Marissa Mayer on Scaling Google and Yahoo | Blitzscaling 17

This is session 17 of technology enabled Blitzscaling, a Stanford University class taught by Reid Hoffman, John Lilly, Allen Blue, and Chris Yeh. This class features Chris Yeh interviewing Marissa Meyer, the CEO of Yahoo. This podcast has been produced by Greylock Partners. For more podcasts, class notes, slides and videos, please visit greylock.com so, to begin.

With, let's give a warm CS183C welcome to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. So one of the great things about 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, yep.

And talk a little bit about your time at Stanford, because I know one of the interesting things is you studied symbolic systems. You were also part of SLE and did symbolic systems as Reid did as well. So talk to me a little bit about 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 science master's, graduating in 99, and I did symbolic systems. So Reid and I have that in common. And I did sle. So I guess all three of us have that in common. As part of my freshman year, I absolutely loved Stanford, but I really, really loved the 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 med friends at other schools, I realized that we were all taking the same classes. We early all had the same atomic like construction kits, all the same flashcards. And I really wanted to have an 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 unusual for here at Stanford. And obviously Stanford's always had a very strong computer science department, a really strong psychology department. And so I started learning a little bit more about symbolic systems, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science and took some linguistics classes, liked those two, and really liked the interdisciplinary 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 brains develop and how they learn. But the other interesting application of that, of course, is artificial intelligence. And so I ended up switching into symbolic systems and spending my time thinking more about could we actually build a brain that operates the way ours does, as opposed to how to dissect them.

And I think that you also, while you're an undergrad, not only were you majoring in symbolic systems, you also taught at least a couple of courses in symbolic systems as well. Can you talk about that?

Sure. Well, I did. How many people here have. I mean, if you. I think everyone's taken probably 106 A and B, and I think now it's almost standard run for the course. But. 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 times at the end of my. At the end of my tenure.

One of the interesting things is our faculty sponsor for the class is Mehran. And you know Mehran, of course. And Mayeron actually was my instructor for CS106A in the ancient days when I was an undergraduate.

So you may have been in my first class because actually Mehran was the first person I was a section leader for. And he was actually unusual because he was the one professor at Stanford that actually would get more people on his second day of class than his first. Maybe that was true here for this class too, I don't know. But he was so popular, people would spread the word about Mehron and get more people to come to the next class and even to the first one.

Absolutely amazing. I still remember some of the lectures he actually gave the snooze bar example for. He said, you still remember that? That's amazing. So you were here. Obviously you're very busy academically, but you probably spent your time on other stuff as well. As an undergrad, you're very involved in a lot of things. Talk about what you did outside of class.

Well, I really. I loved the residential life, so I was an rcc, I was an ra, and so I did a bunch of different work in the residences. I was also on the debate team, something I started doing in high school and continue to do here. I did some parley debate, which is a little bit less intense than some of the national debate tournaments because it's all extemporaneous speaking and. Yeah, just really enjoyed my time here and I'm sure I did more activities than that, but those are the ones that really stand out.

And then when you finished your master's and you went to work for what was then a pretty small company, how big was it when you joined?

I went to work for Google. It's interesting. I assume many people here know Eric Roberts. So I spent, I did a two year master's because I was doing a co term because I was a head ta. I basically had like a half course load. There's a very good deal where if you have a head ta, like they cover some of your credits and give you a stipend and all of that. And so I had basically a summer off between the two years of my master's program. And so I went to Switzerland and 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 compare it to other people's paths on the web and do collaborative filtering. So if you visited site A, B and C and someone later visited site B, they would say maybe you want to visit site A and C. And we were aggregating all this information for the Union bank of Switzerland to make their traders better at finding relevant information quickly in the morning when they first arrive at the job to see what the market conditions were. And so I came back and Eric 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 me a little bit about my summer research and I told him what I'd been working on. It was so funny because I still give Eric a hard time about this because he said, oh, that's so funny because you were looking at where people go on the web and trying to understand where traffic goes and what sites all relate. There's these two guys on the fourth floor, they're building a search engine. They're not looking at where people go on the web, but they're looking at link structures between sites to kind of do something similar. Like you'd probably be really interested in what they're working on. And he's like, but I can't remember the name. He's like, it's Larry Page, Sergey Brand. But I can't remember the name. And I was like, well, you know Eric, I just got back from Switzerland, I'm teaching for the first time. I'm really overwhelmed.

I don't have time to meet with.

And I was like, I don't have time to meet with a startup or get involved in the startup right now. And so I kind of punted. And it was actually good because that was, I mean they literally formed Google about the week before Google started, about middle of September of 1998. And I had gotten back around the 20th or so of September. At that point, they weren'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 of the first employees at Google asking, would you consider coming over to interview? And it was funny because at the time it was quite late. I had really procrastinated on picking my job that would my first job. And so I said I would consider it, but I need you to interview me on Tuesday because I absolutely committed, I'm going to make a decision by May 1. And so it was funny because I went over to interview for the job and then Larry and Sergey came in and interviewed me. And then afterwards they walked out and I heard them say, hey guys. I think they said, we're going to Kleiner. So they were basically going to give the big VC pitch that ultimately led to one of their big funding rounds. And then everyone in the company went with them because it was such a small company at the time, like, everyone went with them. And I remember the office manager came back in and said, heather. And she said, I'm sorry, I know it's very important for you to complete your interviews today because you're hoping to make a decision in the next week or so, but everyone just left to 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. But yeah, no, it was a fun time.

I think it ended up being 25 million split by Kleiner and Sequoia.

That's right. And I remember they actually did their press conference over on, I think the second or third floor of the Gates building, because I remember I had just assigned my offer and I had seen the word Google handwritten on a note saying, google press conference this way one morning when I was walking into Gates and that's when I found out they got their funding.

Now, you joined Google as an engineer, but I think over time things evolved and you became really focused as a product person. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution?

Yeah, I mean, it was very gradual. So what happened was I came in as an engineer and I started working on a lot of different artificial intelligence algorithms at first to suggest things like related queries or related websites, later to match ads to queries. So we basically were doing kind of a sort of a fuzzy matching and broadening algorithm to basically match up some of our early ads. And then along the way, we realized we had a really hard time finding someone to make user interface changes. And so I had 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.

And so then they said, okay. And we kept interviewing for about four months. We interviewed people because the idea was we didn't have that 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. And it's almost impossible to find such a person. It was kind of this crazy job description. So after about four months of trying, my boss or his host, they pulled me aside and said, hey, I really appreciate all your help in trying to find the UI systems engineer. Doesn't seem like it's working out. You have this interesting thing in your background, symbolic systems. There is some philosophy and psychology in there with, 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 the assignment and walked on, I remember he stopped me and said, by the way, what we don't need is more opinions. We just need data. It was like, don't try and think about what the site should look like. Just implement what the data 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 I would go back and I would code it into the front end, into the web server of Google, making the. Exposing the feature. And I did that for a few years 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 UI thing. And it was funny because then about two to three years into Google, Larry and Sergey went and toured other Silicon Valley companies. They came back and they said, 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 your job descriptions say. Because it was true. Even though 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 feature sets they needed to be able to use, Google search, et cetera. And so he rounded us up and started the product management discipline at Google. But as I said, for me it felt very gradual because I was kind of already doing that work and that function.

