight to one or like a 12 to one ratio, 12 engineers, eight to 12 engineersfor each product manager. and at that kind of rate,we're basically getting one new product managerfor every 32 new engineers, and it's very hard to keep up. and further, which wasvery upsetting to me,

jonathan took, i thinkhe took john and assigned john to work with salar,and he took pearl, and assigned pearl to work with susan, and i had no one to work with,and so i went to jonathan, and i said "okay, well, thisis great, but when do i get some help on the product management?" and he said "well youdon't have any revenue." and i was like "i don't have any revenue?" because he was like "well,susan does partners,

and salaar does advertisers.you don't have any revenue." and i said "but if wedidn't have any users using the site, if we didn'thave any users on google.com, we would have no revenue. there would be no revenue opportunities." and, i was like "okay" and i just decided i wasn't going to get frustrated about it, and i said "okay. i want to bet." and he said "well, whatdo you want to bet?"

and i said "i want to betthat i can hire and grow new product managersbetter and faster than you can hire experienced ones." so, i was like "i want thelicense to be able to go and hire some people to help me, and i'm more than happy,if we hire good people, i'm more than happy to share the wealth and spread them around through the whole product management group, but let me go."

and he said "okay, i'll take that bet, but what are you going to do?" and i said "well, i'm going to go and hire great computer science andsymbolic systems majors and computer science-relatedmajors out of school who haven't been productmanagers anywhere. and i'm going to teach them to be great product managers in the google style. we'll give them a lot of mentoring and

we'll kind of follow the template." salar and i both came fromstanford right into google, and there it was kindof a baptism-by-fire. we got a lot of responsibility, we got big projects to work on, and larry and sergey just yelled at us until we became the peoplethat we needed to be to do those jobs well, and so i said "i'm just going to repeat that process."

- very technical management process. - i'm going to just repeat that process and hopefully with less yelling. (laughs) and so, he said "okay" andwithin about a month or so i had hired the first apm, brian rakowski, who now runs the program, and things just took off from there. we did a lot of different things in terms of helping build a community

across the apms, build a rotation, because we fully acknowledged and expected that, like a lot of peoplewhen they are graduating, you don't know exactlywhat you want to do. and so the odds that you get assigned the perfect job inside of google is low, and so we said ok. one of the scary things about that is usually for you to try different types

of product management,consumer product management. advertiser product management,publisher product management, enterprise product management, you'd have to change companies a lot. we actually said look, that'sone of the great things about google is you can actuallystay at the same company and try a lot of these different roles. so we're going to make that really easy for the associates earlyon in their career,

and then, after theygraduate from the program, we decided we'd makeit a two-year program. then they can go and work on what they ultimately want to work on, and end up in the groupthey want to be in. they can stay in theirgroup or they can move on. yeah. - [voiceover] can you talk aboutsome of the personal traits that you selected for withthat initial cohort of apms?

- sure, so what did we selectfor for the first cohort. - so one quick thing, becausewe don't have the microphone, we'll just repeat the question. - yeah so, i was just going to paraphrase. so the question was whattraits do we look for, personal traits do we look forin the first class of apms. so i wanted people who arereally technically excellent, so that was very clear,but there were a bunch of other traits and thingsthat i was looking for.

one, i wanted people who really understood how to apply technology. not just people who aregreat at coding technology, but who would basically say,"hey i see this trend happening with fm transmitters, and ithink it means that we're going to be able to do x, y, or z." and so we designed a lotof questions to ask people, about like you know what'sthe coolest thing you've seen in the last six months, andwhat long term implications

do you think that it has,and people who got good at answering those kinds of questions, ended up being better apms than people who might be able to tellyou just very technically what's possible or not possible. the other thing is, wehad to acknowledge that we were hiring people whowere really inexperienced in this role, but they wereyet taking a leadership role. and so you needed somebodywho was very humble,

and also was a really good listener. and the humble piece comes in because, to really win therespect of the engineers, and people that they were working with, it was a matter of saying wellwait, this isn't just about you walking in and runninga meeting on day one, that's not going to happen, the other people on yourteam are 15, 20-year, very experienced, veryaccomplished engineers.

the right way to win them over is to say, "hey, sure, of course i'lltake notes for this meeting, of course i'll schedule the meeting." like, "oh of course, youneed me to go and get you some machines to expand yourcode or expand your test on, i'll go and apply to get the hardware and wrangle some of the processes." and so, we hired people who were willing to sort of roll up their sleevesand get their hands dirty

in terms of the overall process. and really help listen to the engineers, because the engineers hadsome of the best ideas of where the products should go. and then also really winning people over by their ability to helpthe team get organized. but also, because ofthe lack of experience, they would have to be very data-driven. because the thing is youcan't make your point

in terms of how you want to evolve a product based on instinct. so i've seen this work elsewhere, i've seen a feature beadded here or there, the way a lot of timesthey would have to win over those engineers was bybeing very data-driven and saying look i've looked at the logs, it looks like all of our users do this and then they follow on and they do that,

and therefore we thinkwe should have a feature that makes that follow-on step easy. things like that, andso basically listening really well, being humble,being very data-driven and being really technically excellent were probably the four personality traits we looked for the most. but i do remember, because tothe fm transmitter example, there was one night,when i forget if it was

larry or sergey thatcame down and had dinner with the first class of apms. and we were all sitting around a table, i was sitting on one end, they were sitting on the other. and i think maybe it was larry, he said "lately i've beendoing all these experiments with fm transmitters to tryand understand which one can broadcast my ipodfrom sitting in the trunk

to the radio in my carthe best, and which one has the highest range and all this--" and it was reallyinteresting because it was sort of this dinnerparty, but you can imagine normally at a dinner if someonesaid something like that people might lean back, startanother side conversation, but the moment he said that, it's amazing, because i remember likeall eight or ten people literally leaning in to the table,

and saying "which brands have you tried? which one's the best? does it work? is there interference?" and people just started peppering him with questions about these fm transmitters he had been trying andhow well they worked. and it was really interesting and obvious to me in that moment that we had picked peoplewho were really curious.

not just about search, orwhat we were doing at google, but just about applications ofnew technologies and trends, how they worked and whatthey could ultimately mean in terms of how life was gonna change or what people were gonna try and do with different parts of technology. - it sounds like one of the things that helped make the program what it is is really getting that close attention

from senior people like yourself or larry and sergey coming down. i think that, and we're skipping ahead a little bit in this sense, but i think you've also institutedthe apm program at yahoo. can you talk a little bit about that, and how do you get thesenior people involved there? - yeah we have, there werea few apms from google who ultimately had also ended up at yahoo

over that period of time and so, they said "look, it was such a great experience for us and we want to have a great product management discipline here." and yahoo had a good product management discipline, but we reallyfelt like we wanted to grow people in that sameway, in that same vein. and so i had enjoyedbuilding the program so much myself at google, that i saidok, that was sort of my turn,

so enrique torres andfernando delgado stepped up and they were formergoogle apms who stepped up to basically run the apm program at yahoo. and so they've done ittheir own way, and it's fun, and it's really worked nicely there too. - and do you feel likethis is the kind of program where it could work in alot of different companies? is it very special to just silicon valley, or do you see broader applicability?

