Jeff Nolan’s surprisingly bitchy post about Yahoo prompted me to blog on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s the interesting challenge of doing external relationship development in the current tech environment from inside the walls of a public company.

It’s one of the highlights of my job that I get to meet with a lot of startups, developers, VC’s, and industry bloggers (species that are often cross-bred). Many become my conference and cocktail-party familiars, twitter and facebook friends, idea collaborators, daily RSS reads, and even sometimes real friends. Many, of course, do not, but in the course of an average week I connect with dozens of people, a bunch of whom I can dialog usefully with vis-a-vis my job, and many of whom I end up connecting to other parts of Yahoo! Often enough, I connect people to other 3rd-party companies.

Today’s environment is transparent, open, and conversational - meaning almost anyone can get to anyone and communicate with them publicly, semi-publicly, or privately. This is great - when I need to find someone, it tends to be quite easy to reach them directly or with one degree of separation via my network. When someone needs to reach me, I am equally easy to find (and in fact have a public “contact me” email link that’s one click away from a search on my name). As conversations become substantive, companies are increasingly transparent about their objectives, plans, competition, and even finances, all of which materially increase effectiveness.

So much for the good stuff. The challenges are: a) that I’m still under the constraints of a public company, and can not in any way be “conversational” about material inside information; and b) that open doors like mine are magnets for everything from unrelated BU inquiries (from people who should know better) to “the Yahoo! suggestion box”, and the signal-to-noise ratio of inbound items can create a lot of distractions and confusion if I don’t filter aggressively.

We could deal with the first issue the way public companies often do (wait until release and then sic our sales “BD” people on you), but I and many of my colleagues try to operate in the more open mode when we can. In these meetings, we share what we can publicly, are open about our constraints, and sometimes put companies under NDA to discuss more details. Often, however, we do not. People - especially, it seems, web2 types who believe all information should be free — tend to be careless, forgetful, sloppy, and sometimes overtly insubordinate to confidentiality restrictions on information shared under NDA. (Recently, for example, I revealed product plans under NDA, and the recipient not only told a Wired reporter, but introduced me for on-the-record comment!)

In general, I’d rather have a non-confidential conversation anyway. So, we often skip the NDA, we tell you what we can, and we trust that you can deal with the fact there’s information we can’t tell you. If we’re operating in an area close to a given company that we’re talking to, I’ll take pains to make everyone aware of the potential for conflict.

Very often, these kinds of meetings are at our request. Equally often, they’re at the company’s request (or their investors’). Any company that’s been around more than a few cycles will likely have knocked on many doors, been pinged by multiple groups, maybe engaged with corp dev, had their investors tee up various VP’s, etc., trying to push a deal or with a very thinly veiled hope we will acquire them. Very occasionally, these kinds of meetings do lead to immediate deals or m&a conversations, but usually not, and we often can’t say too much more than “interesting, thanks” or “please circle back to us next quarter” or “we’ll engage with you when we’re closer to release”.

Sometimes, we’d really like to say more - about the product fit, about where we see the market going, about ideas that for Yahoo! that cascade from your demo. Or there might be a natural deal that’s two quarters away. Other times, we might find your idea fantastic in the abstract, but don’t see an obvious way plug it into our roadmaps meaningfully given technology / strategy / personnel and any number of other issues. But we often find ourselves in the situation where can’t tell you why or share ideas that reveal our specific plans.

Sometimes people find this frustrating (as Jeff apparently does). Especially once you’ve made the rounds a few times, or as the organization changes over time, this is understandable. But as much as I love newsgator (loyal user, comment on their blog, almost went to work there, etc.), Yahoo! still doesn’t have a product that’s ready-made for an RSS aggregating enterprise media widget and attention data distribution platform. That I can disclose. Yet. (Sorry!)

Particularly when you are solving market problems in a new way, you might not get the response you are looking for on the first (or even nth) visit. Your six-month attempt to sell Yahoo! your solution might not effectively land you on a roadmap that was planned 18 months out. But I would appreciate it if you did not slam me and my colleagues for not saying enough at a meeting, or for not offering a deal to your satisfaction on the spot. That’s how the world works; deal with it or don’t come.

(I would also appreciate it if you would not expect a mid-level manager on my team to provide a substantive comment on the MSFT situation. Does he look like a PR spokesperson or Yahoo! board member? It’s a PUBLIC COMPANY; what do you think we’re going to say in a BD meeting?)