And it really ties 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 job description. That's all I do. But people who are going to do whatever needs to be done. One of the interesting things about Google, obviously, is it grew incredibly rapidly. It's what we call blitz scaling. So companies that are growing 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 of the inflection points where maybe you had to do things differently, you had to change your processes or change the organization to accommodate this incredible growth?

I think there were so many interesting scaling lessons at Google. I think that there are a few of them. So one thing that when Eric Schmidt came, he really, I remember we would always have to be reinventing our processes. Just when you would sort of, if you feel like, okay, 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 like one step further and then everything would break and we'd have site outages or people getting really frustrated. And one of the things that he talked about a lot, which I understand is one of the principles of this class, is that he was like, look at every 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, with tens of people versus hundreds of people versus thousands of people managing tens, hundreds, thousands. And each time you cross over one of those barriers, it's very likely that the 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 the 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 think that Eric did at first, and it really frustrated us. But when Eric came in around March and we had a plan, we had closed the previous year at about 200 people and we had a plan to add, to get to 400 people, so basically double the size of the company over the coming year. And Eric showed up in March and he looked at the plan, he just said, there's just no way you guys are going to be able to double the number of employees. Obviously we were going to more than double traffic, more than double revenue. He said, well, there's no way you're going to be able to double the 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 the company collectively hire 50 people this year. We basically took our hiring plan and scaled it down by about a factor of four. And it was actually quite funny. He created these little dollar bills with Larry and Sergey's faces on them, and he called them Larry's and Sergey's. And he laminated them. He had his assistant laminate. And 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 with a Larry and Sergey. And so he took the Larry's and Sergeys and he distributed them out to the different VPs. And then of course, there became like a black market for Larry's and Sergey's, which actually became surprisingly efficient.

Yes.

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 engineer to build something forum. So he'd be like, look, I'm gonna give you this Larry and Sergey, but you have to promise you're gonna use it to hire someone who's gonna build this feature to like, you know, secure this revenue, et cetera. And so it actually became really interesting. And I, and I think, but it, as painful as it was because we were just like, wait, there's just way too much work here to slow down our hiring like this. It was actually a really good moment for the company because it made us be really thoughtful about how we were scaling, where we were putting our resources. We had to be that much more thoughtful about where to prioritize and where the opportun. And so, yes, hyper growth is really fun, but you also want to realize when you want that hyper growth to happen in terms of users and revenue and not necessarily in terms of the size of the company, one of the.

Interesting things is you institute something like the Larry and Sergey black market system, but then at some point in time, presumably you guys decided to stop doing that. I assume there aren't still laminated Larry's and Sergei's being handed out. So how did that happen?

I mean, Eric was always very principled and we did annual planning cycles and so we ran that way through the remainder of the year. So I think the last Larry and Sergey got turned in like right around Christmas or New Year's. And then the next year we went with a formal hiring plan that we had all agreed to as part of our overall strategic process. But it was sort of an interesting way for him to come and add his own bit to Google's culture that very first year.

Right. And so there's also a natural expiration of the program as well. Now, speaking of programs at Google, one of the most successful programs at Google is the APM program which you launched. It's now become probably one of the most incredible sources of talent in Silicon Valley. And I think a lot of students in the classroom are interested in that program. Can you talk about where that program came from? Why hadn't somebody done something 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 was in two, I think it was 2002, Jonathan Rosenberg joined. So we had just formed the product management group the previous summer, and Jonathan joined eight or nine months later. So this product management group was really small. It was me doing various consumer work, basically everything that you saw on google.com, susan doing work with partners and Salar doing work with advertisers. So each of us had our own different constituent group that we were designing products and features for. And at the time we had more than 100 engineers, et cetera. And Jonathan was hired as the VP of Product Management. So he became all of our boss and we started working with him to try and recruit new product managers in. And we just had this very interesting issue that we needed people who were really technical because the Google engineers really prided themselves on being very technical and not really wanting to interact with people who didn't deeply understand the technology. Jonathan, of course, was a really experienced product manager and had his view of who makes a good product manager. But the end game of it was that Jonathan had been there for about four months and we had hired two people into product management. We had hired John Piscatello and Pearl Renicker. And so there was basically a team of five of us at the same time. Wayne Rosing, who was running engineering, had hired eight people a week for the last eight weeks. So he had hired like 64 people. And one of the things you learned is that you actually want to scale engineering and product management in a certain ratio, right? You know, it basically ends up depending on how complicated the products are. You want to kind of hold product management in an 8 to 1 or like a 12 to 1 ratio. 12 engineers, 8 to 12 engineers for each product manager. And at that kind of rate, we're basically getting one new product manager for every 32 new engineers. And it's very hard to keep up. And further, which was very upsetting to me. Jonathan took, you know, I think he took John and assigned John to work with solar, 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, I said, okay, well this is great, but like, when do I get, when do I get some help on the product management? And he said, well, you don't have any revenue. And I was like, I don't have any revenue. Because he was like, well, Susan does partners and solar does advertisers. You don't have any revenue. And I said, but if we didn't have any users using the site, if we didn't have any users on google.com, like we would have no revenue. Like there would be no revenue opportunities. And. 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, what do you want to bet? And I said, I want to bet that I can hire and grow new product managers better and faster than you can hire experienced ones. So I was like, I want the license 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 like, let me go. And he said, okay, like, I'll take that bet. But like, what are you going to do? And I said, well, I'm going to go and hire great computer science and symbolic systems majors and computer science related majors out of school who haven't been product managers 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, you know, and we'll kind of follow the template. Solar and I both came from Stanford right into Google and it was kind of a baptism of a 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 people that we needed to be to do those jobs well. And so I was like, I'm just going to repeat that process. I'm going to just repeat that process and hopefully with less yelling. And so he said, okay. And you know, and within 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. And 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 a lot of people when they are graduating, you don't know exactly what you want to do. So the odds that you get assigned to the perfect job inside of Google is low. So we said, okay. 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's one of the great things about Google is you can actually stay at the same company and try a lot of these different roles. So we're going to make that really easy for the associates early on in their career. And then after they graduate from the program, we decided we'd make it a two year program. Then we, you know, then they can go and work on what they ultimately want to work on and end up in the group they want to be in. They can stay in their group or they can move on. But yeah.

Can you talk about some of the personal traits that you selected for with that initial cohort of APMs?

Sure. So what did we select for for the first cohort of APMs?

So one quick thing, because they, because we don't have the microphone, we'll just repeat the question.