- it's actually basedon a lot of different rotational programs that you actually do see in broader business. a bunch of the decisions we made on it, i knew that viacom, theparent company of mtv, had a really special rotational program where they would hireyou in, it was two years, you would do six-month rotations through mtv and a bunch of theirdifferent subsidiaries

learning a lot aboutdifferent parts of business. mckinsey obviously and a lotof the management consulting firms have a two-year analyst program. and so i had reallydrawn on that notion of trying to give people reallybroad exposure in a program that was really designed for training, but obviously becauseour needs were so acute, you couldn't just have people dedicated to small projects or experimental projects.

so we basically were able to give people really big charters so they could immediately start to make a difference while they were learning on the job. - one of the things that has happened, obviously eventually youspent a lot of time at google, but you are now the ceoof yahoo, big step up, and you must've taken some of the lessons from what you saw with both eric and larry

running the company. what are some of the thingsthat you learned from them while they were at google thatyou're now applying today? - sure, i was really luckyto have had great mentors and got to have seen suchgreat business leaders over the years and just inso many different situations. i was at google for about 13 years, and i will say not a daygoes by that i don't at least hear them in my head andin a different scenario,

in terms of differentadvice they've given. eric was always an amazingfountain of insights and advice, you know larry'smuch more instinctual, but sometimes you'd learn somuch from what his instinct was in terms of how he might run a meeting, how he would redirect a product team. and so, there are so many different things that have come with it. but i think one of the keylearnings from eric is,

i came to yahoo at a momentwhere it was very tumultuous. everyone liked to count howmany ceos there were in certain periods of time and i alwaysrefused to play that game. now i'm far enough way from itthat it's not acutely painful but i was basically the7th ceo in 61 months when i walked in the door. so it had been a very tumultuous time. it became very clear tome, one of the things that eric had said which wasa really humbling statement,

as you had gotten closer andcloser to the executive level, is he said, "good executivesconfuse themselves when they convince themselves they actually get to do things." (laughs) and he's like, "you don'tget to design web pages, you don't get to designapps, you don't get to code, right, what you get todo is set a direction and then your job is defense,get things out of the way, get the stuff that'sgonna slow the team down,

distract the team, get in the way of the team, out of the way." and so he's like, "youknow your job really becomes listening tothem about what's gonna get in the way and how to getthat cleared out of the path so they can move asfast as they can move." because you've got to acknowledge yourself that you're not gonna do the designs, you're not gonna do the implementation,

you're not gonna do the coding, and so your job is to helpmake them as effective as you can make them. and it was funny becauseone of the first things that people said to me when i got there, it was my 2nd day onthe job, and they said "ok, so, when are you going to have your big strategy rollout meeting?" and i said, "my what?"

and they said, "well you knowyour grand vision for yahoo. all the new ceos showup and sometime between day two and day five, theycall the whole company together and roll out their bignew vision for yahoo." and i said, "well idon't think i'm going to have a big dog and ponyshow, i think i'm gonna kind of go and sit in thecafeteria and listen to people because you guys have allbeen here for a lot longer than i have and i've got someideas of what we should do,

but you've got a lot moreideas about what we should do, and you know what'sworked and what hasn't, so i'm going to spend a lotmore time listening to you before we do that." so i was like, i think we'llmaybe have a strategy meeting, i had come in 2012, maybe we'll have a 2013 strategy meetingsometime later this fall, but i'm gonna need your helpin shaping the strategy. i think that that was actuallya much more comfortable way

for the people at yahoo toaccept me, to view me, and like i really view my role there is to listen and then to get things out of the way. and you know, you overallset some direction but then you ultimatelyspend a lot of time really just trying to get ridof any distractions or things that are gonna ultimatelymake the team less effective. - so it sounds like youwere really coming in and trying to learn fromwhat was already going on,

trying to listen, what kindsof questions did you ask that were most effective atgetting useful information? what can our students learnfrom the time that you had? - it's funny because i am kind of shy and i'm sure i did ask a lot of questions, but what is funny is thatthere were so many people who were eager to come andbring their viewpoint. (laughs) and so things you wouldlearn, i remember i was in the cafeteria one day,and this guy came up to me

and kind of tapped my tray, and said, "is it time to go?" and i thought he meant go, like leave, like leave the company,because at the time in that tumultuous period the company had had a lot of attrition, and i said, "no no, please don't go,please give me a chance i've only been here for a few days." and i was like "we might end up

doing something really good here." and he was like "no no no." he's like "look, we've all been here, we've been here for thelast five, six, seven years, waiting for management and for the board to figure itself out, figurewhat direction we should go in, and i mean, is it go time,is it time we can just run and do some of the stuffwe've always wanted to do?" and i was like "by allmeans, go!" (laughs)

"run, don't let me getin your way, you guys have got some ideas about what to do, more power to you." and so people would comeand bring that perspective and so, you just wouldimmediately end up in dialogue with them trying tounderstand what it was, that if you don't feel likeyou're really empowered to get things done right now,what's getting in your way? right? and so everyone hadtheir different perspectives

on the different things thatwere getting in the way. and one of the things we didis we rolled out a program we called pb&j, for process,bureaucracy and jams. where we basically said, if there's things that are getting inyour way you could go up on this moderator tool and write it down and then other people wouldcome and vote it up or down as to whether or not thatwas really a problem. and it was daunting because i remember

someone came up to me and said, "you know, i don't even knowwhere you're going to start, there are thousands ofthings at this company that need to be fixed." and that's a really dauntingthing to have said to you in the first few weeks of a job. but then the interesting thing was, we set up this pb&j and itreally helped us prioritize big things, littlethings, things that were

getting in the way, thingswhere people were just like "i don't understand." i'll give you some of the funny examples that we cleaned up and thenthere were bigger things. there were parking gateson the parking lot, and nobody knew why. (laughs) and like, you had to have your key, your badge didn't actuallyopen the gym door, unless you had taken anhour-long orientation.

