Doing Business with the Semi-Permeable Corporation

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.

posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 9:25 pm Category: yahoo. Comment or trackback.