Diorex

Last year, I was invited to a Yahoo summit called Meet the Sponsored Search at their HQ in Sunnyvale, which was a first look for Top Advertisers and Company Reps to see the product. It was a fairly intimate setting, with maybe 150 guests, 50 or so Yahoo people, many of whom were at the VP level or higher.

They solicited feedback (and apparently ignored much of it…) about various products and introduced us to lots of Yahoo executives.

I remember thinking at the time that Jerry Yang was personable and outgoing. He seemed approachable and knowledgeable about the topic (no surprise), but in a non-technical way. At least the time we were in the room with him, he acknowledged that there were better ways to do things and that Yahoo had missed the boat after essentially having a monopoly on the technology to begin with. He seemed to grasp that they had squandered an almost impossibly large lead in the space, but that they were committed to getting those users back. Everything out of his mouth was polished and sincere. He looked like a billion dollars and acted like it as well.

We had lunch with Terry Semel and he spoke to the crowd of advertisers in a way that made no sense to the assembled group of power marketers. He said things like his engineers had come kicking and screaming about the need for panama and made him authorize this change. The next thing out of his mouth was stating that the New Sponsored Search (2 very conspicuous words we did not hear from a single Yahoo employee all day - Panama or Google) was the #1 engineering priority for the company.

It was almost as if he had been handed some cue cards on hot buttons he needed to hit. there was no passion or conviction in his voice. He said what someone had told him we wanted to hear, but not very convincingly. Subsequently, he was invited to press the flesh with a few of us. This was an opportunity to talk to about 10 of his largest and most influential advertisers (all were major name brands as I recall) and he seemed bored and unexcited about his product. After he left us, one of the advertisers remarked offhand “It is almost as if he is being forced to do Panama rather than he sees the potential opportunity.”

The stark contract between the two personalities was striking. Terry Semel in his power suit being hassled to speak to his most important clients, looking bored and restless as if there was something far more important for him to be doing than interacting with them. Meanwhile there was the incredibly well dressed but casual and hip Jerry Yang, who just got it. Who understood that the people in the room were important to his company and that our feedback and ideas could help make the launch better.

I, for one, think Yahoo will be far better off under one of its original founders. I suspect that the engineers will once again run the company and that the suits will need to polish up the resume. More important, I don’t think Yahoo will feel like its number one priority will be in pleasing Wall Street and telling them what they want to hear. In a perverse way this is probably the best thing for the company. Focus on the users and let the revenues and profits be secondary.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 11:06 am and is filed under Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.