Being broke is hard, but losing my passion is even harder. I left Yahoo two weeks ago.
I would never have joined Yahoo in a million years if it wasn't for Upcoming. And very few people know that I had worked for Google before (2004-2006); everyone thought I was crazy that I would join Yahoo as a Xoogler (ex-googler). I was not crazy, there was not social media stuff within Google beside Orkut in 2006, and you all know how well Orkut does. Upcoming was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, and it used to be THE event site for tech geeks and indie rock fans. When the recruiter contacted me about this position, I was very excited and hoping that since this is an acquisition, it's probably being run independently like Flickr. And the best part was, it didn’t look like Yahoo at all.
I had a great team when I first started. I got my first taste of working knowledge in social media beside forums and discussion boards. Events became my life, my career, and my passion. Since then I hosted many internal and external Yahoo events and tech conferences (not my core role but I picked that up on the side), I turned into a professional boothbabe :). But slowly, my team was trimmed down from 12 people to 3 over the course of a year. The only property that was able to fend off the invasion from the mothership is Flickr because they are not that deeply integrated with Yahoo like Upcoming is, which was a smart move. It's funny how everyone says "Oh event is so important, but let's have the engineers at Upcoming to work on some other stuff."How many times have my peers hacked out some great ideas and didn't get executed because of stupid internal bureaucracy? And then a few months later those ideas got cranked out by other startups?! How do you keep your spirit up when it happens over and over again?While I love my team and peers and bosses who were great to me, many of the people there are lacked of vision and simply talkers.The company is now run by many enterprise and non-web, non-Internet people, let alone any Web2.0 expert is in charge. I remember once one of my seniors told me she talked to a VP about Upcoming and Foursquare, the VP said "I don't get it, if I want to go out I'll just call my friends, why do I need to go online and look for stuff to do?", "And what is Foursquare again?" At that moment I decided it really is time to go. I am not saying everyone should be a LBS fanatic and narcissistic and broadcast every single fucking thing they do, but as a VP (non-finance or HR function) of an Internet company should at least know what these services are and their meanings.Is TechCrunch being totally fair to Yahoo? Absolutely not. Yahoo is still a billion company with millions profit. How many of the startups TechCrunch covers are even making money? Yahoo might not be innovating as much as we would like it to, but a few of its properties are still number one in their categories, such as Y! Finance, Sports, and News. And not to mention Yahoo! Japan is still the #1 site there, as well as Yahoo! Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan. I still want Yahoo to exist in the space and provide values to users.I just don't want to work on listing services like Yahoo always does. Community and UGC are so important that Yahoo doesn't really seem to get even though Answers was once very successful property. Further, Yahoo bought a series of Web2.0 products and just neglected them. I love events, and that was the sole purpose of me joining Yahoo. I still have a lot passion with events, but I had been checked out for a long time ever since I was assigned to do something else. I spent a lot of time doing work and learning stuff outside of Yahoo over the past 1.5 years. I learned how to build mobile applications, I helped running other people's conferences, I ran a fundraiser for a micro-finance organization I support, and I have been taking a class on GIS. My passion and energy need an outlet.It was a no-win battle with Yahoo. It is not worth the fight for me anymore. The moment I gave my notice, I stopped drinking...
I would never have joined Yahoo in a million years if it wasn't for Upcoming. And very few people know that I had worked for Google before (2004-2006); everyone thought I was crazy that I would join Yahoo as a Xoogler (ex-googler). I was not crazy, there was not social media stuff within Google beside Orkut in 2006, and you all know how well Orkut does. Upcoming was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, and it used to be THE event site for tech geeks and indie rock fans. When the recruiter contacted me about this position, I was very excited and hoping that since this is an acquisition, it's probably being run independently like Flickr. And the best part was, it didn’t look like Yahoo at all.
I had a great team when I first started. I got my first taste of working knowledge in social media beside forums and discussion boards. Events became my life, my career, and my passion. Since then I hosted many internal and external Yahoo events and tech conferences (not my core role but I picked that up on the side), I turned into a professional boothbabe :). But slowly, my team was trimmed down from 12 people to 3 over the course of a year. The only property that was able to fend off the invasion from the mothership is Flickr because they are not that deeply integrated with Yahoo like Upcoming is, which was a smart move. It's funny how everyone says "Oh event is so important, but let's have the engineers at Upcoming to work on some other stuff."How many times have my peers hacked out some great ideas and didn't get executed because of stupid internal bureaucracy? And then a few months later those ideas got cranked out by other startups?! How do you keep your spirit up when it happens over and over again?While I love my team and peers and bosses who were great to me, many of the people there are lacked of vision and simply talkers.The company is now run by many enterprise and non-web, non-Internet people, let alone any Web2.0 expert is in charge. I remember once one of my seniors told me she talked to a VP about Upcoming and Foursquare, the VP said "I don't get it, if I want to go out I'll just call my friends, why do I need to go online and look for stuff to do?", "And what is Foursquare again?" At that moment I decided it really is time to go. I am not saying everyone should be a LBS fanatic and narcissistic and broadcast every single fucking thing they do, but as a VP (non-finance or HR function) of an Internet company should at least know what these services are and their meanings.Is TechCrunch being totally fair to Yahoo? Absolutely not. Yahoo is still a billion company with millions profit. How many of the startups TechCrunch covers are even making money? Yahoo might not be innovating as much as we would like it to, but a few of its properties are still number one in their categories, such as Y! Finance, Sports, and News. And not to mention Yahoo! Japan is still the #1 site there, as well as Yahoo! Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan. I still want Yahoo to exist in the space and provide values to users.I just don't want to work on listing services like Yahoo always does. Community and UGC are so important that Yahoo doesn't really seem to get even though Answers was once very successful property. Further, Yahoo bought a series of Web2.0 products and just neglected them. I love events, and that was the sole purpose of me joining Yahoo. I still have a lot passion with events, but I had been checked out for a long time ever since I was assigned to do something else. I spent a lot of time doing work and learning stuff outside of Yahoo over the past 1.5 years. I learned how to build mobile applications, I helped running other people's conferences, I ran a fundraiser for a micro-finance organization I support, and I have been taking a class on GIS. My passion and energy need an outlet.It was a no-win battle with Yahoo. It is not worth the fight for me anymore. The moment I gave my notice, I stopped drinking...
