Open mind, insert thought

Just a few weeks shy of my five-year anniversary, I did it.  I left Yahoo!  And it wasn't with an entirely happy heart that I did so.  A bit of background:

For the past five years, I led product teams at Yahoo!  In my time there, I enjoyed an amazing job and worked with some of the most dedicated and talented people I have ever met.  I was given opportunities to make tremendous changes that impacted the lives of millions on a daily basis.  Some of those changes were homeruns, some of them were massive failures.  But the changes of which I was most proud were the ones almost no one noticed -- policing and cleaning up one of the largest online communities in the world, putting pedophiles and other seriously bad people in jail when they abused our service, and protecting kids while keeping Yahoo! out of court and out of the press.  And, of course, I'm happy that I helped some righteously outspoken people be heard, worked on products so advanced they won't be available to the public for a couple years, and just generally made the Internet a more interesting, safe and fun place.  I worked on small teams and I also cultivated a team that topped out at more than 100 people worldwide, and together we built some great products.

And, then, I left.  It was clearly time to go.  I leave incredibly disappointed in both the corporate management and the board of directors, who let the opportunity with Microsoft slip away.  A deal like the one Microsoft proposed was a necessary step for Yahoo!, and its loss was the result of sheer hubris.  The arrogance I witnessed at Yahoo!, which is present in all big companies, reached a peak a couple of years ago - ironically just about the time our loss to Google was beyond question.  That fall from power as the #1 online service resulted in cross-company retrenchment as execs thought more about securing silos of power than about the good of Yahoo!.  That play-it-safe attitude led to Yahoo!'s current state, revealing what the entire investment community has now come to see -- that Yahoo!'s uppermost leadership needs a swift kick in the ass and the company needs to be bought.  With the exception of Connected Life (the last BU for which I worked), I believe that Yahoo! corporate has lost anything resembing a competitive edge.  To be fair, I applaud the work being done by several individuals across the organization, including those on the Y!OS team; however, I fear that it's too little too late.  Stepping back from the tactical, one can see that, when an upstart company like Facebook can rise up to be a worthy competitor for a storied giant like Yahoo!, it's time to start thinking about plan B.

So, I was (to my surprise) open to being poached.  And poached I was, by a tremendous opportunity.  I leave Yahoo! to head up product for a well-funded social gaming company.  As I watched the online community sector develop over the past 11 years, I came to believe that the traditionally difficult-to-monetize world of user interaction would ultimately be won in social gaming.  And Zynga is the right company at the right time to capitalize on that promise.  I'm pleased to join them as VP of Product Management, and I know that our products will evolve dramatically over the next year.

So, after five years of fighting every day to save the world (and one of the biggest global Internet brands) from itself, I ride off into the sunset.  Beyond the horizon, there are interactions and experiences that promise to be fun for everyone - just wait and see.

...and, even though I missed it by a few weeks, I was still given my five-year gumball machine.  Thanks and peace to all of the hard-working people I stood beside in those purple trenches.  It was a great experience every single day.

Posted by Scott D. at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I think that 149 New Montgomery St. in San Francisco must be a cursed address.  I worked there for a period of time, preparing for the IPO that was going to be the big blow-out at the end of 1999.  eGreetings had become a greetings and gifting site (thanks to a lot of torturous work from my team), and on the strength of a promising monetization story, we did the roadshow and filed to go public.

If you remember your bubble history, December of 1999 was not really a great time for an IPO.  We went out, rolled over, and died, and the rest of the industry followed.

One of our gifting partners at the time survived, however - they were Red Envelope.  I had a friendly relationship with the company going all the way back to my days at Excite.  I remember when Pete Baltaxe came in to the Excite offices to discuss his new venture, which was to become 911Gifts.  We had just launched the Excite Shopping channel, and Pete was looking for distribution.  It was during my tenure at eGreetings that his company's name changed to Red Envelope.  They wanted to continue to deliver on the last-minute gift promise, but didn't want the recipient to KNOW that the sender was sending something last minute.

Now I hear that Red Envelope has laid off most of its workforce and will likely shut down soon.  Oddly, they seem to have failed to embrace the lessons that the bubble taught us about growing a customer base inexpensively.  They moved into expensive but unproductive catalogs (which I remember receiving) and failed to aggressively acquire search-engine traffic to sustain flow to the site.

Looking at the stories of their failure, I was surprised to see that they'd moved into the old eGreetings offices on New Montgomery.  Word to the wise - it's a lovely location, but just don't move in there.  When times get tough, as they inevitably will, your designers will spend too much time envying the cool kids across the street at Academy of Art College and your business folks will skip out of work early for drinks at the Thirsty Bear.