Yeah, so I was just going to paraphrase. So the question was, what traits did we look for? Personal traits did we look for in the first class of APMs? So I wanted people who were really technically excellent. So that was very clear. But there were a bunch of other traits and things that I was looking for. One, I wanted people who really understood how to apply technology. Not just people who were great at coding technology, but who would basically say, hey, I see this trend happening with FM transmitters and I think that it means that we're going to be able to do X, Y or Z. And so we designed a lot of questions to ask people about like, you know, what's the coolest thing you've seen in the last six months and what 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 tell you just very technically what's possible or not possible. The other thing is we had to acknowledge that we were hiring people who were really inexperienced in this role, but they were yet taking a leadership role. And so you needed somebody who was very humble and also was a really good listener. And the humble piece comes in because to really win the respect of the engineers and people that they were working with, it was a matter of saying, well, wait, this isn't just about you walking in and running a meeting on day one that's not going to happen. Like the other people on Your team are 15, 20 year, very experienced, very accomplished engineers. The right way to win them over is to say, hey, sure, of course I'll take notes for this meeting. Of course I'll schedule the meeting. Like, oh, of course you need me to go and get you some machines to expand your code 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 sleeves, get their hands dirty in terms of the overall process and really help listen to the engineers because the engineers had some of the best ideas of where the products should go. And then also really winning people over by their ability to help the team get organized. But also because of the lack of experience, they would have to be very data driven. Because the thing is, you can't make your point in terms of how you want to evolve a product based on instincts. Oh, I've seen this work elsewhere. I've seen a feature be added here or there. The way a lot of times they would have to win over those engineers was by being 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 think we should have a feature that makes that follow on step easy, things like that. And so basically listening, listening really well to 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 to the FM transmitter example. There was one night when I forget if it was Larry or Sergey. They came 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 been doing all these experiments with FM transmitters to try and understand which one can broadcast my ipod from, you know, sitting in the trunk to the radio in my car, the best and which one has the highest range and all this. And it was really interesting because it was sort of this dinner party where you can imagine, like, normally at a dinner, if someone said something like that, people might lean back, start another side conversation. But the moment he said that, like, it was just amazing. So I remember, like, all eight or 10 people literally leaning into the table and like, saying, which brands have you tried? Which one's the best? Does it work? Is there interference? Like, and like. And we just started peppering him with questions about these FM transmitters that he had been trying and, like, how well they worked. And it was really interesting and obvious to me in that moment that we had picked people who were really curious, not just about search or what we were doing at Google, but just about applications, of new technologies and trends, how they worked and what they could ultimately mean in terms of how life was going to change or what people were going to 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 we're skipping ahead a little bit in this sense, but I think you've also instituted the APM program at Yahoo. Can you talk a little bit about that? And how do you get the senior people involved there?

Yeah, we have. There were a 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 really felt like we wanted to grow people in that same way, in that same vein. And so, you know, I had enjoyed building the program so much myself at Google that I said, you know, okay, that was sort of my turn. So Enrique Torres and Fernando Delgado stepped up, and they were former Google APMs who stepped up to basically run the APM program at Yahoo. And so, you know, that was. They've done it their own way and spot and it's really worked nicely there too.

Do you feel like this is the kind of program where it can work in a lot of different companies? Is it very special to just Silicon Valley or do you see broader applicability?

It's actually, I mean, it's based on a lot of different rotational programs that you actually do see in broader business. So I mean a bunch of the decisions that we made on it, I knew that Viacom, the parent company of mtv had a really special rotational program where they would hire you in it was two years. You would do six month rotations through like MTV and a bunch of their different subsidiaries, learning a lot about different parts of business. McKinsey obviously, and like a lot of the management consulting firms have, you know, a two year analyst program. And so we had, you know, I had really drawn on that notion of trying to give people really broad exposure in a program that was really designed for training. But obviously because our needs were so acute, we 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 you spent a lot of time at Google, but you are now the CEO of Yahoo. Big step up. And you must have taken some of the lessons from what you saw with both Eric and Larry running the company. What are some of the things that you learned from them while they were at Google that you're now applying today?

Sure. I was really lucky to have had great mentors and got to have seen such great business leaders over the years and just in so many different situations. I was at Google for about 13 years and I will say not a day goes by that I don't at least hear them in my head. And in a different scenario, in terms of different advice they've given. Eric was always an amazing fountain of insights and advice. You know, Larry's much more instinctual, but sometimes you'd learn so much from like what his instinct was in terms of just how he would run a meeting, how he would redirect a product team. And so there's so many different things that have come with it. But I think one of the key learnings from Eric, as you know, I came to Yahoo at a moment where it was very tumultuous. Everyone liked to count how many CEOs there were in certain periods of Time. And I always refused to play that game. Now I'm far enough away from it that it's not acutely painful. But I was basically the seventh CEO in 61 months when I walked in, when I walked in the door. And so it had been a very tumultuous time. And it became very clear to me one of the things that Eric had said, which is a really humbling statement as, as you'd gotten closer and closer to the executive level, is he said, good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually get to do things. And he's like, you don't get to design web pages, you don't get to design apps, you don't get to code. What you get to do is set a direction and then your job is defense. Get things out of the way, get the stuff that's going to slow the team down, distract the team, get in the way of the team out of the way. He's like, your job really becomes listening to them about what's going to get in the way and how to get that cleared out of the path so they can move as fast as they can move. Because you've got to acknowledge yourself that you're not going to do the designs, you're not going to do the implementation, you're not going to do the coding. And so your job is to help make them as effective as you can make them. And it was funny because one of the first things that people said to me when I got there is my second day on the job. And they said, okay, so when are you going to have your big strategy rollout meeting? And I said, my what? And they said, well, you know, your grand vision for Yahoo. Like, you know, all the new CEOs show up and sometime between day two and day five, they call the whole company together and roll out their big new vision for Yahoo. And I said, well, I don't think I'm going to have like a big dog and pony show. I think I'm going to kind of go and sit in the cafeteria and listen to people because you guys have all been here for a lot longer than I have. And I've got some ideas. I about what we should do. But you got a lot more ideas about what we should do and, you know, what's worked and what hasn't. So I'm going to spend a lot more time listening to you before we do that. So I was like, I think we'll maybe have, you know, a strategy meeting for. I came, I had come in 2012. I was like, maybe we'll have, like, a 2013 strategy meeting sometime later this fall. But, you know, I'm going to need your help in shaping the strategy. And a lot of that. I think that that was actually a much more comfortable way for the people at Yahoo to accept me, to view me, and I really view my role there is to listen and then to get things out of the way, and you overall set some direction. But then you ultimately spend a lot of time really just trying to get rid of any distractions or things that are going to ultimately make the team less effective.

