Here's Why Street Smarts Trump All in Business | Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Ken Goldman

Integrity is number one. These you might want to take down because this is how I think about it. I've thought a lot about what I'm going to talk about now. There is, I read, first of all, you ought to read a lot and then I'm going to come back to, and so I read a lot. I spend, believe it or not, probably 10 hours over my weekends reading. I like the Wall Street Journal. I think it's very well written. I learn a lot from reading that. I like reading The Economist. I like reading The Economist. I go through the Businessweek pretty quickly. I might leaf through Fortune, Barron's. I actually read Barron's. But if you go through all those, what takes down people, just look at SAC, what takes down people, companies, is integrity, doing what's right. And you shouldn't need, your compass should tell you what's right and what's wrong. You don't need rules. You don't need some rules and regulations and laws to figure that out. Integrity is number one, and once you screw it up, it's almost impossible to get it back. As you think about your career, think about it as a strategy. I thought about my career as to what are the building blocks I need to be CFO. I need to understand planning and budgeting. I need to understand forecasting, which I learned originally. I need to learn how to manage people. One of the nice jobs when I was at Memorex, I was corporate budgeting and measurements, but because of that job, I took an expansive role. And by the way, I never looked at on paper what my job is, I just expand upon it. And so there I learned, when I was in a budgeting role, I learned enough. I spent a lot of time with treasury and tax, was able to learn treasury and tax. So figure out, my point there is figure out where you wanna be. You can't figure out the steps along the way unless you know where you wanna go. It's like a strategy of a company. You can't— tactics beget a strategy, strategy begets tactics. So if you don't, on your career, if you don't know where you wanna go, you won't know the steps along the way. So I sort of always say, figure out where you wanna go, what's your endpoint, and then what are the steps you need to get there? Another hot button of mine, be impactful, make a positive difference. A lot of stuff you can do in life, and by the way, it doesn't mean you have to go work in a company, commercial company. You could go work for nonprofit. You could teach. There's a lot of jobs you can do that have an impact. So it doesn't have to be a commercial, you know, for-profit enterprise. But whatever you do, do it well, try to make an impact, try to make a positive difference as opposed to just going through the motions. This is an important item. People always ask me for advice as to thinking about where— how to think about companies, if you get companies. And I actually say it a little differently than some other folks. I say figure out where you want it, what geography you want to live in. Because we're not as mobile, we are mobile, but what's helped me a lot is the network effect of knowing people in the Bay Area. So once I got here, it's easy for me to stay here and to do well here because I know a lot of people. So I do say, and people don't always agree with me, but I do say figure out what location. I presume many of you want to stay here. Then figure out what industry. And I always say go where the action is, the hot industry. Because you can go work in some other industries, and I don't wanna sort of say right now what's negative. Well, I'll say what's hot so I'm not negative to anybody. Yeah, so SaaS, consumer internet, big data, virtualization. There's a whole number of trends today. that are very big, that are large. And so I say go where the action is. Internet is just incredible, it's fun, it's great. It's a whiteboard as to where it's going. And consumer internet, so Pinterest, and as I mentioned before, what we're doing at Yahoo, Google, Facebook. I mean, there's just so much going on today. People are disrupting the way we used to do it. The SaaS version, you think of the Workdays of the world. You think of Salesforces of the world, NetSuites of the world. There's just so many companies, certain clean tech, SolarCity, great example, disrupting the solar business and figuring out how to make money. So I say go where the action is, because if you don't and things don't work out, there's less opportunities to figure out what you wanna do. And you gain value by being in a hot company, a hot industry, even if the company has its pluses and minuses and ultimately doesn't do. as well. Then I say go figure out the company in your job. And so with that, but if you go in a great industry and for whatever reason your company doesn't do well, you can always get another job somewhere else because you came from somewhere which people treasure the experience you've gotten. Challenge