NY Times Article about Yahoo!'s Display Ad Exchange

Yahoo! has begun to publicly talk about the display ad exchange that I heard about while interning there this past summer. They are calling it AMP, though the article doesn't mention when it will be launched. I wrote in an earlier blog post that this advertising project will basically determine the future of Yahoo!, and it is probably a major reason why the board has been reluctant to accept Microsoft's offer.

Advertising: The Future of Yahoo!

I met with Chris Jaffe today, who runs the Advertising User Experience Division here at Yahoo!. We talked about where he thinks the best opportunities are at Y!, and where the future of Y! lies. Not surprisingly, he believes that advertising is the place to be, and admits that in the past Y! placed it's B level engineers in advertising (with A level in product development). Now he is seeing this trend reverse as Yahoo! enters its "teenage years." In his meetings with Sue Decker, they have both agreed that the future of Y! is moving away from its owned content (yahoo.com) and into advertising partnerships with content owners (Ford, P&G, NBC).

One area that he believes Google is much farther behind than Y! is in TV advertising--currently advertisers on TV barely know what demographic is watching their ad, and in the near future Yahoo! will be providing data that is just as detailed as what is available for online ads.

Chris also discussed the area where he believes Google is still killing Yahoo!: scalability. All of the advertising tools at Google are automated--they just need to feed the "Adwords fire" and the auctions will take care of themselves. Y! still has a large salesforce, and in his opinion 3/4 of these people are un-needed (saving only the people who deal with Fortune 50 companies). Hopefully I will be able to discuss this in more detail with Robi Ganguly, who is also on my team and working in the division focused on improving scalability.

I believe that Chris truly agrees with the vision of Sue and Jerry here (he said that he has turned down multiple offers in the last 8 months), but he is concerned that they may not be able to deliver in time. In his opinion, if APEX hasn't launched in 18 months and blown away the competition, then Yahoo! is toast. And looking at Panama, this is a legitimate concern.

As for me, he believes that right now is the time to start a company or move into technology--the internet space is established but still moving very quickly, and there are very smart people who have figured out how to be successful (he mentioned Meebo as a great example). He also believes that you can move into consulting at any point in time, and that the experience you get working in the Valley will make you a more intriguing candidate for any job.

Meeting with Bradley Horowitz

On Friday, I had a meeting with Bradley Horowitz, Head of Advanced Development Division at Yahoo!. Bradley had given a talk for the Executive Speaker Series the first week of my internship, and I was very interested in his role as 'innovation leader' at Yahoo!. We discussed the difficulties of maintaining an entrepreneurial culture at a company the size of Y!, which are exacerbated by how quickly Y! has grown. One major problem that I have seen is that Y! has no platform--there are very little best practices across the network, and products/business units are still verticalized with little communication. Bradley mentioned that fixing this problem is one of Jerry Yang's priorities, and that very soon he will implementing a major change to address this problem.
I also asked Bradley how a company like Y! can keep its best employees; what stops them from leaving for startups or starting their own companies. Bradley runs Brickhouse, which addresses this problem, but he agreed that there is nothing Y! can do (or should do) if an employee has a great idea and wishes to pursue it outside of Y!. However, if the employee chooses to pursue his/her idea within Y!, than instead of a 1:1000 chance of success, it will be more like 1:100 or 1:50. So basically it comes down to people's risk tolerances--starting your company at Y! will never make you a billionaire, but it can make you a millionaire.

Jerry Yang new CEO at Yahoo!

Quite the first day at work for me at Yahoo! It was just announced that Terry Semel has stepped down at Yahoo! to take a non-executive role. Jerry Yang, one of Yahoo's original founders, has taken his place as CEO. Sue Decker, who was believed to be in position to take the CEO role, has been named President. All three will be discussing at a company wide meeting today at 5:00. Couldn't have imagined a more exciting first day for me!