So it sounds like you were really coming in and trying to learn from what was already going on, trying to listen. What kinds of questions did you ask that were most effective at getting useful information? Information? What can our students learn from 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 that there were so many people who were eager to come and bring their viewpoint. And so, you know, things you would learn is like, I remember I was in the cafeteria one day, and this guy came up to me and kind of tapped my tray and said on the front, and he said. And he said, is it time to go? And I was like. And I thought he meant, like, go. Like, leave. Like, leave the company. Because, like, at the time, like, you know, 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, like. And I was like, we might. We may. We might end up doing something really good here. And he was like, no, no, no. He's like. He's like, look, he's like, we have been here. We've all been here. We've been here for, like, the last five, six, seven years, waiting for management and for the board to, like, figure itself out and figure what direction we should go in. And, like, he's like, I mean, is like, is it go time? Is it, like, is it time we can just run and, like, do some of the stuff we've always wanted to do? And I was like, by all means, go. Like, run. Like, don't let me get in your way. Like, you guys got some ideas about what to do? Like, more power to you. And so, you know, people would kind of come and bring that perspective, and so you just would immediately end up in dialogue with them, trying to understand what it was that, well, if you don't feel like you're really empowered to get things done right now. What's getting in your way? Right. And so everyone kind of had their different perspectives on the different things that were getting in the way. And one of the things we did is 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 in your way, you could go up on this moderator tool and write it down, and then other people would come and vote it up or down as to whether or not that was really a problem. And it was daunting because I remember someone came up to me and said, I don't even know where you're going to start. There are thousands of things at this company that need to be fixed. And that's a really daunting thing to have said to you in the first few weeks of a job. But then the interesting thing was we set up this PB and J, and it really helped us prioritize big things, little things, things that were getting in the way, things where people were just like, I don't understand. I mean, like, I'll give you some of the funny examples that we cleaned up. And then there were bigger things, but there were parking gates on the parking lot and, like, nobody knew why. And like, you had to have your key. Your badge didn't actually open the gym door unless you had taken an hour long orientation. And I was like, really? Because, like, any hotel in the world will just let you go and, like, stand on a treadmill and, like, no orientation needed. Like, I know we're all engineers and we're a little clumsy, but, like, this seems like a bit extreme. And so, you know, like, we just started, like, just trying to get some of this stuff where, like, everyone just be like, I don't understand why. Like, why does the gym door work on my badge? Like, I don't understand why. Like, why are these turnstiles here? And so, you know, we did a lot of little symbolic things like that, just where people would report it. And as soon as it got 50 votes, we would go see if it was a reasonable thing to change, and then we would just change it. And so we did a lot of small things like that. But then we also tried to address things like our product shipping process. How could we launch products better? Because people would say things like, hey, it's really hard 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 that through different HR process, processes around hiring people, getting promotions, compensation, different things like that. And so we had PB and J across the whole company. And what was amazing is we actually changed as a result of different things that ended up on that moderator. A thousand things in the first year of PB and J. So, I mean, because what happened was it basically started to just direct. It wasn't. It was an effort run by a person on my team, Patricia. But she basically got people in each department who were really passionate about just trying to fix up all these little things along the way. And so 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 the way of the most people.

One of the things that's interesting 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 you had to do with Yahoo, I think you referenced it a couple times, is there'd been a lot of turmoil. The company had been around a long time. You really had to come in and change the tone and change the nature of what was going on, and PB&J was part of it. There were also probably some bigger things that you did to tell people it is go time. Can you talk about the challenges you face in basically turning such a large battleship and getting it oriented and set in a new direction?

Sure. I would say, I think that there's sort of a view on culture, the view that I have anyway, that was actually given to me by one of my early APMs, Brett Taylor, because Brett had worked both at Google and ultimately later worked at Facebook. And in talking with Brett, I said, what is it like to work at Facebook after Google? How is it the same? How is it different? And he said, you know, I can't really articulate it. But he was like, but both companies have really strong cultures. And he was like, you know, one thing you learn is that really strong companies almost always have really strong cultures. And he's like, when you're at Google, you know you're at Google, he's like, even though you took down all the logos and like changed all the colors, like you would still know that you're there. And he's like. And the same thing is true for Facebook and I would say the same thing is true for Yahoo. And you'll find this is true for a lot of really like, very strong, cultured, strongly cultured companies. And when you sort of grok that, you do end up having respect for the fact that culture is something that's hard to change. And so I think about it a lot just from that whole sort of the medical background. For me, thinking about it in the form of genetic engineering. And so at a very remedial level, what you can say is, look in genes, you can get genes to Hyper Express, you can get them to Over Express, you can turn them off. But it's actually reasonably hard to inject new mutant genes or new mutant DNA into a DNA strand. And culture really is the DNA of a company. And so I really felt that when I came to Yahoo, it was very important to me 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 of properties and assets. And we wanted to say, okay, how do we make it the best version of itself? How do we take what's great about the company, their enthusiasm, their sense of fun, you know, even things like our reporting, our, you know, the content, we create a lot of these different pieces. How do we get that to Hyper Express and really become super productive and efficient? How do we get some of the things that are getting in our way, as reported by PB&J and you know, people just chatting about what's getting in the way, how do we turn those things off? But it was less about trying to inject totally new things. And that's why programs like PB&J worked so well, is because they really came from the culture of the company and the values of the company.

You help people express what was already there.

In other words. And I did see a question over here. I don't know if you still have it. Yeah.

That was more zooming in on what were the roadblockers for shipping or deploying new products. I was really curious about that.

Okay.

Roadblocks to shipping and deploying new products. Changes to the process for releasing products.

Yeah. So the question is, for roadblockers, I would say there's a lot of different things that we needed to look at. One, we had a lot of teams that were under resourced and or lacked sufficient tenure of somebody having said, hey, I shipped the last version or I know exactly how to get this done. And so we did. One of the things we've done is we implemented a tech council, which is about our 10 to 12 most senior engineers and architects at Yahoo, to really talk about how do we want to do continuous integration, how do we want to do continuous deployment, how do we want to do regression testing, how can 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 institute those types of processes, but we also did things like people didn't even know necessarily who was shipping what when. So we instituted something called a launch calendar, which we had similarly done at Google. But basically when you're launching a project, you go up on this tool and just say, hey, I'm planning on launching this change on this day. And that's actually super helpful for all the other departments in the company because that means pr, marketing, legal, everybody knows ultimately what's shipping and customer service. If they start to get emails about a new feature being seen or not working that well or working really well, they know what it's about. So we had sort of a centralized bulletin board for those launches to help people coordinate better. But there were just a lot of different things that we needed to do to ultimately basically make that process much more fluid. And there was also just an element of wanting to move quickly. So we started saying, look, decisions in a week, a good decision today is better than a perfect decision tomorrow. And we want to just be able to move quickly in terms of what we deploy. And that really overall just sped up the cadence, which was important.

As you're trying to make these changes at Yahoo, obviously part of that is you're working with an executive team, you're working with senior leaders. Talk about how you used your management team to help make changes. How did you work with them? How would you pick that up from Google or other sources? Where do you look to for management ideas?