conventional wisdom. I always say don't believe what you hear. So challenge conventional wisdom. So think differently, just because people say, yeah, here's Here's what everyone's doing. Here's what the lemmings are doing, whatever. How people make a lot of money is contrary bets. Back in '07, the contrary bet against the banks and mortgages and so forth and housing. But what's the contrary bet? So again, take a skeptical view, not a negative view, but a skeptical view of what you hear and make your own decision. Got to be, I say, smart and lucky. There is something about being, making your luck, but also being in the right place to have some luck. We're all fortunate 'cause, I should actually tell you this, I interview a lot of folks and I can tell you the first thing that turns me off in a resume is if I see someone jumping a lot. And then people say, well, the company didn't do as well as I thought, and this and that, there's a bunch of excuses. And that may be okay for one time, but if I see in a resume someone jumping a lot, whether they've only been at a company 2, 3 years multiple times or less, which I see a lot in this valley, turns me off. I basically, I almost 100% will veto that candidate, almost 100%. And we have a hiring review in our company and we all think the same way. So when it comes to our hiring review, which all the senior folks are on that committee, We see someone jumping a lot, beat it away. You gotta make it, you gotta be in a place enough that you can do some real work, you have some real accomplishments. And you can't keep on blaming the company you went to 'cause you picked the company as well. So when I say smart and lucky, figure out, you have to be a little lucky, but you also have to be smart in terms of how you think about what companies you go to. Be a team player. There's a lot of analogies to sports. So I'm a big believer, sports is all about team. Working in companies is a team sport. You can't get— you can't do it all by yourself. You need to find a way to bring folks on, motivate them. Many times they won't work for you directly. You have to use moral suasion, but this is a team sport. What's your shoe? Cash is king. I'm into cash, I love cash, so. Anything you do, whether it's your own personal life, making sure you have the resources available, whether it's a company, making sure you have adequate cash, always important. I'm not going to spend a lot of time, I always say ignore sunk costs. What I mean there is, whatever you've done in the past, if you've put a lot of money and it's not working, you can't do anything about that. So what's done is done, you gotta move forward. So you always think everything forward, not necessarily— Backwards. Back. And I say, the little comment is, get a life. There is a balance. I'm pretty religious about this. I believe another friend of mine told me this stool, 3-legged stool approach to life. One leg is work, one leg is family, one leg is physical fitness. I happen to work out every morning. On Tuesdays I have a trainer, Saturdays I have a trainer. I pretty much block that out. I don't care what's going on anywhere in the world unless I'm traveling, I can't change, I'm gonna have my workouts. I just, there's too many excuses you can find for not doing, taking care of yourself. And I just said that comes very important to me and I'm gonna adhere to that, which means I will find time, make time and work around it. And frankly, once you do it, it all works. So what were some advice I gave to my kids? And I'm gonna go through this quickly 'cause it's sort of, Details what I just said. Work hard. Don't expect— so you want to be the first in, last out, hopefully. So I always say in your first jobs, first impressions are critical. Work, work hard. So that's what I say, first in, last to leave is the way I talk about it. Try to keep doing any personal stuff in the office to a minimum or do after hours. So, you know, as you start out, you know, you want to be there working. And as we got very publicized for this, it's a hell of a lot better to be working in the office than at home. Never say, not my job. Always offer to help. You know, and the corollary to that is, you know, expand your job. If your job is here, try to find a way to make your job here. Figure out extra stuff you can do. that maybe is not part and parcel of your job, but allows you to branch out, and it allows you to get visibility. First impression is important, you know, find something that has impact, visibility, and success. So look for something, you know, when you're starting a new job, and you know, all of us, you know, I've started many, I've changed jobs every 5, 6 years, and you know, that's what worked for me, sometimes 7. But when you start a new job, you know, I don't care what you've done in the past, people are looking at First impressions, so finding something that you can show significant contribution that has an impact that gives you some momentum