Additionally, it would be nice if the beneficiaries of all these open doors at Yahoo! did not abuse them to end-around deals they’ve been unable to do directly. Or trash us for not being coordinated enough when we hand these end-arounds right back to the BU owners. Or comment negatively about Yahoo’s lack of collaborative culture when we refuse to give out the cell-phone numbers of our colleagues.

Every once in a while, when I’m burned by one of these frustrated or abusive would-be partners, I regret being as available as I am. I guess today’s version of one of my father’s favorite maxims is, “no good deed goes unpublished”. But I know I’ll be greeted with another fantastic or inventive startup tomorrow, and I’m reminded of why I love what I do.

The more interesting alternative to irritable demands and cranky blog posts, of course, is to appreciate the entrepreneurial nature of Yahoo and the people who work there. To know that we are as keen as you to create new and innovative products.  To work with us, using the BD opportunity to build relationships and surface potential solutions. To demonstrate disruptive solutions that help us challenge orthodox ways of thinking about Yahoo! products. To enable us to drive orthogonal intersections across internal channels, even if it means multiple meetings and engagement points. To light a collective fire under any signs of “not invented here” roadmaps.

I’ve always thought that’s what strategic partnerships were all about — it’s certainly what interests me. Believe me, there are lots of people at Yahoo! who are hungry for and receptive to this approach.

So, if the chance to pitch an emerging media solution to a 600-newspaper consortium while they’re in build mode, or to engage the world’s most popular start page in a conversation about your widgets in the run-up to YOS is the kind of opportunity that appeals to you, then we’d love to hear from you.

Again.

It’s very gratifying to at last be able to talk publicly about YOS, Yahoo’s strategy for opening itself to 3rd-party developers across many of its properties and tools.

Dozens of the most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with have been involved in envisioning, setting strategy for, roadmapping, developing, and rolling out the many elements of this project (and hundreds behind the scenes). It’s by far the most ambitious product initiative I’ve ever been a part of, and it’s been really fun to watch (and help) the entire company align around this — for all the potshots people take at Yahoo!, it really is an incredible market force when it gets fully behind something like this. It’s been even more fun to watch my talented product, design, and engineering colleagues get it built.

In case you weren’t following the detailed announcement at Web2.0, we announced a robust developer application platform offering distribution across many Yahoo properties and views, a suite of social API’s, and a broad initiative to wire “social” into the user experience across the entire company. Of course it’s OpenSocial compliant, as we hinted at in announcing our partnership to develop a foundation around that standard.

I recommend watching this video of Ari Balogh (Y’s CTO) and reading this YDN post if you would like to know more. Only SearchMonkey is live (signup link) so far, but there’s much more coming, and the train is gathering steam.

So stay tuned, and stay in touch if you want to be part of it!

I’m going to let this speak for itself:

Frista updte - Uganda

Frista talked exitedly to me about her brewing process. She is now able to sell over six jerry cans full of her home made brew each week. The loans have enabled her to buy a sugar cane plantation and repair her grinding machine. This has improved the flavour and the efficiency of her beer and she has increased her sales as a result. She sells each jerry can of beer for US$18. She thoroughly enjoys her work and the fact that her customers are always happy (and drunk!). The process of making the beer from sourgum takes about a week and she enthusiastically mimed to me the entire process.

She has recently has to pay the last furneral rite of her late father and now she is able to use all the loans for her business. The business is able to support her and her eight children.

Original post at kiva.org.

For those of my friends who’ve been wondering what I’ve been so heads-down on lately, I’m happy to finally share the news that Yahoo! has announced support for the development of OpenSocial, by working with MySpace and Google to set up an independent foundation for its long-term stewardship. I hope this will turn out to be OpenSocial’s best “container” yet.

OpenSocial is already in the open in the sense that it’s available for use by anyone, and has been since it first came out last November. The spec is published with a Creative Commons license, and there’s reference code put out under an Apache open-source license. There’s been lots of community collaboration on it, and Google has been a good custodian in bringing it this far along.

What putting it in a foundation does is ensure access to the future direction of the spec is open to everyone, and create a way for contributions to be protected from patent lawsuits and IP contamination (for people and companies that have to worry about those arcane but very real kinds of impediment to intellectual collaboration). Most importantly, it means application developers, containers, and would-be contributors alike can take a bet on this technology with the benefit of knowing it’s free (as in beer, and as in speech) forever, that a community of developers is out there building on it, and that they won’t get box-canyoned into proprietary code.