I had really liked the way that Eric ran his staff at Google. So we would have a big staff meeting on Monday and then we would do various strategy reviews on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, end up having a lot of one on ones on Thursdays 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 all the different departments inside of Yahoo are cross functionally working together. So if you need something from another member of e staff that's like that Monday meeting. It's a great way to kick off the week to say, hey, this is what we're shipping this week, or this is what we're trying to get done this week. And I'm really gonna need some help on deals or I'm really gonna need some help 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 will have that on Monday to coordinate everything. Then we'll do deeper dives, sometimes strategic, sometimes technical, sometimes process oriented on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. And I would say for the first two years now, I do fewer one on ones, but I do do them as we need them. But I did one on ones really religiously with members of the staff. I tried to do them every week just to ultimately understand from each leader what was working for them and what wasn't. And then we added a meeting on Friday afternoons, which was an all company meeting, where we're really transparent and we talk about all the new people who've joined, we talk about people who've passed, who are passing milestones of like being at the company for five, 10, 15 years. And it's amazing how many people. You know, there's this phrasing at Yahoo about bleeding purple and they really, it really is amazing. Almost every week we have someone who passed the 15 year mark. And like the new people who've come to the company are like, whoa. Like, you know, because Silicon Valley is very unusual to have someone have that kind of tenure. But it was funny because when after they asked me about the big strategic dog and pony show and I said, well, I'm not planning on doing that anytime in the first few months. And then I said, you know, a couple days later I came and said, okay, well, I was like, when do I get to talk to the employees? And they said, and the person I spoke to said, at the quarterly all hands. And I had heard about the quarterly all hands. It was to go over the quarterly earnings call that the CFO had delivered the day, the first day that I arrived. I said, no, no, that's. I get it. That's Tim's meeting. He's going to go over the previous quarters, revenue and EBITDA and all of that. But like, when, when do I get to, you know, talk about products and take questions from, from the company and they're like, the quarterly all hands. And I was like, oh, I See, because one of the things that would, people would say to me most often when I was spending all that time down in the cafeteria, people come up to me and they'd be like, it's amazing that you're down here because like, nobody ever talks to us. People would say all the time. And I was like, I just couldn't figure out. I was like, well, I was like, look, communication in a company as big as Yahoo is really complicated. I'm going to try and communicate as best I can, but you could always communicate more, et cetera. And I didn't really get it. And I was like, oh. I was like, is that why all the employees keep saying that no one talks to them? Because no one ever talks to them. Like, there's only four meetings a year where the executives go out and like actually talk with and engage with the employees. And so now we do that on a weekly basis as it's really become a big beloved tradition at Yahoo to use the moderator tool. And we do deep dives on new products that are coming out and talk about some of the current events of the day that are affecting the company. And it's overall, it's been just a great communication tool, but also something to really bring us together because it means we celebrate what went well together, we talk sometimes about what hasn't gone that well together. And, and overall it's been a great community 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 been 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. Because if we have a board meeting, we actually show the board slides that Friday at FYI, which in a sense is like for FYI, for your information or for Yahoo's information. And so we really try and show as much of the decision making process what we're thinking about the decisions that we're making as we possibly can at those meetings regarding the pdj.

If there was something that was upvoted but you couldn't change because it had business needs, how did you, if that happened and how did you, you address that when you did?

Yeah. So on PB and J, if we had something that was upvoted, but there's something that we couldn't change due to business needs, we had a response at least in the tool. And so someone would actually go up and write a response and say, you know, we've looked at this, we've considered it, here are the reasons we can't do it. And you know, and then, and sometimes people would re raise it again later or raise it in a different form. And sometimes that, you know, that next attempt would work. But you know, we really try to change as much as we can and you really want to be open to questioning your assumptions and changing the overall structures that are getting in the way. But yes, there are, sometimes you can't. But we did feel that one of the things is we just had various thresholds because we were like, wait, if 50 people in the company have voted something up, it deserves at least a response, right? If you're like, wait, if that many people chose to come up to the moderator, we've fluctuated between being about a 10,000 to 12,000 person company. If you're like, there's that many people who are taking their time to come up and saying this really bugs me, it's getting in my way. The least you can do is read it, really consider it to hopefully change it. But if you can't change it, at least explain so those people can come back up later and say, okay, that does make sense to me. I understand why that's difficult for us to change right now.

Chris, so you were saying about the strategy session on like Tuesday and Wednesday and stuff, what does that actually mean? Or like what does a good strategy session look like?

So in terms of the strategy sessions or deep dives that we have on Tuesday or Wednesday, those tend to be just more freeform time. And so sometimes we'll look at things like we'll do a deep product review, something new is shipping, we'll go through the entire product experience, what the metrics for success are going to be, how we're going to measure ourselves, what the marketing and rollout plan looks like, what any legal concerns look like, and we'll do a really thorough launch review. Then you'll have another deep dive where it's our people team wanting to talk about what benefits we're going to offer for the next year and really going through the different benefits. And so the structures of those meetings tend to change quite a bit. Sometimes they're an hour, sometimes they're an hour and a half, depending on what the topic is. But it's basically an opportunity for members of the executive staff to say, hey, I have this topic, I need a decision on something. I'm going to bring you the data into this meeting. Any members of E staff are welcome to attend that meeting. And so we usually have really good attendance and participation across the executive staff in those forums. And then ultimately, you know, make Coming. Coming to the decisions that they need made in those, in those meetings. Yeah.

A couple other questions. Let's go to this side.

At a certain point you banned all remote working at Yahoo. And you mentioned like you didn't want to change the culture. Was that like a major shift of culture?

So the question was around the work from home ban that was instituted. And given that I didn't want to change the culture, how is that not 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, like, 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. Like I spent like, I spent like a good 6 to 12 months of my life where like every time I left I actually spent. I realized I became kind of a Yahoo hermit because every time I left Yahoo people wanted to ask me about working from home. So but like what happened was it was really just a result of listening because I actually, I would say I had close to three dozen people over the course of my first few months come up to me and they would grab me in the cafeteria or grab me after FYI and they'd be like, I love all the changes you're making in the company. I love how fast you've gotten us all moving and the vision that you're painting. And my team is really inspired and we're working really hard and once a week we have to stop and call this person who works on our project that we never hear from and catch them up. And I kept kind of hearing that narrative again and again of just like, wait, here we all are, we're all working really hard, 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 was less interestingly about the people who formally worked from home. Because I think that 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 a two bedroom apartment and one was his bedroom and the other was his office. And he would wake up in the morning and get all ready for. For work and like, walk across his living room and spend the whole day in his office. And at the end of the night, he would like, walk back and like, eat dinner in his kitchen. But he was like. He's like, I had to. He had to be very structured about it. And I think people who work like that, you know, actually when they've got a great setup for themselves at home and they're very structured about it, it works well. But I think we all. One of the things you'll learn as you enter the workforce is like, there's those days when you're like, okay, I've got to wait for the cable guy, or I've got to wait for this delivery. Like, I'll be just plunked down at the kitchen table and try and get something done. And you feel like you're productive because you're like, there's no interruptions, et cetera, et cetera. But like, but the truth is, you're probably, at least in my case, I'm like 50 to 75% as productive in that state as I am when I'm at the office. And so we actually, I found, had less of a problem. I have less of a problem with working from home formally, where there were people who were like, worked from home five days a week and had a great setup. But we had lots of people who 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 mail their team in the morning, be like, you know, working from home today. Like, you know, don't want to lose, you know, an hour in my commute. But the point is like that actually, you know, you're gonna now be interfacing with seven other people on your team. All of them either have to keep stopping to write you emails or call you to talk to you. And it's just not as efficient as if you were sitting at the next desk over at the next cube over. And so, you know, that was really. What we needed to stop to is interesting is we actually granted a lot of exceptions to the work from home ban, if you want to call it that, where we kept letting people work from home because they did have really formal and good setups. But we did want to basically send the message that, you know, this was Yahoo's moment and it wasn't the right thing for all companies, but it was the right thing for us right then to have people in the office so we could collaborate better, have just less of these friction points. And it was more about sending the message to people who were kind of casually or occasionally working from home and not being that productive about it, that that was probably not the best thing to do, at least at this moment in 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, you said, the default is we expect you to be in the office. Office. The other thing I learned from this is that even the CEO of Yahoo still has to wait for the cable guy, which is a very sad statement on the world. We have other questions. Let's go all the way to the back there.