and i was like "really? 'causelike any hotel in the world will just let you go andstand on a treadmill, no orientation needed, iknow we're all engineers, and we're a little clumsy,but this seems a bit extreme." and so we just started tryingto get some of this stuff where everyone would just belike, "i don't understand why, why doesn't the gym door work on my badge? i don't understand why. whyare these turnstiles here?" and so we did a lot of littlesymbolic things like that,

just where people would report it, and as soon as it got50 votes, we would go, see if it was a reasonablething to change, and then we would just change it. and so we did a lot ofsmall things like that. but then we also triedto address things like our product shipping process. how could we launch products better? because people would say things

like, "hey, it's reallyhard to launch something. it's really hard to navigate the process, of how do i take my code and actually get it reliably into production?" and so we would trace thatthrough different hr processes around hiring people, getting promotions, compensation, different things like that. and so we had pb&jacross the whole company, and what was amazingis we actually changed,

as a result of different things that ended up on that moderator,a thousand things in the first year of pb&j. because what happened was it basically started to just direct,it was an effort run by a person on my team, patricia, but she basically gotpeople in each department who were really passionateabout just trying to fix all these littlethings along the way.

it really empowered everyone to say, "hey, there's all these things wrong, we can fix them, and actually we can help, and because of all the votes up and down we can actually prioritize the things that are bugging the most people and really getting in theway of the most people." - one of the things that'sinteresting about that and how it relates to other things

we've talked about in the class is it's taking a community-based approach using inside the organization,being able to get a lot more scale out of it by taking that community-based approach. one of the things youhad to do with yahoo, i think you've referencedit a couple times, is there had been a lot of turmoil, the company had been around a long time,

you really had to comein and change the tone and change the natureof what was going on. and pb&j was part ofit, but there were also probably some bigger things that you did to tell people it is go time. can you talk about thechallenge that you faced in basically turningsuch a large battleship and getting it orientedand set in a new direction? - sure, i would say ithink that there's sort of

a view on culture, theview that i have anyway, that was actually given tome by one of my early apms, brett taylor, 'causebrett had worked at google and ultimately later worked at facebook. and in talking with brett i said, "what is it like to workat facebook after google? how is it the same, how is it different?" and he said "you know ican't really articulate it, but both companies havereally strong cultures."

and he was like "you know,one of things you learn is that really strongcompanies almost always have really strong cultures." and he's like "when you're at google, you know you're at google,even if you took down all the logos, and changed all the colors, you would still know that you're there, and the same thing is true for facebook." and i would say the samething is true for yahoo,

and you'll find this is true in a lot of really strongly cultured companies. and when you sort ofgrok that, you do end up having respect for the fact that culture is somethingthat's hard to change. and so i think about it a lot just from the medical background,for me, thinking about it in the form of genetic engineering. and so at a very remediallevel, what you can say is

in genes you can get genesto hyper-express, right, you can get them to overexpress, you can turn them off, but it's actually reasonablyhard to inject new mutant genes or new mutant dna into a dna strand. and culture really isthe dna of a company, and so i really feltthat when i came to yahoo it was very important tome that we not try and change yahoo into something else. that it is a great company,there's great people there,

we have a great set ofproperties and assets, and we wanted to say, how we do make it the best version of itself, how do we take what's great about the company, their enthusiasm, their sense of fun, even things like our reporting,the content we create, a lot of these different pieces, how do we get that to hyper-express and really become superproductive and efficient?

how do we get some of the thingsthat are getting in our way as reported by pb&j and people just chatting about what's getting in the way, how do we turn those things off? but it was less about tryingto inject totally new things, and that's why programslike pb&j worked so well, is because they really camefrom the culture of the company and the values of the company. - [chris] it helped peopleexpress what was already there.

- yeah.- [chris] in other words. - and i did see a question over here - [chris] yes. - i don't know if you still have it. - [voiceover] i was morezooming on what were the roadblockers for shippingor deploying new products? i was very curious about that. - ok, roadblocks to shippingand deploying new products, changes to the processfor releasing products.

- yeah, so the questionis, so for roadblockers, i would say there's alot of different things that we needed to look at. one, we had a lot of teamsthat were under resourced, and/or, lacked sufficienttenure of somebody having said "hey, i shipped the last version," or "i know exactly how to get this done." and so one of the things we've done is we've implemented a tech council,

which is about 10-12 mostsenior engineers and architects at yahoo to really talkabout how do we wanna do continuous integration, how do we wanna do continuous deployment, how do we wanna do regression testing, howcan we make shipping all that code really smooth? because we didn't have a lot of processes for that in the beginning. and so we tried to institutethose types of processes

but we also did things like,people didn't even know necessarily who was shipping what when, so we instituted somethingcalled a launch calendar, which we had similarly done at google. but basically when you'relaunching a project you go up on this tool and just say "hey, i'm planning on launchingthis change on this day." and that's actually super helpful for all the otherdepartments in the company,

because that means pr, marketing, legal, everybody knows ultimatelywhat's shipping, and customer service, ifthey start to get emails about a new feature beingseen or not working that well or working really well,they know what it's about. so we had a centralized bulletin board for those launches to helppeople coordinate better. there were just a lotof different things that we needed to do to ultimately,

basically make thatprocess much more fluid. and there was also just an element of wanting to move quickly,so we started saying "decisions in a week.a good decision today is better than a perfectdecision tomorrow." and we want to just beable to move quickly in terms of what we deploy. and that really overalljust sped up the cadence, which was important.

- as you're trying to makethese changes at yahoo, obviously part of thatis you're working with an executive team, you'reworking with senior leaders. talk about how you usedyour management team to help make changes, howdid you work with them, how would you pick that upfrom google and other sources, where do you look to for management ideas? - i had really liked theway that eric ran his staff at google, we would have abig staff meeting on monday,

and then we would dovarious strategy reviews on tuesdays and wednesdays, end up having a lot of one-on-ones onthursdays and fridays, and then cap off the whole week with a big company meeting on friday afternoon. so i haven't done all of those things, but we do have a staff meeting on monday where we all get to talk about what did we do the previous week,

what do we have going on that week, to really make sure that allthe different departments inside of yahoo are crossfunctionally working together. so if you need something fromanother member of e-staff, that monday meeting is agreat way to kick off the week to say, "hey, this is whatwe're shipping this week," or "this is what we'retrying to get done this week, and i'm really gonnaneed some help on deals," or "i'm really gonna need somehelp on marketing," or legal,

or "i'm really gonna need to make sure that this data center is up and stable for this day and that we don't have any scheduled maintenance," things like that. so we'll have that on mondayto coordinate everything, then we'll do deeperdives, sometimes strategic, sometimes technical,sometimes process-oriented, on tuesdays and wednesdays,and for the first two years, now i do fewer one-on-ones, buti do do them as we need them

i did one-on-ones really religiously with members of the staff, itried to do them every week, just to ultimatelyunderstand from each leader what was working for them and what wasn't. and then we added a meetingon friday afternoons which was an all-company meeting, where we're reallytransparent and we talk about all the new people who'vejoined, we talk about people who are passing milestones

of being at the companyfor 5, 10, 15 years. and it's amazing how many people-- you know there's this phraseat yahoo about leading purple, and it really is amazing, almostevery week we have someone who passed the 15-year mark, and the new people who cometo the company are like "wow," because silicon valley it'svery unusual to have someone to have that kind of tenure. but it was funny because,after they asked me

about the big strategic dog and pony show, and i said well i'm notplanning on doing that any time in the first few months, and then a couple dayslater i came and said, "ok, well, when do i getto talk to the employees?" and the person i spoke to said,"at the quarterly all-hands" and i had heard aboutthe quarterly all-hands, it was to go over thequarterly earnings call that the cfo had deliveredthe first day that i arrived.