Posted by Scott D. at 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I attended the 2008 CES, which meant I was in Las Vegas for a full week.  Yes, I did survive.  Barely.  Imagine four six-hour days in a row of standing at a demo station, giving essentially the same pitch every 10-15 minutes.  Follow that up with the requisite Vegas lifestyle each night (the evening STARTS around 11:30), and you might understand why I'm just a bit burnt this weekend.

It was not all bad (actually, it was kinda worth it ;) ).  The highlight of the week undoubtedly was hooking up with my good Colorado friends from Soul Patch, Ryan and Jason.  They're with Foundry Group, a VC firm in Boulder, and they were in town to see the latest and greatest toys.  We grabbed dinner, then headed to the suite at the Wynn where the guys from Slingbox were staying.  The suite was insane, and they had Rock Band hooked up to the Plasma.  We took our positions, Ryan playing guitar, Jason on the drums, and me on the mic (there was no second guitar controller for playing bass).  The song was Dani California, and if I must say, this tired set of bandmates rocked the Wynn.  I scored 100% on the vocal line, a feat of which I'm quite proud!  After that, of course, there were cocktails, people watching (by which I mean woman watching - good lord, Vegas brings out something in people...), and then a promise to meet again soon.  After parting with those guys, I ended up at LAX at the Luxor to meet my team mates - but that's another story.

Glad I went, glad to be home, hoping there's no permanent damage to my sleep patterns. 

Posted by Scott D. at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wow.  Adult FriendFinder, the leading social network dedicated to sex, just sold.  Actually, its parent company, Various, did.  For $500 Million dollars.  To Penthouse Media.

This was a bit of a tricky sale, I'd have to believe.  For a while, it seemed as though AFF would be unable to generate a viable "liquidity event."  The thinking was that a sex-based social networking site could never go public (this is probably still true).  And Google, Yahoo!, and MSN would never buy it.  And the major players in adult media wouldn't buy it either - it was already too huge and would be too expensive.  I'm honestly not certain why Penthouse bought them.  I'll take a look, but it's possible that Penthouse had already tried duplicating AFF's success and realized just how hard community is to get right.  Or, they negotiated the price on AFF down from what it could have been worth if it had been, say, a dating-based social network ($500 Million for 260 Million registered users and 1.2 Million paying users could seem a bit low, compared to the $1 Billion bandied about for Facebook's 50 Million users).  Or perhaps the stars just aligned for AFF.

Either way, congrats to the good people at Various on the sale.  Way to go!

Posted by Scott D. at 07:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Scott D. at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gack.  There was a time, not so long ago, when I actually got paid to hack PHP and think hard about how I would lay out the tables in a MySQL database.  In that mis-spent youth, I also installed more than my fair share of MovableType and vBulletin software.  If I'd run into this problem back then, I have no doubt I'd have it solved by now.

My problem is this.  I just want TypeLists.  You know, like the good folks at SixApart offer their TypePad customers?  Well, you can't get that handy feature without joining TypePad.  I can't even find it in the documentation for an upgrade to MovableType 4.x.  So, I went spelunking for plugins.

Now, this site is not hosted on my own server.  It's hosted on Yahoo!  So, I have more limited access to the machine than I'd like.  Even so, I think I have everything set up properly for a List plugin, but it's just not happy.  And, with a baby at home, I don't get to play around with a problem like this for more than about an hour.  So, now I have a project.  One which I should have been able to solve quickly.  My kung fu is slipping!

Posted by Scott D. at 07:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's strange.  I really was, at one time, an idealist.  Apparently no longer, because the treatment our company has received has really pissed me off.

Yes, it absolutely sucks that the Chinese government puts journalists and activists in jail.  I wish they wouldn't.  Most of us wish they wouldn't.  But they do, and the only pressure to make them stop will be political.  Telling businesses to do what our government cannot or will not is absurd, and we shouldn't put up with it.

American corporations do business in China.  Our shareholders want us to and we want to, because the country represents the single largest market opportunity in the world.  In order to do business there, a company must abide by Chinese law.  Otherwise, that company would get shut out.  I hate to admit this, but companies operate within the law to generate value for shareholders.  Any moral or socially-responsible agenda a company may pursue beyond that is wonderful, but that's the baseline - othewise the company ceases to exist.

If a single company decided to take a stand and break the law in China on moral grounds, its competitors would happily eat its lunch.  So don't expect us to do it.  If the US government wants US companies to refuse to abide by Chinese law while doing business in China, then it needs to legislate that.  And even if our government would pass such legislation (they won't), the rest of the world wouldn't necessarily follow suit.  So then American business would have pulled out of a huge, huge market, leaving it to the rest of the world to swoop in and make enormous profits for generations to come.  That seems a bit stupid to me.

Simply put, this isn't an easy one, and I hate that Yahoo! was singled out and held up to ridicule.

Note: this is my opinion and mine alone, NOT an opinion from Yahoo!.

Posted by Scott D. at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)