So on the point of kind of, you know, culture and hiring and people, one thing that people shift into understand is that when you go out with your company, you know, what really, really matters perhaps more than anything else is the people you hire. Right. And so when you go into a company as a CEO, you know, you did not have the opportunity to be that intentional. And so like there's all these stories like Larry and Sergey that we discuss in past how they were review resumes like 15 times or whatever. So what do you do in that position? You're taking over a shift and the ship comes with the package. Right. So like how do you go about that?

Well, you do your best to meet everyone. Sorry, I'll repeat the question. Or you can. Okay, so, so I would say the question is one of the most important things you can do is hire. And when you're starting a company from scratch, you kind of get to hire who you want and you get to sort of shape it in a particular way. When you're coming into an already formed company, it feels like it's already a package that's well established. How do you handle that? And a couple of different things. One, we did change the overall hiring practice because there's different ways 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 we had a lot of managers could hire who they wanted. It was not a committee or a wisdom of crowds based approach. Also on the annual compensation elements, there were basically no performance reviews and you could give raises and bonuses to who you wanted to give raises and bonuses to, which basically meant there was kind of a lot of cronyism, for lack of a better word, because you had people hiring their friends and then giving those friends promotions, raises, bonuses, et cetera. And so we had to really think about how did we want to approach performance. Like, maybe we should have performance reviews when the company's performance isn't that great. One of the things you might say is, well, wait, the company just is comprised of a lot of individuals, so maybe we should actually do our own performance reviews and keep track. So we set up a goal system for a cross the company. We set up a performance review system for employees to give people feedback. And I also set up a hiring review process, which was my view is I still want managers to be able to hire whoever they want to 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 you should 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, in my view, didn't really change how many people we hired or even who we hired, but it did change, like the level of scrutiny on it and the level of thought that managers would give to why are we hiring the people we're hiring? What are they going to do? And ultimately what will they help us achieve when they got there? And so, and the other thing is, companies are living organisms that change over time. People come and go, especially in tech. There's a lot of transitions that people make. And so from 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 is already more than half people who've been hired in through this process or into this vision, into this direction that we're currently taking the company. Sort of interesting because you can almost think of it, I remember reading somewhere that every cell in the human body, I don't know if it's true, but every cell in the human body turns over every seven years. So every seven years you're an entirely new person. And like, you know, that's kind of true for companies too. It won't ever, you know, there'll always be some people who are the same. But like, by and large, like, there is that, that kind of turnover, and if you approach that in a principled way and really try and manage it, you can ultimately have. It can be something that can be either very good for the company or very bad for the company. And so we've tried to make that a really positive process of renewal, of getting people who are really motivated to come and work on returning Yahoo to greatness.

One or two more scale questions and we'll also return to the audience and alternate. One of the things that you've done at Yahoo is you've used ma, you've acquired a number of companies, small companies, large acquisitions like the Tumblr acquisition. Can you talk a little bit about what's worked well about that? And maybe if there are things that haven't worked well? And again, all backwards looking, obviously you're running a public company. We don't need to know about Horizon. Anything forward looking.

We've done a lot of acquisitions at Yahoo now, several dozen. And I would say 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 strategic building. Sorry, we have building blocks and then we have strategic acquisitions and they roughly map to size and scale. But we did each kind of acquisition in a different way. So talent acquisitions. One of the things that happened, and I know because when the board was recruiting me, it was really important to me, one of the things that happened is we knew we had to hire new people 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, like, I didn't want to come by myself either, right? I was like, wait, like if I, if you're going to hire me in here, like, like I'm going to have to be able to hire some of the people that I know the company needs to hire and meet new people, but people who have the right skill sets, et cetera. And so one of the interesting things about talent acquisitions is it worked really well for us because we could bring in really terrific people and they would say, okay, but I don't want to come by myself. And we'd actually be able to kind of group higher, you know, four or five people in small sets into the company. And the nice thing about it 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 people who worked on mobile in a 12,000 person company, 14,000 person company. The day that I joined. It was one of my interesting cafeteria conversations that we had where I had a real heart attack in that moment because I just Sold the board on like let's remake Yahoo for mobile and in the mobile generation. And then I met this guy Tony and he's like, he's like. I was like, what do you work on? He was like, I'm a mobile engineer. I was like, we have a mobile team, like that's great. How many are there? And he was like 30. I was like, oh my gosh. I was like, you know, so we need that 30 to be like 500 people like really, really fast. And one of the ways we did that was we had, we would go and do talent acquisitions where the team had built a beautiful application but it really wasn't hitting the size or scale that they wanted it to. But they were still great at building mobile applic and they knew how to work together 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 strategy and get new apps out quickly because these teams could move so quickly. The other thing is, Yahoo now is 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 into a project's tech stack and find that wait, some of this code is know, 10 years old, 12 years old, 15 years old, hasn't been updated. Some of the people who know how it works or could easily explain how it worked aren't even there anymore. And so some of the strategic, some of the strategic building blocks that we brought in would be, you know, basically companies where we not only wanted the people, but we wanted a key piece of technology. So for example, like there was a company we bought called Zobni, which is Inbox backward and they had been working on reinventing mail, but one of the things they had gotten really good at was contact. They were constantly parsing all your emails. So when you got something that said hey, my phone number's changed, or they saw in a footer that the person had a new title or a new email address and the footers or headers of the email, they would ultimately immediately update it dynamically. And so we were like, this is great because if we could just take this technology and just replace the contact address book in Yahoo Mail with this new, more modern, easier to maintain piece of technology. It's a very clean swap out. Not only do we get great people, 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 about $1.1 billion. Bright roll, which was a video ad network we bought in Flurry, are the three biggest acquisitions we've done. And there our goal is, how can we, can we take a company that does something that relates to what Yahoo does but pushes us in a new direction? Like Tumblr pushed us into social. Yahoo has always been very strong at display advertising, which for many people is banner ads. But now banner ads don't work as well as they once did. They're still very effective, but they sometimes don't work as well as one. And the new mode is much more storytelling through video, which is why you see so much more video advertising. We said, wait, you know, if we want to keep kind of moving in the vein that we are in, of being really strong, a really strong offering for brand advertisers, for them to get their message out, display 2.0 is video. So how can we, you know, can we buy a company that really moves us strongly into video? And Bright Royal had the largest video ad network in North America. And so we were really excited to do that. And Flurry really reinforced they're one of the largest mobile analytics platforms. And they also are looking at how not only to analyze how people analyze their apps and optimize their apps, but also how to monetize their apps. And so there was a great opportunity there. But we've come up with this term, mavens Mobile, video native, and social being sort of an acronym for that. And we really want the strategic acquisitions to push us forward, hopefully in at least one of those areas, if not multiple of those those areas, in terms of how they push us forward, how they push the business.

Got it. Okay, Other questions maybe from this side, front row. Yeah. You talked about the strong culture in Google, and you obviously spent over a.

Decade in that company.

So how did you make sure that you didn't try to clone that culture?

And how did you make sure that.

You helped shape culture that was unique to Yahoo? Got it.