and i said, "no no, i getit that's tim's meeting, he's gonna go over theprevious quarter's revenue and (inaudible) and all of that,but like, when do i get to, ya know, talk aboutproducts and take questions from the company, and they were like, "the quarterly all-hands." and i was like, "oh, i see," because one of the thingspeople would say to me most often when i wasspending all that time

down in the cafeteria,people would come up to me and they'd be like "it'samazing that you're down here, because nobody ever talks to us." (laughs) people would say that all the time, and i just couldn't figure out, and i was like, "well look, communication in a company as big asyahoo is really complicated, i'm gonna try andcommunicate as best i can," but then you know you canalways communicate more, etc.

and i didn't really get it and i was like, "oh, is that why all theemployees keep saying that no one talks to them?" because no one ever talks to them, there's only four meetings a year where the executives goout and actually talk and engage with the employees. and so now we do that on a weekly basis, it's really become a big beloved tradition

at yahoo to use the moderator tool. and we do deep dives on newproducts that are coming out and talk about some of thecurrent events of the day that are affecting the company. and it's overall been reallya great communication tool, but also something toreally bring us together. because it means we celebratewhat went well together, we talk sometimes about whathasn't gone that well together, and overall it's been a greatcommunity-building tool,

as well as really helping to build transparency in the company. because i think one of the things that was really important to me was because the company had beenin such a state of chaos, was to try and demystify,really demystify management and our decision, and demystify the board and their decisions, and by having that kind of transparency,'cause, if we have

a board meeting we actually show the board slides that friday at fyi. which is like fyi, for your information or for yahoo's information. and so we really try and show as much of the decision-makingprocess, what we're thinking about the decisions that we're making as we possibly can, at those meetings. - [voiceover] regarding thepb&j, if there was something

that was upvoted, but you couldn't change, because it had businessneeds, if that happened, how did you address that when it did? - yeah, so pb&j, if wehad something that was upvoted but it was somethingthat we couldn't change due to business needs, we had a response at least in the tool. and so someone would actuallygo up and write a response, and say, "you know we've looked at this,

we've considered it, here arethe reasons we can't do it." and sometimes people wouldre-raise it again later, or raise it in a different forum, and sometimes that nextattempt would work. but, we really try tochange as much as we can, and you really want to be open to questioning your assumptions and changing the overall structuresthat are getting in the way. but, yes, there aresometimes when you can't,

but we did feel that one of the things is, we just had variousthresholds, so we were like, "wait, if 50 people in thecompany have voted something up, it deserves at least a response." if that many people choseto come up to the moderator, we've fluctuated being abouta 10,000 to 12,000 person company, if there's that many people who are taking theirtime to come up and say, "this really bugs me,it's getting in my way,"

the least you can do isread it, really consider it, hopefully change it, butif you can't change it, at least explain so that thosepeople can come back up later and say, "ok, that does make sense to me, i understand why that's difficult for us to change right now." - chris. - so you were saying aboutthe strategy sessions on tuesdays and wednesdays and stuff,

what does that actually mean, or what does a good strategy session look like? - so in terms of the strategy sessions, or deep dives that we haveon tuesday or wednesday, those tend to be just more free form time. and so sometimes we'lllook at things like, we'll do a deep product review, something new isshipping, we'll go through the entire product experience,

what the metrics forsuccess are going to be, how we're gonna measure ourselves, what the marketing androllout plan looks like, what any legal concerns look like, and we'll do a reallythorough launch review. then you'll have anotherdeep dive where it's our people team wanting to talk about what benefits we're gonnaoffer for the next year and really going throughthe different benefits.

so the structures of thosemeetings tend to change quite a bit, sometimes they're an hour, sometimes they're an hour and a half, depending on what the topicis, but it's basically an opportunity for membersof the executive staff to say, "hey, i have thistopic, i need a decision on something, i'm gonnabring you the data, into this meeting, any members of e-staff are welcome to attend that meeting,

so we usually have really good attendance and participation acrossthe executive staff in those forums, and then ultimately coming to the decisions that they need made in those meetings, yeah. - a couple of questions,let's go to this side. - [voiceover] at one point you banned all remote working atyahoo, and you mentioned you didn't want to changethe culture of yahoo,

was that a major shift in culture? - so the question was aroundthe work-from-home ban that was instituted, and giventhat i didn't want to change the culture, how is thatnot a cultural change? which i think is a good question. one of the things that happened, and it's sort of funny,because, by the way, i have nothing against working from home, my brother works from home,i have lots of friends

who work from home, i've become like the anti-work from home poster girl, it's really not fair.- [chris] (laughs) i spent like a good six totwelve months of my life where every time i left-- i realized i becamekind of a yahoo hermit, because every time i left yahoo, people wanted to ask meabout working from home. (laughs) and so, what happened was,

it was really just a result of listening. because i would say i've hadclose to three dozen people over the course of my first few months, come up to me, and they wouldgrab me in the cafeteria, or grab me after fyi, and they'd be like, "i love all the changesyou're making in the company, i love how fast you'vegotten this all moving and the vision that you're painting, and my team is really inspired

and we're working reallyhard, and once a week we have to stop and callthis person who works on our project, that we never hearfrom, and catch them up. and i kept hearing thatnarrative again and again, of just like, wait, here we all are, we're all working reallyhard, we're high performers, and we've got this person who's kind of letting the team down,or not that available, and it was actually less interestingly,

as i plowed into it, it wasactually less interestingly about the people whoformally worked from home, because i think sometimes when you have a very formal setup for working from home, i actually remember i had a friend who worked at google for a bunch of years and then moved back to his home in sweden, and he literally had atwo-bedroom apartment, and one was his bedroom, andthe other was his office,

and he would wake up in the morning and get all ready forwork, and then walk across his living room, and spendthe whole day in his office, and at the end of thenight he would walk back and eat dinner in his kitchen, but he had to be very structured about it. and i think people who work like that, actually when they've got agreat set up for themselves at home and they're verystructured about it, it works well.

