Why YOU need to Change Communication with Investors | Yahoo Chief Financial Officer Ken Goldman

At Yahoo, we changed something. We do our investors, so I suggest you all take a look at it. We are the only US company that's ever done this, that does its earnings call live on video. Everyone else does it on the phone, conference call. What's your rationale behind that? I'm gonna give you that in a second. And by the way, do feel free, I'm actually very comfortable with anyone who wants to raise their hand and get questions, so that's absolutely fine. We, so the way we do it is, we have, well, maybe I'll just answer the question. We have 2 things that other companies don't have, 3 things. We have a finance channel, so finance site, so this is a way to sort of promote our finance site, Yahoo Finance, so that's one. 2, we have a studio, so we have a studio right there, so we don't have to go somewhere to go find a studio, because finding a studio is a pain actually. So we have a studio right at our Sunnyvale headquarters as opposed to having to go to Stanford or NASDAQ or Bloomberg down in the city. And 3, we have Marissa. What? Marissa. Not me, trust me. No one wants to see me. She's photogenic, she's quick on her feet, she's very smart, she's very eloquent. So investors want to hear and see her. Fourth is what we're able to do is we're able to show real-time new material. So we can show data on various trends up until that day. We can show video splice of our products and some new products that we just brought out so we can give investors some real-life idea. You can't do that on a webcast. It just is not really available. And so that's again another way that we have changed the world, it was actually my idea interestingly enough, of how to change the way we communicate to investors. And that's one thing I like about my job, you can dream up something you want to do and you do it. And so we have control over what we do. I mentioned this before, part of the job, CEO sounding board. Marissa, as CEOs are very lonely, I'm going to come back to this a little bit later, CEO is a lonely life, so to speak, because you really don't have sounding boards. You can go to your board and your chairman and they may be able to help, but frankly, they really don't see the inside like we do. And the CFO is expected to be very objective. We don't have a bias. We're not just doing marketing and we're not just products or sales. We tend to sort of, because it does come back to numbers, we tend to sort of wrap it all together. And so we sort of, one of our roles is call it as we see it and not be biased, not be lobbying for something. And so that helps us in our role. So we are a sounding board to the CEO. One of the things that we do a lot, I do a lot, it's hard to believe, but Yahoo had an extremely delegatory approach to how we spent money, both for capital and normal expenses. We changed that. And I can't tell you how important it is thinking about the approval authorization matrix. Who can approve what in the company? It's critical. And I happen to be very hands-on, so I reduced it. So I now approve, I don't wanna give the exact numbers, but I approve down to a very low level all capital expenses, all operating expenses. So I've really changed that. And part of why I do that is I happen to know a lot of folks, and so I like to negotiate. I push back. I challenge how much we spend, who we spend with. Sometimes I know the CEOs and CFOs of these other companies, and I'll go back and tell them to sharpen their pencil. One of the guys actually, Lyndon Rive, who is a cousin of Elon— I saw him out there. I saw his picture out there anyway. So I said, Lyndon, you have to sharpen your pencil. And he sent me a picture of a nice sharpened pencil on my— said, yep, my pencil is sharpened. But it is very, very important. One of the things that good CFOs can do and finance can do is really think about how to reduce costs. Thank you.