in the new company. So visibility, I always say work at the headquarters. You wanna have visibility to the CEO. And if you're in some far-flung office that you don't have, you're not at headquarters, it's hard to have visibility to the CEO and corporate management. So I always say, Go work at headquarters of where you work, whatever company, and find something, get the visibility. When I was at Fairchild, and I still remember this, I was 26 years old, 25 years old, whatever it was, and we used to have monthly presentations to Corrigan, CEO then, and CEO would give it, CFO would give it, and Wolf, I would get up and that was my opportunity to get in front of the CEO. And that was one of the ways I created a lasting impression with Wilf over many, many years because of that first impression he saw of me in those operational reviews that we would have at Fairchild. This is my first job out. Don't be afraid to ask questions. If you don't understand, ask questions. Don't just— if you really don't understand what's being asked of you, There's nothing wrong and we do it, I do it all the time, just ask. Ask questions. I say this, which I really do believe is, work should be interesting, fun, challenging, and rewarding. So work should be interesting, fun, challenging, and rewarding. So enjoy yourself, enjoy work, find jobs that you enjoy, that really gets your passion. Just like I said, CEO has passion, you should have passion in your job. The way you do that is finding a job and a career and a company that you really enjoy and gets you motivated to get up in the morning and get out and go to work. This is an important one I'm going to say, experience counts, I tell my kids this all the time, experience counts, dollars and titles don't for a long time. So worry about experience, worry about more knowledge, more experience, more stuff, more stuff you do, don't get hung up on your salary. Don't get hung up on your title, it doesn't really matter. I mean, at some point it will matter. What you're trying to do is you're trying to get a resume of experience, of accomplishments, of things you've done, of impact you've done, things you can, when someone asks you, geez, tell me a little bit about what you did at that company, you can blurt out fast and furious what you've done. They don't care about your title, figure out what you've done. And so don't worry about, Frankly, I always tell my, you know, don't worry about your salary. If, you know, I got a very good salary at Yahoo, I never asked, I didn't negotiate one item about it. I said, Marissa, whatever you offer me, I'm gonna take. I want the job, it's more important to me than, I'm not gonna negotiate. Did not negotiate one item of the opportunity. Now it turned out to be a very good opportunity, but nonetheless, the example is still the case is when you find a good job, don't nickel and dime, just go do it. And money will have a way, everything else, titles, money, all that stuff has a way of taking care of itself if you take care of first, which is do a good job and experience. I already talked about this, plan your career with a goal in mind and a strategy. Talked about ethics and integrity, critical. Character, maybe another way of saying ethics and integrity is character. Character, folks, really important to the extent you become a leader. You need to motivate people and they're gonna look to your character as really, really important in terms of how you think about it. Last one, and I may just stop after this and let— 'cause I've gone about 45 minutes, which is— I had some other things I could have done, but maybe I'll just stop here. And if I run out, then I'll go back to some stuff. One of the characteristics of folks that really identifies people People ask me, what is one of the criteria characteristics of people? This is not totally intuitive, is competitiveness. There's been studies done of successful people in careers and certainly in athletics. The number one criteria, the number one, more than smarts, more than SATs and all the other stuff, is competitiveness, and street smarts. So I say, yes, I'm reasonably smart, but I'm damn competitive. And I would tell you that Tim Draper is as competitive as it gets. Yeah. And so that is— and you see folks in athletics, what really differentiates the winners from the ones that aren't winners or losers— I don't want to use the word losers right now— is that competitiveness, that will to win. And I would submit that that is more important than raw knowledge, raw SAT scores or GPAs. Now that's important and companies that hire you are gonna be looking at that. Yeah, we are gonna look at that if we're hiring you. What your GPA is, what school you went to, and SATs, we'll look at all that stuff, but I can tell you For my own, when I go interview folks and what I like to think about myself is that street fighter-ness, that competitiveness, that will to win. That is, that is the number one. That is number one.