Yahoo chose personal-life products over enterprise software

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 34:03

   reins and you're rebuilding and transforming the company how do you stay focused not getting into these money grab areas of like ai coding ai assistance becoming a neocloud all of a sudden and using your data centers for other stuff and then just kind of staying focused on one product at a time. For us, it went back to the thing that I think always falls into the cheesier side of this job, which is the mission. It really mattered here. And I took my time with it.

2. 34:33

   You know, I rolled out a brand new mission for the company with a 45 minute to an hour long presentation to the company. It was actually, by the way, much longer for the management team at my team offsite. It was almost twice as long. We did a condensed version for the whole team that I spent, you know, working on with the team, you know, almost a year that that was coming into focus, six months of really doing it. And everyone in our company understands it now and can recite it back and knows what we're doing and why at very real levels of detail behind it. So as I said earlier, going back to being the trusted guy to the internet, helping our users accomplish their goals, no matter how big or small. We're not judging. A trip to see the Taj Mahal, beating the snot out of your friends from UCLA in fantasy, it doesn't matter. Make a dollar in Yahoo Finance,

3. 35:22

   make a million dollars, whatever it is, our job is to help you do that. And that's a mission that is 30 years old. It's also a mission we can do for another 30 years as things change. The internet is changing more right now than it ever has. That's both an opportunity and a threat for how we would deliver on being the trusted guide. But as part of that, we were very specific in saying we're not going to be an enterprise or B2B company. We're going to handle your personal life.

4. 35:51

   So Yahoo Mail is where that is most important because Gmail, it actually sits in the Google Cloud group now and is really a enterprise. Outlook is an enterprise-level product. There are things you would do differently if you were focusing on someone's personal life with mail, as opposed to their work life. And so that's an example of where you would do that. So what are the assets around that? Superior aggregation, proprietary data sets that you can leverage then to do that. And then what we call you know, context, content that provides context. So that's why we got out of competing for enterprising breaking news. And some of these people like at ESPN, Shams, Woj in the early days, these are guys who started at Yahoo. And when I got here, there were things like, you know, we had people, we had White House correspondents, we had all these different things that TechCrunch

5. 36:45

   is another example. One of the most important brands in tech journalism, but wasn't right here. Instead, we have the best fantasy analysts. We have amazing business analysts for analyzing the stock market. We just signed Deidre Bosa from CNBC. Yeah, I saw that. To join Brian Sazi and people we already had. And so that's where we wanted to do content, was to help our users make better decisions to accomplish their goals.

6. 37:11

   So that's all cheesy, but actually provide a really important filter for what we would do and not do. And that still guides us today. And we will look to add other brands to that. They don't have to be Yahoo branded,