OpenSocial itself still has plenty of maturing to do, but millions of users of twitter, facebook and even old-skool social apps like evite know how great application experiences that tap into your social network can be. Now OpenSocial has every chance to become the Wordpress of social app platforms and yield a similarly rich ecosystem of innovation around it. Kudos to Google here - helping OpenSocial take root by putting it out in the open isn’t just a smart thing to do (even though it means giving up “ownership” of it); it’s the right thing to do.
Helping close this deal for Yahoo! has been a great experience for me personally, too. In addition to helping Yahoo! walk the talk, having a lot of fun, and learning more than I ever thought I would about patent non-assertion, I’ve also gotten to know a very smart and passionate bunch of people at Google, MySpace, and my own employer during this.

So I guess now that it’s public, it’s time to join Orkut and add some new folks to my MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo networks - I’m sure they’ll be inviting me to join causes, share restaurant reviews, and throw monkeys soon!

UPDATE: Blog posts are starting to come in. You probably know where to find them, but I particularly like this quote from CNET: “It’s like the Justice League of social media”!

I’ve been following with interest the controversy surrounding Jason Calcanis’s post How to save money running a startup. I’m not sure why people get so huffy about these things, but in any case there’s not a word in his post I don’t agree with.

But there’s a missing ingredient here: leadership. Because there’s a name for a place where people work 24/7 without coffee or lunch breaks, optimize their workspaces so they can multi-task and be more productive while working, then take their work home with them, and continue this ad nauseum. It’s called a grind. No matter how passionate people are about the company, eventually they will run out of gas.

Successful leaders of small teams, in a startup or otherwise, are able to create both a vision for the long-term and a sense of urgency around reaching each of the many serial interim milestones. And, equally importantly, to find ways to celebrate and blow off steam between sprints.

Whether it’s bottles of wine that double in size for different user-number goals and are then drunk and signed by the team, outings tied to revenue goals, or just good old-fashioned partying after the big release (all of which I’ve used or seen work), how you infect other people with your passion and drive is probably even more important than creating the conditions that optimize for them.

I’m very excited that Fire Eagle has launched to developers as of this morning.

It’s a project I’ve been supporting out of Brickhouse, and the team that’s been developing it has been working incredibly hard to get it ready for launch. I’m delighted to see the eagle fly — and even more eager to see what developers and users make of it.

If you’d like a beta invitation, drop me a line — now you know where to find me.

On the few occasions I’ve had to hear Tim O’Reilly speak, I’ve never failed to come away inspired.

A couple of choice anecdotes and quotes from his opening keynote at Etech last night:

• “Hackers change the world while having fun”
• On Col. Kittinger, the guy who went up in a weather balloon, skydove out, hit the speed of sound without a vehicle, and was laying out of it on the ground — his friend ran up and gave him the finger to celebrate his statement: “There are always people who say it can’t be done. Just give ‘em the one-finger salute and keep on going.”
• Wrestle with the angels. Attack the hard problems.
• Things they are paying attention to at O’Reilly (and represented at the show):
• open-source hardware
• sensors and ambient computing / data mining open platforms and implicit web
• bionics / people hacking / brain hacking
• personal genomics
• collective intelligence (”Larry Lessig is the Matt Cutts of government.”)
• climate change
• Rilke’s “The Man Walking”

In talking to an entrepreneur considering several projects of various levels of commercial strength, he was reminded of the Cookie Monster winning a game show on Sesame Street. Behind Door #1: a million dollars in cash. Door #2, a castle and a yacht. Behind Door #3: a cookie. You know where Tim’s going. . as the audience starts chanting like the Cookie Monster. . .

“Choose the cookie!”

It was a long week for many of us at Yahoo!, as many colleagues and several close friends were part of our layoff or left amid the chaos. Marc, Susan, Salim, and Bradley - I’ll particularly miss working with you and have both enjoyed and appreciated your contributions. They will live on, and I have no doubt you’ll be up to your armpits in interesting opportunities soon.

I’m glad this week is over.

This is the kind of update you never want to get as a microlender. Verbatim from my Kiva journal for one of my entrepreneurs, a hairdresser named Jerioth Wanjiru:

James Maina, Director of Ebony Foundation (EbF), has provided the update below for you. Due to the exceptional circumstances (including lack of reliable internet) where James is working in Kenya right now, Kiva is posting this update on his behalf.

Thank you,
Kiva Team
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Dear Kiva Lenders,

I wish to thank you for your continued concern and support during this very difficult moment in Kenya‚s history. We have been a peaceful Country in a generally troubled region and people sort of took the peace for granted.

