{"id":772,"date":"2011-11-16T00:10:19","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T05:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigperler.com\/blog\/?p=772"},"modified":"2024-06-06T23:25:57","modified_gmt":"2024-06-07T03:25:57","slug":"how-to-fix-yahoo-stern-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.craigperler.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/16\/how-to-fix-yahoo-stern-style\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Fix Yahoo, Stern Style"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Another action packed evening at my Digital Media Marketing class at NYU Stern: after presentations by former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig<\/a> and former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel<\/a>, and with them, VC guru and former Yahoo board member\u00a0Eric Hippeau<\/a>, and former CEO of NBC Universal Jeff Zucker<\/a> in the audience, we the class presented (in teams) our solutions for how to “fix” Yahoo.\u00a0 Dan and Terry spent half the class telling us their stories, walking us through their careers, and some of the honest truths about their Yahoo tenures (only after the class promised not to Tweet any of the secrets).\u00a0 Not surprisingly, the morals of their stories are exactly the same as those observed during this past weekend’s NYU Entrepreneurs Festival<\/a>: passion and persistence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advice from Terry Semel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Terry recounted his Warner Bros. career, detailing how he started out selling WB movies to theaters in Cleveland, eventually making his way to becoming WB chairman.  Terry’s poignant advice was to take risks, accept all offers, and don’t always listen to your wife!  Terry also told us how he recruited Dan to Yahoo – every other day Terry would call Dan and say something akin to, “do you want to someday be an 80 year old Jew waiting his days out in Scarsdale, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”  Of course, Dan eventually gave in, and in fact, his footnote to the night was, “whatever you do after graduation, follow your passion. Otherwise it sucks.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The really great part of tonight’s class, however, was when us students got to propose solutions for how we’d fix Yahoo if we were CEOs to Terry, Dan, the rest of the class, and the other random and nameless people who seem to audit the class each week.\u00a0 The solutions were creative, well thought-out, and generally well-received; however Dan definitely had criticisms for all of us, though expectedly so!\u00a0 While most groups proposed fixes to certain Yahoo portal or Yahoo property features, Coleman, Dan et al were really looking for a bigger picture solution.\u00a0 The comments remind me of this scene from Adam Sandler’s movie Anger Management (not a WB title, as far as I’m aware) – just substitute Dan’s “but how would you fix<\/em> Yahoo?” for Nicholson’s “but who<\/em> are you?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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