but i think we all, oneof the things you'll learn when you enter the workforce,is like, there's those days when you're like "ok, i'vegotta wait for the cable guy," or "i've gotta wait for this delivery, i'll just plunk down at the kitchen table and try and get something done." and you feel like you're productive, because there's nointerruptions, etc. etc., but the truth is you're probably,

at least in my case, i'mlike 50-75% as productive in that state as i amwhen i'm at the office. and so we actually, ifound, had less of a problem with working from home formally,where there were people who worked from home five daysa week and had a great setup, but we had lots of peoplewho would just be like, "oh it's raining really hard,and traffic's bad this morning so i'm not gonna come into the office." and they would just mailtheir team in the morning,

and be like "working from home today, don't want to lose an hour in my commute," but the point is, thatactually you're gonna now be interfacing with sevenother people on your team all of whom either have to keepstopping to write you emails or call you to talk to you,and it's just not as efficient as if you were sittingat the next desk over, or at the next cube over. and so that was really whatwe needed to put a stop to,

it was interesting because wegranted a lot of exceptions to the work-from-home ban,if you wanna call it that, where we kept lettingpeople work from home because they did have reallyformal and good setups, but we did want tobasically send the message that this was yahoo's moment,and it wasn't the right thing for all companies, but itwas the right thing for us right then, to have people in the office so we could collaborate better,

have less of these friction points, and it was more aboutsending the message to people who were kind of casually oroccasionally working from home and not being that productive about it, that that's probably notthe best thing to do, at least at this momentin yahoo's history. - and you were changing the default, it wasn't that you suddenly said nobody can work from home,

and if you work from home you're fired. it was, the default is, weexpect you to be in the office. the other thing ilearned from this is that even the ceo of yahoo stillhas to wait for the cable guy, which is a very sadstatement on the world. we have other questions, let's go all the way to the back there. - [voiceover] on the point ofculture and hiring and people, one thing that people areshifting to understand

is that when you go out with your company one thing that it'sreally really nice to have more than anything else isthe people you hire, right? and so when you go into a company as ceo, you did not have theopportunity to be that intentional and deliberate (inaudible) and so there's all these storieslike this larry and sergey (inaudible) 15 times orwhatever, so what do you do in that position whenyou're taking over a ship

and the ship comes withthe package, right? so, how do you go about that? - well you do your best to meet everyone-- - quick quick-- - oh sorry, i'll repeatthe question, or you can. ok so i would say, the question is, i mean one of the most importantthings you can do is hire, and when you're startinga company from scratch you get to hire whoyou want and you get to

shape it in a particular way. when you're coming intoan already formed company, it feels like it's already apackage that's well established how do you handle that? and, a couple different things, one, we did change theoverall hiring practice, because there's differentways you can hire, one of the things that was happening, and i would just hear it again and again

in the narratives from different employees who would talk to me is, managers could hire who they wanted, it was not a committee or awisdom of crowds based approach. also on the annual compensation elements, there were basicallyno performance reviews, and you could give raises and bonuses to who you wanted to giveraises and bonuses to. which basically meant therewas kind of a lot of cronyism,

for lack of a better word,because you had people hiring their friends andthen giving those friends promotions, raises, bonuses, etc. and so we had to really think about how did we want to approach performance, like maybe we shouldhave performance reviews. like, when the company'sperformance isn't that great, one of the things you may say is wait, the company is just comprisedof a lot of individuals,

so maybe we should actuallydo our own performance reviews and keep track, so we setup a goal system for across the company, we set up aperformance review system for employees to give people feedback. and i also set up a hiring review process, which was, my view wasi still want managers to be able to hirewhoever they wanna hire, but if it's really a good hire, you should be able to justify it.

does that make sense? it doesn't mean that youshould hire someone different than you otherwise would have hired, it just means that if somebody asked you, "hey, how come you're hiring person a?" you should have a really good reason, as opposed to, because i want to. and so that hiring process, inmy view didn't really change how many people we hired,or even who we hired,

but it did change thelevel of scrutiny on it, and the level of thoughtthat managers would give to why are we hiringthe people we're hiring, what are they gonna do, and ultimately, what will they help usachieve when they got there? and the other thing is,companies are living organisms that change over time, youknow people come and go, especially in tech, there'sa lot of transitions that people make, and sofrom that perspective,

you'll know over time that you will get to ultimately shape the culture. today at yahoo actually we've hired, we have a company of about 10,700 people, and about 6,000 of them,maybe just more than that, are newer than i am. right, so the company isalready more than half people who have been hiredin through this process or into this vision, into this direction

that we're currently taking the company. it's sort of interesting, 'causeyou can almost think of it, i remember readingsomewhere that every cell in the human body, idon't know if it's true, but every cell in thehuman body turns over every seven years, so every seven years you're an entirely new person. (laughs) and you know, that's kindof true for companies too, there'll always be somepeople who are the same,

but by and large thereis that kind of turnover, and if you approachthat in a principled way and really try and manageit, it can be something that can either be verygood for the company or very bad for the company. and so we've tried to makethat a really positive process of renewal, of getting peoplewho are really motivated to come and work onreturning yahoo to greatness. - one or two more scalequestions and we'll also

return to the audience and alternate. one of the things thatyou've done at yahoo is you've used m&a, you'veacquired a number of companies, small companies, large acquisitions like the tumblr acquisition. could you talk a little bitabout what's worked well about that and maybe if there's things that haven't worked well, andagain, all backwards-looking, obviously you're running a public company,

we don't need to know aboutanything forward-looking. - we've done a lot ofacquisitions at yahoo now, several dozen, and i wouldsay that one of the things that we've done is we've kind of classified them in three different groups. we have talent acquisitions,we have building blocks, and then we have strategic acquisitions. and they roughly map to size and scale, but we did each kind ofacquisition in a different way.

so, talent acquisitions, oneof the things that happened is, and i know because when theboard was recruiting me, it was really important to me. one of the things that happened is, we knew we had to hire newpeople into the company, but everyone i talked to would be like, "i would love to come into yahoo, i would love to work on these projects, but i don't want to come by myself."

and i understood that,because i didn't want to come by myself either, right? i was like, wait, if you'regonna hire me in here, i'm gonna have to be ableto hire some of the people that i know the company needs to hire, and if i meet new people whohave the right skill sets, etc. and so one of the interesting things about talent acquisitions is itworks really well for us, because we could bringin really terrific people

and they would say, "ok,but i don't want to come by myself," and we'd actuallybe able to kind of group hire, four or five people insmall sets into the company. and the nice thing aboutit is because they were already working as a team, they could hit the ground running really quickly. so one of the things we saw, for example, was we had about 30 peoplewho worked on mobile in a 12,000 person company,14,000 person company,

the day that i joined thatwas one of my interesting cafeteria conversations that we had, where i had a real heartattack in that moment. because i had just soldthe board on let's remake yahoo for mobile, and inthe mobile generation, and then i met this guytony, and i was like, "what do you work on?" and he was like, "i'm a mobile engineer." and i was like, "we have a mobile team? that'sgreat, how many are there?"

