Barney Pell's Weblog

q: still at Yahoo 12 years later, why?

filo: today even more exciting. all the new ideas, doesn't seem like it's a 12 year old mature industry. feels like just getting started.

q: what's your role in the company now?

filo: technology, networks, datacenters, how to scale. platforms we should be building for the apps and services we want to deliver. what lets our employees be more innovative, enable partners, etc. the whole stack.

bradley: come in the morning and spend 3-4 hours working on my myspace profile. keep it minimized, check it through the day. my role is innovation. "hack yahoo" program as an example. create a process by which we can do what we're really good at -- create a product that works for half a billion people. we want to innovate, get a product to market that may not need to be inhibited by the large audience and uptime, moree innovative. I look after the yahoo developer network. And the way we build a product from greenlighting a project to the agile development methodology we use.

q: a year ago when Terry was here, there was a very clear perception around yahoo, had just bought flickr, delicious, clearly got web2.0, terry was turnaround ceo story of the year. a year later there is a vibe that yahoo has slowed down in some way, maybe not as much going on, perhaps google has pulled away. it might have something to do with search and monetization of search and inability to compete on that level. is part of your job to help goose yahoo a bit?

bradley: I'm picking up what you're picking up in terms of the media. the issue is you can think of yhoo as two lines of business. first, audience creation. second, monetization of those experiences in ways that aren't detrimental but provide value. we haven't done as good on monetization aspect. that casts a shadow on the other successes. but flickr has grown 15x, we've launched yahoo answers that grew organically to 60M uniques. in addition to growing organically, we've begun to knit them together. not social media products, but a social media company. yahoo travel has flickr photos embedded. we're making progress on monetization side. when that catches us, yahoo has been growing faster than the internet as a whole, so there is big updside.

q: two guys drop out of stanford phd program and create a huge brand. that's the core story of yahoo, and also of google. what do you make of google?

filo: they started out competing in one area, grew to compete in more areas. we worked with them when they were a small company. at that time we weren't competing, today we are. we've never had a shortage of competitors. 12 years ago it was aol, msft. the competitors change over time. today google is one of them, msft, and big media companies. also all the possibilities in the next hot space, the next youtube. those are just as much a threat. we're thinking about where we need to be. the one constant is we know things are going to change, 5 years will be very different. who is going to be the leader in search 5 years from now? maybe us, maybe google, maybe some startup that hasn't started yet.

q: re search. because of the monetization, google can just bid more for companies than anyone else. for myspace inventory. for youtube. that impacts what strategic options you have as a company. where are you in addressing that from a tech standpoint? panama, where is it going?

filo: we've always had competitors. msft could outspend us on anything, they have the money. that's not going to define our success or failure. that's the environment we operate in, we have to build better products and services. generally companies that we really want we end up getting and I don't think that's going to change.

to answer monetization directly: just starting to roll out. we have a few hundreds advertisers transitioned. we're going slow as heading into xmas season. we're taking it cautiously, but the plan is to get advertisers convereted over q4 and into q1. so far, feedback is positive. once everyone transitions in q1 we can leverage the new platform. build the next gen ad platform.

q: see opportunity to go beyond the adwords market standard?

filo: sure, everyone sees huge opportuinty out there. google is doing what they're doing today. no reason to see why we can't do better. we're putting the pieces in place in the next few months to be able to do that.

q: bradley is the product goign to kick butt?

bradley: change sthe way advertisers think about campaigns, wholistic view. we're doing so well on the product side, #1 internet platform in the world.

q: yahoo seen by many in this crowd as potential next business card logo. what do you find in common in the acquisitions you do?

filo: starts with a great product service idea, something that is going to fit into what yahoo is doing today or we want to be doing. big aspect is the people, probably the most important part. a lot of ideas but really the people with passion around it.

bradley: we've done a great job in the micro-acquisition. eg upcoming is just 3 people, but made a huge impact. we have a special competence in bringing in small teams, keepign the integrity of the teams and maximizing the potential of the people.

filo: take an outside idea, bring it into yahoo and be even more successful.

q: rumors of yahoo merging with another large internet company, msft. can you dismiss those entirely for us?

filo: not much to say about it. over 12 years of our history, we've talked. rumors come and go. pretty safe to say nothing will be announced tomorrow.

q: people now talk a lot about openness. aol made announcements about opening their apis. bruce chisholm struggled with how open he could be about adobe. dan rozensweig talked about this issue here years ago.

filo: over the last year or so, we got a lot more serious about putting out apis. flickr from day 1 was open. now we're going after specific things, get apis out there and open them up.

bradley: yahoo embraces openness not just in apis and platforms but as a cultural quality. we allow people to present at academic conferences, partner well, work closely with a number of other companies. we opened yahoo physically with open hack day. from how we think about data, to users, it's a pillar of what it means to be in yahoo.

questions from the crowd:

q: you did a deal with recipes area, with multiple players. what's your media content strategy?

filo: we've been in content business for 11 years since we put up our first news stories. we've taken the approach of finding the best content for our users. recently we've created some of our own content. and user generated content is huge for us, social stuff becoming increasingly important. so you'll expect to see a mix.

q: what are your top 2-3 challenges in scaling the network, computer power? (only a handful of companies have invested in the infrastructure, some now turning that into an asset like amazon and google).

filo: with 100,000 computers, how to do that effectively, power it, cool it, manage it redundantly, and make it look like one computer. and let developers build things on top of it.

q: any problem building data cetners? we heard there was competition not for developers and coders but electricians to help wire up data centers...

filo: the last 5 years was slower but the glut ran out.

q: we heard a teen say yahoo is silly, and google is a friend. what is driving that?

filo: for kids we have games, music, things that are fun, and we want that brand. one adult said she viewed yahoo as a trusted brand, and we want that too. we want people to feel like they're safe with us, reliable, don' lose your data. that is a lot of hard work you don't see on the outside to build that trust and get that from the users. we will mean different things to different people as we have so many properties.

bradley: when a teen says that was silly, we like that.

q: great job with flickr, upcoming, and delicious. until google bought youtube they weren't doing much with social media. you haven't pulled the trigger on a blogging platform. do you feel the need to get a large content property into that platform? what the fuck, why haven't you done something? (think Vox is the hottest platform, buy it and give it to your users. if you dont pull the trigger on facebook or sixapart, I would say what the fuck is wrong).

bradley: 360 is something we put out to market, the closest thing to an authoring and blogging platform. when we put out a product, we're generally #1 or #2 (17 major categories right now). 360 went out, and we learned a lot, it may be doing a 180.

filo: that space is very interesting. social media is one of the key focuses, been the key focus for last year, and blogging is a key part of that. we hope that 5 years from now we'll be a very major player in that space. we'll continue to try things internally, and look at acqusitions, will be a bigger player in that space.

q: all the web giants doing dramatic things from real estate up in oregon. are brick and mortar now limiting factors for web2.0 companies?

filo: in general it hasn't been a hindrance to us, and there are many third parties building capacity.