The country is now battered almost to a pulp and blood spilt with vengeance, senseless killings and wanton destruction. Markets, food stores and shops have been looted. Hospitals are dysfunctional and health centers incapacitated by riots and barricades. The violence, death and destruction witnessed in the Country for the last couple weeks has jolted the Nation into conscience and every body is now craving normalcy.

While peace is slowly returning to all affected parts of the Country, the impact of the riots has been devastating. Hundreds of people have been killed turning thousands of innocent children into helpless orphans and over one million people have been displaced, becoming internal refugees over night.

The impact of the riots is most felt in the micro and small business sector. Over 1 million small businesses were looted and or burnt down destroying the only source of income to millions of Kenyans. Most of the fighting and destruction occurred in slum areas in Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru and Kericho in Rift Valley. These regions are home to over 70% of Ebony Foundation‚s clients and as you can imagine almost all of our clients in these regions have been affected by the riots. Only one region- (Mount Kenya) which is home to about 20% of EbF‚s clients was spared the violence. The economy in this safe region is now getting stretched as the residents have to now house the displaced population.

We have recently completed auditing the riot‚s impact on our clients and as of yesterday about 4,900 of our clients had been badly affected by the riots:

– About 1,532 of our clients were displaced and both their homes and business premises burnt down. This population is currently housed in church compounds and police stations.

– Another 2,479 clients had their business premises burnt down or looted leaving them with no source of income at all.

– 833 clients had their homes looted or burnt down and about 56 clients are missing and feared dead or critically injured.

We arrived at these figures through a survey being administered at holding grounds, police stations, and through reliable reports from groups and community leaders. Our staff and local group officials have also been committed to conducting field assessments. I am sending a photo today which you may share with the lenders. The biggest tasks at the moment are to feed and house the displaced people, and to finance the reconstruction of the small businesses that were affected in order to enable the people to reclaim their source of income. In addition, Ebony Foundation is now helping other MFI‚s audit their clients.

Eb-F has formed the following committees to address the above issues:

– A humanitarian committee that is working with the International Red Cross to provide food, shelter and medical care to the victims.

– A business reconstruction committee that is working with the affected clients to re finance and rebuild the small businesses that were looted and/or burnt down.

– A compliance committee that is studying the legal and contractual aspects of the affected loans to arrive at the best policy action.

Thus, we ask for your continued patience as many loan repayments will be late, and it even may be impossible for some loans to be repaid in full at all. Thank you for your patience as we work hard to address all of these difficult issues, to serve our borrowers and help them recover, and to repay loans as quickly and as much as is possible in the coming months.

Sincerely,

James Maina
Executive Director
Ebony Foundation

Kenya

There are many threads unfolding about this, include some good discussion of whether to waive repayments and how to support the ongoing operations of in-market kiva partners like the Ebony Foundation. I am glad to see this, but most of all am profoundly saddened by this state of affairs.

One of the fun things about the MyBlogLog reporting dashboard is how easy it is to monitor referring search terms, and how unexpected some of them are. Here are some that represent the range, as well as a few of the more interesting or amusing ones that have caught my eye over the past year. I’ve skipped the obvious ones (Yahoo, my name, etc.).
While many of them are not especially popular in terms of number of referrals, some are shockingly well ranked (including the last two, for which I rank #4 and #6 on Google, respectively).

• refurbished vw beetles
• gtd outlook
• craigslist mexico city
• mark cuban
• vw transmission fail (heh!)
• hyper local communities
• i hate good-byes. i know what i need. i need more hellos.
• point setting on ghia
• gambling vs. insurance
• “farecast” “revenue”
• underwear shoot 2007
• “the world is scary”
• prefab modernism
• widget trends
• linkedin “people you may know” (this is a popular one)
• “why i love new york”
• custom show tractor trailers
• belle and sebastian live at hollywood bowl
• visualizing data journalism
• fairmont sucks (heh!)
• loans that change lives
• is indeed.com illegal
• “my wife thinks you [sic]
• “install propane”
• car+ problem
• new york subway turnstyle
• mexico
• california+ redwoods
• bigfoot vs.
• joel spolsky scientologist
• guy kawasaki 10 rules
• “the wire” “politics”
• cookie+ puss
• writa [sic] a poem
• meaning greetings to the new brunette
• how to build valet stand
• youtube pie fight
• music insults
• decadent societies