Yahoo gave each brand its own entrepreneurial GM

Transcript

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

1. 9:31

   for. So what are the main questions that you start asking once you get into the company? Yeah. So there's a couple of things. I mean, one is, speaking for Yahoo in particular, it's a conglomerate. It's not one brand. If you look at the other companies kind of our size in the industry. Pinterest, Snap, Reddit, Roku, these are all kind of one product companies for the most part. And with Yahoo, it's a conglomerate of many different brands that compete independently in their spaces. So Yahoo Finance competes with Bloomberg or CNBC or, you know, maybe Wall Street Journal. We have a new product that competes with TradingView and others in that space. Sports, ESPN and others like that. Yahoo Mail, Gmail. I mean, they all have competitors that are very different and it creates this ecosystem of brands. That's not the first time I've seen that. IAC had 60

2. 10:27

   plus brands. And with Ask, we joined that family. CBS Interactive, I had 30 plus brands, many of which had nothing to do with CBS. So CNET was the leading technology site. Sportsline was one of the OGs in sports and fantasy sports, Last.fm in music. I mean, you go down the list, GameSpot and video games, we had all kinds of different brands that we had to figure out the right structure for. I did it wrong at Seapus Interactive the first time where we started off, I tried to have everything report to me. My background was all product and I was a pig in slop with these brands, many of which I was a user of. And it turned out that I was just going to slow things down, that we needed to run way faster. I had to hire general managers who could be entrepreneurial and be independent. And my job was to work on their plans and hold them

3. 11:16

   accountable and try to help out where I could to let them run. It was interesting when we got here, whatever had happened through the years of Verizon, they kind of evolved into a company that really had one head of product, one head of technology, one head of content, spread across all the brands. There were people who specialized, engineering teams who specialized, but they were really kind of spread between them. And so the first thing that we did was reorganize the company into this more conglomerate structure with GMs in all these groups. That means they all get their own head of product, their own head of technology, their own head of content. Even from central, they will have their own head of sales, usually marketing, PR, business development. So, you know, and they'll be kind of assigned to the

4. 12:00

   Those divisions. And so we had to put that structure in place. And then I had to go higher for that. So some of which were people internally, who were great, and we're going to be part of it. Some I had to go get true experts who were badasses in their field. And so that's what we did. We started putting that team together. And that really was that 2022 timeframe. The next step is once you have that team, you understand what you're doing. Well, now let's look at, you know, are we doing all the right things? Do we need to reduce our focus? Are there things that we should spend?