Sure. The question is, since I had been at Google for so long, how did I make sure that when I came to Yahoo, I didn't try and clone the culture? And in truth, I'm sure there are things that I brought over consciously or subconsciously, but there's a couple of things. One is I loved Google and I loved the company. I love my time there and the people I was able to work with. But you always have some of your own perspectives where you're like, I liked this part of it, but I would have done it this way, or I liked this part of it, and I would have done it this way, and I think that would have been better. And so there certainly were some ideas that I had where I was excited to take them, modify them, you know, to incorporate an insight that I had and see how they worked. And so I did some of that. But the other thing is just, you know, is you always want to work somewhere where you're really excited about the people and the culture. I mean, that'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 somewhere for the right reasons, you believe in the mission of the company, you believe in the people of the company. The last thing you want to do as a new entrant into it, even as the CEO, is change it, right? And for me, Yahoo had been just, just such a vaunted enterprise. I remember I was here at Stanford. I remember someone telling me, hey, there's this guy named Jerry. I think his username was literally Jerry J E R R Y. And you go to Tilda Jerry, and he's keeping a cool list of notes of fun websites he's finding on the web before Yahoo was even in HTML. Like, I remember, like going and poking around his world readable directory to try and find cool URLs. And so, you know, and then I watched it become like, you know, Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web and then Dave and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web and then ultimately Yahoo and then, you know, launching as a company. But, you know, I admit I had seen so many parts of that. And then, you know, at Google, for some of our first years, like, you know, one of my first assignments was like, help us win the Yahoo contract because we had a joint board member. He had gotten us some ins and some meetings with Yahoo. And I remember going to Yahoo and having to show off some of the AI algorithms and things I was working on to try and show them why Google search might be a better alternative than some of the other search providers they were working with. I'd had this all in my history. And so I'd really looked up to the company for a long time. I'd had a lot of friends who'd worked there, had a lot of respect for it. And 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 want to do is disrespect it or change it.

Two more questions that we've prepared and then we'll throw it all open to the students. Because there are two questions we always try to ask folks. The first question is, obviously you're very busy as a CEO, but how do you invest in yourself? What do you find the highest roi? Is it reading books? Do you have a coach? Is it meditation? People do different things. What do you do to invest in yourself?

Well, I do all kinds of different things. I have a three 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 because it's sort of funny because a lot of people think that Google just happened, right? They're like, it just was amazing. It just grew like wildfire, like no one's ever seen anything like it. And like, I assure you, the experience of being inside of it was nothing like that. Okay? I mean like it was, you know, working. You'd be like, can you actually work 130 hour weeks? There's only 168 hours in a week. The answer is you're very strategic about when you shower, eat and sleep. Yes, you can work 130 hours a week, but you won't have time to drive home and back and forth, so you better move all your clothes to the office. Like that was like the experience of like trying to grow Google during those ages. It's funny, like I actually have a friend who has a co working space in the city and I went to the co working space on like a Saturday afternoon. There's a bunch of different companies there. There was no one there on like a Saturday afternoon. And I was like, this does not bode well at all for any of the companies in this space because I was like, like, you know, there's just there. I mean there was just Sundays were really hopping at Google, but like Saturdays it was very rare that there weren't at least dozens of people in the office trying to get something done because we just 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 thought a lot about burning out and like, can we keep going at this pace and this rate? And what I saw, both myself and other people, is that we were able to 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 okay to carve out something that really matters to you. So I have a good friend Craig, who is the first employee Larry and Sergey hired Craig Silverstein right after he was their first employee. And Craig had this rule, I remember because 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 no later than seven. And so, like, it was. I remember because I would be like, oh, no, it's the last day of the month. Like, I'm not gonna be able to get a 10pm code review tonight. And so like, you know, and I. And you know, there were just like little things like that. And I noticed that the people who were the happiest, the sanest, able to work for the longest kind of would have that. And I started calling this finding your rhythm. A lot of people talk about balance when they think about balance. And all of you guys, I mean, you know how hard college is and like, and how, and you know, how much you have to push yourself. But this notion of like three square meals a day, eight hours of sleep a night, like, you know, I was like, you know, that's what some people need, but it's not what everyone needs. And it's much more about, like, what do you need in order to not feel resentful? And so I started asking people who I was worried about burning out, like, what's your rhythm? And I got very interesting answers back. Like, there was Nathan, who had recently graduated from Stanford. And I said, you know, look, I appreciate how hard you've been working, but, you know, I really want you to think about, like, what matters to you and when do you get resentful? Because. And he came back with this very interesting answer. And he was like, Tuesday night dinner. And he was like, every Tuesday night, my draw mates and I have a potluck at one of our apartments. The old Stanford draw group will get together. And he's like, and if I miss Tuesday night dinner, or worse, if I have to cancel it when it's supposed to be at my apartment, he's like, I'm just bummed the whole rest of the week. And he was like. And then that's when I would find myself on, like, he's like, on Wednesday and Thursday, I'd be like, well, I worked this hard and I didn't even get to go to Tuesday night dinner this week. So I'm leaving at 5, right? And like, you sort of, you know, you'd have that kind of perspective of like, wait, like because you, it's okay for you to have the view of like, wait, you've given a lot of yourself to this company. But like, you know, you should be able to say, wait, like, I can't have everything I want and all the leisure time that I want, but. But I can have the things that really matter to me. And then castle it. I had a mom of three, Katie, who was working a lot with our Bangalore office. And she kept doing conference calls every night at like 1 in the morning until like 2, 3am and I was really worried about it. And I said, you know, Katie, like, you know, just explain to me like, what your rhythm is. And she said, no. She came back and she said, marissa, don't worry about me. She's like, I don't mind the Bangalore conference calls in the middle of the night at all. She's like, what bugs me is when I'm late to the piano recital or I miss the soccer game and like that disappointed look on my child's face when I walk in late. And I was like, okay, then, Katie, we're making sure you're never late to another kid's thing again. It was amazing because it's, you know, she would just tell me in the morning, like, hey, at 4:00 today, I've gotta leave. And it was always amazing because I get like 3:45. Katie would stand up to leave and someone would be like, oh, Katie, we're almost done. Can you just stay for five more minutes? And I'd be like, nope, Katie's gotta go. And I was saying just in myself, like, I've watched my rhythm change because in my 20s and early 30s, before I was married, for me I was like, I really wanted to see the world. And it was all about travel. And I would find but once every four months, I wanted to go somewhere new and 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 a week where I'd be like, oh, I was gone for a whole week. And like, 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 like, nothing went really that wrong, right? And so. And you know, so. And I found if I pushed myself to like six, eight months and like, didn't go on a trip, I would start feeling really resentful. Like, yeah, I really wanted to, to go to Iceland or I really wanted to go here. And I kept to keep canceling and postponing the trip. And it would kind of just get to me. I'd be like, okay, I need to ultimately do that. And as I said now, for me, it's a lot more about family time and, you know, and having, you know, just sort of, you know, you sort of have, you know, the things that. That really matter to you, and that will change over time, which is why I tend to not be too structured about it. Because I think if you're really structured about it, you can sometimes cling to something where you're like, yes, this is part of my routine. It's 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 interesting things I think came out of that discussion that 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 in time to that day on 2012, first day on the job, what would you tell yourself to do differently? What have you learned since then that you're like, oh, I wish I knew it then.