and he was like "30," and iwas like "oh my gosh!" (laughs) and so we need that 30 to be like 500 people really really fast. and one of the ways wedid that was we would go and do talent acquisitionswhere the team had built a beautiful application,but it really wasn't getting the size or scale that theywanted it to, but they were still great at buildingmobile applications, and they knew how to worktogether really well as a team.

so we acquired a lot of teams and put them right into the mobile sphere,and it really helped us reinvent our app strategyand get new apps out quickly, because these teams could move so quickly. the other thing is yahoo nowas a 20-year-old company, has a lot of technology that's quite old. and so it's not that unusual for you to go and dig in to a project's tech stack, and find that, wait, some ofthis code is 10 years old,

12 years old, 15 yearsold, hasn't been updated, some of the people who know how it works or could easily explain how it works aren't even there anymore. and so some of thestrategic building blocks that we brought in wouldbe basically companies where we not only wanted the people, but we wanted a key piece of technology. so for example, there is acompany we bought called xobni,

which is inbox backward,and they had been working on reinventing mail, but one of the things they got really good at was contacts, they were constantlyparsing all your emails so when you got something that said, "hey, my phone number's changed," or they saw in the footer that the person had a new title or a new email address in the footers or headers of the email,

they would ultimately immediatelyupdate it dynamically. and so we were like, this is great, because if we can justtake this technology and just replace the contact address book in yahoo mail with this new,more modern, easier to maintain piece of technology, it'sa very clean swap out. not only do we get greatpeople, but we get technology that's much more scalable, more modern and easier to maintain.

and then we also wanted to be able to make some large strategic acquisitions, tumblr, obviously at about $1.1 billion, brightroll which is avideo ad network we bought, and flurry, are the threebiggest acquisitions we've done. and there, our goal iscan we buy a company that does something thatrelates to what yahoo does, but pushes us in a new direction. like tumblr pushed us into social.

yahoo's always been verystrong at display advertising which for many peopleis banner ads, but now banner ads don't work aswell as they once did, they're still veryeffective, but they sometimes don't work as well, andthe new mode is much more storytelling throughvideo, which is why you see so much more video advertising. we said, wait, if we wantto keep kind of moving in the vein that we're in,being a really strong offering

for brand advertisers forthem to get their message out, display 2.0 is video, so howcan we buy a company that really moves us strongly into video and brightroll had the largest video ad network in north america. and so we were really excited to do that. and flurry really reinforced, they were one of the largest mobileanalytics platforms, and they also are lookingat not only how people

analyze their apps andoptimize their apps, but also how to monetize their apps. and so there was agreat opportunity there. but we've come up with this term mavens, mobile, video, native, and social, it being sort of an acroynm for that. and we really want thestrategic acquisitions to push us forward hopefullyin at least one of those areas, if not multiple ofthose areas, in terms of

how they push us forward,how they push the business. - got it, ok. other questions? maybe from this side, front row. - [voiceover] yea you talkedabout the strong culture in google and you obviouslyspent over a decade in that company so how do you make sure that you didn't try to clone that culture and how did you make surethat you helped shape a culture that was unique to yahoo?

- [chris] got it. - sure, so the question is,since i had been at google for so long, how did i makesure that when i came to yahoo i didn't try and clone the culture. and in truth i'm sure thereare things that i brought over, you know consciously or subconsciously, but there's a couple of things. one is, i loved googleand i loved the company and i loved my time there and the people

i was able to work with, but you know, you always have some ofyour own perspectives. where you're like, iliked this part of it, but i would've done it this way, or i liked this part ofit, and i would've done it this way and i think thatwould've been better. and so there certainlywere some ideas that i had where i was excited totake them, modify them, to incorporate an insight thati had and see how they worked.

and so i did some of that,but the other thing is you always want to work somewhere where you're reallyexcited about the people and the culture, i meanthat's what kept me at google for as long as i was there. because one of the things that happens is, if you're working somewherefor the right reasons, you believe in the mission of the company, you believe in the people of the company,

the last thing you wannado as a new entrant into it, even as theceo, is change it, right? and for me, you know, yahoo had been just such a vaunted enterprise, right? i remember i was here at stanford, i remember someone telling me, "hey, there's this guy named jerry," i think his username wasliterally jerry, j-e-r-r-y, and you would go to~jerry and he's keeping

a cool list of notes of fun websites he's finding on the web. (laughs) and so before yahoo was even in html, i remember going and poking around his world readabledirectory to try and find cool urls, and so theni watched it become, jerry's guide to the world wide web, and then dave and jerry'sguide to the world wide web, and then ultimately yahoo, andthen launching as a company.

but i had seen so many parts of that, and then at google, forsome of our first years, one of my first assignments was help us win the yahoo contract, because we had a joint board member, he had gotten us someins and some meetings with yahoo, and i remember going to yahoo, and having to show offsome of the ai algorithms and things that i was working on,

to try and show them whygoogle search might be a better alternative than someof the other search providers they were working with. and so i'd had this all in my history, and so i had reallylooked up to the company for a long time, i had a lotfriends who'd worked there, had a lot of respect forit, and you know for me i think i had enough enthusiasm for wanting to be a part of that company

and culture, and understand it, that the last thing you wanna do is disrespect it or change it. - two more questions that we prepared, and then we'll throw itall open to the students. because there are two questionswe always try to ask folks. the first question is, obviouslyyou're very busy as a ceo, but how do you invest inyourself, what do you find the highest roi, is it readingbooks, do you have a coach,

is it meditation, peopledo different things, what do you do to invest in yourself? - well i do all kinds of different things. so i mean i have athree-year-old son who's amazing, i spend a lot of time with him, i love to ski, i love to travel, but one of my core philosophies is, and i saw this early at google, it's sort of funny, becausea lot of people think

that google just happened. right, they're like "it was amazing, it just grew like wildfire, no one's every seen anything like it." and i assure you the experience of being inside of itwas nothing like that. (laughs) ok? i mean it was like, can youactually work 130 hour weeks? there's only 168 hours ina week, and the answer is,

if you were very strategicabout when you shower, eat, and sleep, yes youcan work 130 hours a week, but you won't have time todrive home and back and forth, so you better move allyour clothes to the office. that was the experience of trying to grow google during those ages. it's funny, i actually have a friend who has a co-working space in the city, and i want to the co-working space

on a saturday afternoon,there's a bunch of different companies there,there was no one there. on a saturday afternoon, and i was like, "this does not bode well at all for any of the companies in this space." because, sundays werereally hopping at google, but saturdays it was veryrare that there weren't at least dozens of people in the office trying to get something done.

