in the spring of 2003, after i'd been unemployed for about 5 months, an old friend from my first post-grad school job at the "digital consultancy" put the word out that he was looking for a contractor to do an analysis of a particular market segment - the youth market - for Yahoo!. it was scoped at about a 6-week gig and involved figuring out the current value of the segment to the company, recommending new marketing programs directed specifically to youth, estimating a new customer lifetime value to the company if they enacted such programs, and providing organizational recommendations so that yahoo could effectively carry out the strategy.
i love this kind of stuff. anything that involves research and strategy is right up my alley. throw in a little math (in this instance, a customer lifetime value model i would create, plus the associated sensitivity analysis), and that's just a bonus.
and yet, again, i hesitated. i lived in san francisco and yahoo was "down the peninsula," as we say here, almost in san jose, which as the crow flies is only about 50 miles but on a freeway can take 2 hours or so on a bad day. so we negotiated. i'd have to spend some time in the office, sure, but i could come down on off hours to avoid the worst of the traffic, and i wouldn't have to come every day. problem pretty much solved.
(looking back, i can't help but wonder what would have happened if i didn't take that job - and make no mistake, i was close to not taking it. there was the commute, but there was also the crisis of confidence that comes with depression, and i wasn't totally out of that yet. but we won't speculate. thank goodness i took advantage of that opportunity, because it shaped my career in a fundamental way.)
the project was fun, and although i'd negotiated only 2-3 days a week in the office, i soon found myself going down almost every day. others in the company had already done bits and pieces of the work, but it had never been brought together, so there was a lot of existing research to collect and interviews to conduct. more important, though, was the feeling of camaraderie that i hadn't even realized i'd been missing. i actually enjoyed being there. and although yahoo these days is a mere shadow of its former self, these were its glory days. it was the most popular site on the internet. it was making strategic acquisitions left and right, buying up even more traffic, and therefore commanding more advertising dollars than anyone else on the web.
i had fun and delivered what i thought was an excellent final report and presentation. more importantly, however, my confidence had returned. i knew i could do this work, that i had something - a lot, actually - to contribute. and as the project was winding down, i found out about a permanent position in another area of the company - yahoo mail. it was second only to hotmail (now known as windows live mail) at the time in terms of the number of accounts and page views it commanded, and was poised to take over first place. it was a marketing manager position - i'd join one other marketing manager, several product managers, and a team of engineers - about 35 people in all. (the team now, by the way, is well over 100 people.)
i got the job, and so began four and a half years of mostly fun, stimulating work. it was the first time since before graduate school that i'd worked at a large company, so it came with all the accompanying political BS (for which i became quickly known for having little patience), but overall it was a good experience. i worked with smart, fun people. the product did, indeed, become the #1 webmail product less than a year after i joined the team, which was cause for much celebration. and with the help of many others, particularly in yahoo's data analysis group, i introduced an element of data-driven marketing to not only the mail team, but the company as a whole. i'm very proud of some of the work i did there, and i held three different positions during my tenure at the company, learning a ton in each one.
another cool thing about yahoo that fed my soul was something called the yahoo employee foundation, or YEF for short. employees could have money deducted from each paychecks to go to the foundation, even in very small amounts, which was added to the fund. twice a year, the grants committee would review applications from various nonprofits (to be considered, each nonprofit had to be "sponsored" by someone who worked at yahoo) and choose a few to receive grants of up to about $25,000. i donated to YEF the whole time i worked at yahoo, and i served on the grants committee for two years, once sponsoring a group with which i volunteered called Sports4Kids (now PlayWorks). playworks started out as a grassroots organization in oakland, california, and has since expanded to many more cities around the US. it helps augment physical education programs in schools, which are often among the first to be cut when budgets are slashed, as was the case in oakland at the time. it also helps schools integrate "play" into the actual curriculum at schools, since this has been shown to improve learning for many students. anyway, that's my plug for playworks, and i encourage everyone to check them out. i was thrilled when they were chosen to receive a grant from YEF.
my last position at yahoo, which i held for a little over a year, was the least fulfilling, unfortunately. it was challenging, but not in the good way - in the frustrating way, the how-in-the-hell-are-we-supposed-to-get-this-done way. and my mind was wandering back to its more principled place. sure, yahoo was a great company. it provided useful services, compelling content, and just plain fun to hundreds of millions of people around the world. and yet i couldn't shake that feeling, once again, that although things we did had a huge impact on the web community, they didn't have a ton of meaningful impact on the world - at least, not by my definition of meaningful.
(it's only fair here to cite a few exceptions - or at least one, in particular, that stands out in my mind. in 2005, after hurricane katrina hit the southeastern coast of the US, yahoo galvanized a team of people to go to the astrodome and provide not only humanitarian aid but also set up technical infrastructure so that people could find family members from whom they had become separated during the tragedy. i wasn't one of the people who went - i was on vacation at the time - but i have tremendous respect for those who did.)
so i started poking around and telling my friends that i was looking for something different. and that's how, approximately 6 months after beginning to look for new options, i ended up at a company in san francisco called method, a company that formulated, designed and manufactured environmentally friendly home care and personal care products.
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