Oh, there's so many different things. You know, it's funny, because there definitely are things where I would say, go faster, right? There's definitely things here where I'm like, wow, I can't believe 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 interesting. There's some areas where I would tell myself to go slower.

What's one of those areas?

Well, I mean, I think that, you know, in retrospect, I mean, I think that. I don't like the word turnaround. I prefer to think of it as Yahoo's renaissance. But we are in a mode of turning around. And one of the things that happens as a new CEO is that people will sort of expect that sometime in the first year or two that you're going to basically bring in your own team and exchange that executive staff to be. To really be your own. And I did that in pretty much about four to six months. And I would argue that was probably too fast. And I did make a few hiring mistakes 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. And so in some cases, I think for me, like if I could go back to that, to myself in 2012, would be a little bit more about different pacings, some things that should have moved even faster and some things that should have moved more slowly.

Got it. Excellent. You had a question, I know.

Yeah, I did.

That's okay.

So you have a perspective of someone who, who went straight to a small company right out of school, but you've also received an APM program and have done that for many years. What do you think are the trade offs you get from those different kinds of experiences? What kinds of skills do you think each builds in the universe? 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 because it was actually when Reid asked me to come and talk at the class, it was a comment. I reflected on my mother and probably she says it to her children because we in fact are her children. But my mother will say to my brother and I, she's like, I loved every phase of my children. She's like, I love babies, I love toddlers, I like it. She's like, she's like, every phase was like more fun than the next and then the last. And so she just had this real enthusiasm for it where there's some people who'll be like, well, I really love this age, not that age. And I always just thought that 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. For me, I just had this experience of being at this company and I realized that for me 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 were hundreds of people. I loved it when we were thousands of people. I loved being an individual contributor. I loved being a person who managed, you know, a single digit team. I managed, 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 all those different experiences. Try small, try big, try running a program, try running a function because it really tells you, like, what is it that you like? And I found that I like a lot of different things. I like a lot of variety. One of the things I've seen in some of my colleagues is they'll be like, this is my sweet spot. Like, I love it. You know, I mean, it was interesting. There were some business development people early on at our time at Google who were amazing. And when the company got to be about 500 people, they left. And I remember talking to one of our. One of my colleagues, and I was like, I'm just so devastated that they left. And then as we chatted about it, sort of the perspective came out, but they were really very much jacks of all trades. And they loved it when Google was small because they could work on inbound deals, outbound deals, licensing deals, 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, like, hey, you know, if we started another company tomorrow, we would totally hire that guy to be our lead business development guy the very first day. Because, like, that's his sweet spot. And so I think that when you try a lot of different things, when you try things you maybe haven't tried before or don't feel ready to, to do, you learn a lot about yourself in terms of the things that you might like or what some of your strengths are. And so for me, I found that I love all these different phases of companies. I love all these different phases of scale. And, you know, and for some people, they may say, okay, 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, is when you're really happy and really enthralled, not only with the mission, but also with the phase that the company's in.

One final question back there. Hi.

So I was wondering, so when it comes to decision making, no matter, like, small or big, from like, picking CS or joining Google or like running Yahoo, like, what's a drive for you, like, internally? Like, what do you know? Like, how do you know it's like, the right decision to make? Sure. And so this goes back to my decision to go to Google, but is it a criteria I've used since? So it was 1999, actually, I think 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 all kinds of different things, to this kind of different phases. I'd gone for some management consulting roles, I had gone for some teaching roles. I had gone for some startups, I had gone for some big companies. And I was very good at picking, like, the creme de la creme of each one. If I work at a big company, it'll be this one. If I work at a startup, it'll be this one. And if I would do the teaching job, it'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, okay, I'm gonna spend spring break thinking about the best decisions 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 Research Institute up in Menlo park, the research institute that gave rise to nuance and a lot of other really great technologies. Siri. And then one summer working at the Union bank of Switzerland in their research lab. So I kind of looked at those four decisions and said, okay, those are really different decisions, but what, if anything, do they have in common? And I realized that they had two things in common. One, I had always worked with the smartest people I could find, because I think when you work with really smart people, they challenge you, they make you think better, they make you 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. Like, I think we've all, you know, I mean, I think if you're really honest, you'll remember, like, being left here for the first day. Like, I remember that first night, night sitting down in my bed and being like, why did I think this was a good idea? Like, I'm really far from home. I don't know anyone. Like, this is kind of daunting. I remember, you know, going up to, like, some. Well, when I changed the symbolic systems, I remember having to call my parents and say, okay, I think I'm not gonna become a doctor. I think I'm gonna become a symbolic systems major. And, like. And I was like, I don't even know what that is. And I Have no idea how to describe it to my father and explain why this is a good investment of his buddy. And I think that, you know, and then I remember going to Sri and I'd literally only taken CS106A and B. And I somehow thought I could program even, although all I knew how to program in was C at the time. And so I ended up like programming with these like legends of artificial intelligence who had spent 20 to 25 years programming in Lisp. And I was like running around the halls of SRI being like, how do I get a global variable even though I know you're not supposed to use them right? And like these, these old time programs being like set env. And I was like. 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 I thought it was a good idea. And I got there and they had set up an apartment for me and my landlady only spoke German. And so there was a lot of hand signals and a lot of directions about where things were, most of which I could follow. And then she handed me a document that was like 60 pages long, entirely in German, asked me to sign it. So I had no idea what I was signing, and so I signed it. And then I went to the grocery store. And it turns out in Europe there's a very different system for buying produce where you're supposed to print your own sticker as opposed to having someone like, you know, just weigh it at the end of your shopping time. And so I ended up in this, like, conversation I couldn't really have with this grocery checkout clerk who was very upset that my grapes did not have a sticker. She yelled at me for quite a long time and then finally just stormed off in a huff and came back with the grapes with a sticker and pointed. And I 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 those cases, as daunting as those first days felt, I found that if I pushed through it and just was like, okay, I don't really feel like going back tomorrow, but I'm just going to get up and go back to tomorrow, the most amazing things happen. Like, I had such an amazing time here at Stanford and Symbolic Systems, you know, the people I got to take classes with and sort of the legacy of now, symbolic systems in the Valley, led really by Reed, is just such an amazing thing to be a part of. And I got to do my honors thesis at SRI in conjunction with the teams there, which was just amazing. And the Union bank of Switzerland is really what led me to. To Google. Because if I hadn't written that program following people around the web that summer, Eric Roberts never would have said, hey, there's these guys who are working on research really close and similar to yours. And so in those cases, I think that the two biggest criteria for me are work with the smartest people you can find and do things that you don't feel entirely ready to do. Because in that moment, that's how you find out a lot about yourself. And you can surprise yourself and be good at things you didn't think you'd be good at. And at worst, you learn your limitations and you learn things that you're not good at or that you don't like that much. And so that really guided my decision to go to Google. It guided a lot of my career decisions at Google in terms of things that I tried or wanted to do. And it guided me to Yahoo as well.

Excellent. Marissa, thank you so much for coming.

Into the class today.