because we felt such incredible urgency, and there was just so much to get done, and just such an opportunity, that it was a lot of hard work. and as a result, people thoughta lot about burning out, and you know, can we keep goingat this pace and this rate? and what i saw, both inmyself and in other people, was that we were ableto work incredibly hard for incredibly long periods of time,

but one, you have to be really passionate about what you're working on, and two, you can't have everything you want, but it's ok to carve out something that really matters to you. so, i have a good friend, craig, who was the first employeelarry and sergey hired, craig silverstein, hewas their first employee. and craig had this rule,i remember 'cause i had to

usually plan my code reviews around it, that on the last day of every month, no matter what was happening, he left the office nolater than 7:00. (laughs) and i remember because i would be like, "oh no, it's the last day of the month, i'm not gonna be able to get a10:00pm code review tonight." (laughs) and there were justlittle things like that, and i noticed that thepeople who were the happiest,

the sanest, able to work for the longest, kind of would have that. and i started callingthis finding your rhythm. and a lot of people talk about balance, and when they think about balance, and all of you guys, youknow how hard college is, and how much you have to push yourself, but this notion of likethree square meals a day, eight hours of sleep a night,

i was like, you know that'swhat some people need, but it's not what everyone needs. and it's much more about what do you need in order to not feel resentful? and so i started askingpeople who i was worried about burning out, like, what's your rhythm? and i got very interesting answers back. there was nathan who hadrecently graduated from stanford, and i said "look, i appreciatehow hard you've been working,

but i really want you to thinkabout what matters to you, and when do you get resentful?" and he came back with thisvery interesting answer, and he was like "tuesday night dinner." and he was like, "everytuesday night my draw mates and i have a potluck atone of our apartments." the old stanford drawgroup would get together. and he's like, "and if imiss tuesday night dinner, or worse if i have to cancel it

when it's supposed to be at my apartment, i'm just bummed thewhole rest of the week." and he's like "that'swhen i would find myself on wednesday and thursday, i'd be like, well i worked this hardand i didn't even get to go to tuesday night dinner thisweek, so i'm leaving at 5:00!" and you'd have that kindof perspective of, wait, it's ok for you to havethe view of like, wait, you've given a lot ofyourself to this company,

but you should be able to say wait, i can't have everything iwant, and all the leisure time that i want, but i can have the things that really matter to me. i had a mom of three,katie, who was working a lot with our bangaloreoffice, and she kept doing conference calls every nightat like 1:00 in the morning until like 2:00, 3:00am, andi was really worried about it, and i said "you know,katie, just explain to me

what your rhythm is," and she said, "marissa don't worry aboutme, i don't mind the bangalore conference calls in themiddle of the night at all, what bugs me is when i'mlate to the piano recital, or i miss the soccer game,and that disappointed look on my child's face when i walk in late." and i was like, "ok,then katie we're going to make sure you're never lateto another kids' thing again." and it was amazing becauseshe would just tell me

in the morning, "hey at 4:00today i've gotta leave." and it was always amazing, because at 3:45 katie would stand up to leave,and someone would be like "oh katie, we're almostdone, can you just stay for five more minutes?" and i'd be like, "nope, katie's gotta go." and i will say just inmyself, i've watched my rhythm change, becausein my 20s and early 30s, before i was married,for me i really wanted to

see the world and it was all about travel. and i would find, aboutonce every four months i wanted to go somewhere new, i wanted to be out of the office for at least a week, and it was actually very good for me, because i would have weekwhere i would be like, oh, i was gone for a whole week and everything kept running smoothly, and it was also good for my team,

because they'd be like,and she was gone for a week and nothing went really that wrong, right? and i found if i pushed myselfto like six, eight months, and i didn't go on a tripi would start feeling really resentful, likeyeah, i really wanted to go to iceland, or i really wanted to go here, and i'd have to keep cancelingand postponing the trip and it would kind of just get to me, and i'd be like ok, i needto ultimately do that.

and now for me it's a lotmore about family time and having the thingsthat really matter to you, and that will changeover time, which is why i tend to not be too structured about it. because i think if you'rereally structured about it, you can sometimes cling tosomething where you're like, yes, this is part of my routine,this is part of what i need to do to invest in myself,but what you really need to stay rejuvenated and not get resentful

has actually changed over time. - and one of the interestingthings that i think came out of that discussionthat you just had, was that you have to ask people, right? it's not enough, you can't count on people necessarily just coming to you and saying, "this is what i need," you had to actually go to them and enforce it. final question, we often ask this.

if you could go back intime to that day on 2012, first day on the job, whatwould you tell yourself to do differently, whathave you learned since then that you're like oh i wish i knew it then? - there's so many different things. it's funny 'cause theredefinitely are things where i would say go faster. right, there's definitely things here where i'm like wow, i can'tbelieve i've been here

for three years and we haven't changed this or fixed this yet. so there's some areas where i would tell myself to go faster. and there's some areas where i would tell myself to go slower. - [chris] what's one of those areas? - well, in retrospect, idon't like the word turnaround i prefer to think of itas yahoo's renaissance.

but, we are in a mode of turning around, and one of the thingsthat happens as a new ceo is that people sort ofexpect that some time in the first year ortwo that you're going to basically bring in your own team and exchange that executivestaff to really be your own. and i did that in pretty muchabout four to six months. and i would argue thatwas probably too fast, and i did make a few hiringmistakes in that time,

some of which have been very public, and so you really have to live with those decisions in a very public way. and they were really big learnings for me, but i would say in some of those cases, it would have been good to have just gone a little bit slower. so in some cases i think for me if i could go back to myself in 2012

it would be a little bitmore about different pacings. some things that shouldhave moved even faster, and some things that shouldhave moved more slowly. - got it. excellent. youhad a question, i know. - [voiceover] yeah i did. i'm actually asking this (inaudible) - that's ok. - [voiceover] things have changed. so, you have the perspective of someone

who went straight to a small company right out of school, butyou've also seen an apm program (inaudible) for manyyears, what do you think are the trade-offs you get from those different kinds of experiences,and what kinds of skills do you think each builds(inaudible) in a person? - sure, so the question is, you know, being at a small company,being at a large company, running the apm program, how do all these

different experiences compare and contrast and what do you get from them? is that a fair characterization? it's funny 'cause it wasactually when reid asked me to come and talk at theclass it was a comment i reflected on, my mother,and probably she says it to her children because wein fact are her children, but my mother will say tomy brother and i, she's like "i loved every phase of my children,

i loved babies, i loved toddlers, every phase was more fun than the last." she just had this real enthusiasm for it, where there are some people who'd be like, "well i really loved thisage, and not that age." and i always just thoughtthat was very special that my mom said that,but it was funny for me because i got married later in life, and have had children later in life.

you know, for me, ijust had this experience of being at this company. and i realized that forme, it really was that i loved every phase. i loved it when we were 20 people or less, i loved it when we were dozens of people, i loved it when we werehundreds of people, i loved it when we werethousands of people, i loved being an individual contributor,

i loved being a person whomanaged a single digit team, i loved managing tens,hundreds, thousands. i loved every phase of it. that said, one of the things you'll see is and it's important to try allthose different experiences. try small, try big, try running a program, try running a function,because it really tells you what is it that you like. and i found that i like alot of different things,

and i like a lot of variety. one of the things i've seenin some of my colleagues is they'll be like, this is my sweet spot. like, i love it. it was interesting there weresome business development people early on in our timeat google who were amazing, and when the company got to beabout 500 people, they left. and i remember talkingto one of my colleagues, and i was like, "i'm just sodevastated that they left."

and then as we chatted aboutit, other perspectives came up, but they were really verymuch jacks of all trades. and they loved it when google was small, because they could work on inbound deals, outbound deals, licensingdeals, advertising deals, all these different types of deals. as we got to be a bigger company, and they needed to get more specialized, it wasn't as much fun for them.

but the funny thing is,my friend and i both said, "hey, ya know, if we startedanother company tomorrow, we would totally hire that guy to be our lead business developmentguy the very first day," because that's his sweet spot. and so i think that when youtry a lot of different things, when you try things you knowyou haven't tried before, or you don't feel readyto do, you learn a lot about yourself, in terms ofthe things that you might like,

or what some of your strengths are. and so for me i found that ilove all these different phases of companies, i love all thesedifferent phases of scale, and for some people theymay say, "ok, i get it now, i don't like it when it's too small, i don't like it when it's too big, i like it when it's this size." and that's really important,because that's when you do your best work iswhen you're really happy

and really enthralled,not only with the mission but also with the phasethat the company's in. - one final question, back there. - [voiceover] hi, so i was wondering, when it comes to decision-making, no matter small or big, like (inaudible) cs, or runninggoogle, or running yahoo, what's a drive for you internally, how do you know it's theright decision to make?

- sure, so this goes back tomy decision to go to google, but it's a criteria i've used since. so, it was 1999, i actuallythink i had a class in this classroom at that time. it was the spring of 1999, it was a heady time in the valley, i had about 14 job offers,google was my 14th offer, and i had a really hard time deciding. because i had applied to allkinds of different things,

to this (inaudible) phases,like i'd gone for some management consultingroles, i'd gone for some teaching roles, i hadgone for some startups, i had gone for some big companies. and i was very good atpicking the creme de la creme of each one, if i work at abig company it'll be this one, if i work at a startup it'll be this one, if i do the teaching jobit'll clearly be this one. but it was very hard for me to integrate

across the different roles. and so, at about spring break, about a month before i made my decision, i said "ok, i'm gonna spend spring break thinking about the bestdecisions i've ever made, radically different decisions,and what they had in common. and then i'll see how those criteria apply to my job search,"and so i put on the list of really good decisions:coming to stanford,

changing my major to symbolic systems, spending one summer working at the stanford researchinstitute up in menlo park, the research institutethat gave rise to nuance and a lot of other reallygreat technologies, siri, and then one summerworking at the union bank in switzerland, in their research lab. so i kind of looked atthose four decisions, and said ok those arereally different decisions,

but what if anythingdo they have in common? and i realized that theyhad two things in common: one, i had always workedwith the smartest people i could find, because ithink when you work with really smart people theychallenge you they make you think better, they makeyou think differently, they make you justify your decisions more, it just ups your game. and i'd always done something

i was a little not ready to do. i think if you're reallyhonest you'll remember being left here for the first day, like i remember that firstnight sitting down in my bed and being like, why did ithink this was a good idea? i'm really far from home,i don't know anyone, this is kind of daunting. i remember going up to, wheni changed to symbolic systems, i remember having to call myparents and say, "ok, i think

i'm not going to come become a doctor, i think i'm going to becomea symbolic systems major," and i was like, i don'teven know what that is, and i have no idea how todescribe it to my father and explain why this is agood investment of his money. (laughs) and then i remember going to sri, and i had literallyonly taken cs106a and b, and i somehow thought i could program, even though all i knewhow to program in was c

at the time, and so i ended up programming with these legends ofartificial intelligence who had spent 20-25 yearsprogramming in lisp, and i was like runningaround the halls of sri being like "how do iget a global variable?" even though i know you'renot supposed to use them. (laughs) and these old timeprogrammers being like, "set env," and i was like "ahhh!" and then moving to switzerland,

i got there and i didn't speak german, but i knew that i wanted to live and work in a different country,and everyone in the lab spoke english, and so ithought it was a good idea, and i got there and they hadset up an apartment for me and my landlady only spoke german. and so there was a lot of hand signals and a lot of directionsabout where things were, most of which i could follow.

and then she handed me a document that was like 60 pageslong, entirely in german, and asked me to sign it, so i had no idea what i was signing, so i signed it. and then i went to the grocery store, and it turns out in europethere's a very different system for buying produce,where you're supposed to print your own sticker, asopposed to having someone just wait at the endof your shopping time.

and so i ended up in this conversation i couldn't really have withthis grocery checkout clerk, who was very upset that mygrapes did not have a sticker. (laughs) and she yelled atme for quite a long time and then finally juststormed off in a huff and came back with thegrapes with a sticker and pointed at it, andi was like, oh my gosh, i can't even buy produce here, how did i think this was a good idea?

how did i think i could live and work here successfully for a summer? but in each of thosecases, as daunting as those first days felt, i foundthat if i pushed through it, and was just like, ok, i don'treally feel like going back tomorrow, but i'm just gonnaget up and go back tomorrow, the most amazing things happened. i had such an amazingtime here at stanford, and symbolic systems, the peoplei got to take classes with,

and the legacy now of symbolicsystems in the valley, led really by reid, is just such an amazing thing to be a part of. and i got to do my honors thesisat sri in conjunction with the teams there, which was just amazing. and the union bank in switzerland is really what led me to google. because if i hadn't written that program following people around the web,

that summer, eric robertsnever would have said, "hey, there's these guyswho are working on research really close and similar to yours," and so, in those cases i thinkthat the two biggest criteria for me are: work with thesmartest people you can find, and do things that you don'tfeel entirely ready to do. because in that moment,that's how you find out a lot about yourself, andyou can surprise yourself, and be good at things youdidn't think you'd be good at.

and at worst you learn yourlimitations and you learn things that you're not good at, or that you don't like that much. and so that really guidedmy decision to go to google, it guided a lot of mycareer decisions at google in terms of things thati tried or wanted to do, and it guided me to yahoo as well. - excellent, marissa, thank you so much for coming into classtoday. (audience claps)

thank you everyone.

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