How Yahoo! Did Its Hack Day

1 02 2012
Mashup or Shutup

source:yahoo.com

Yahoo! gets flack for all sorts of things. But, of course, there are and have been so many great things about Yahoo! I worked at Yahoo! from 2005 to 2008, and loved almost every day I was there. Perhaps the days that stood out the most to me during my time there were its Hack Days. I was fortunate to be working at Yahoo! when the team organized the first Hack Day, championed and driven by people like Bradley Horowitz, Caterina Fake, Leonard Lin, Chad Dickerson, and a bunch of other inspiring people I worked with at Yahoo! Hack Days had an incredible energy.

The early Hack Days at Yahoo! followed roughly these rules:

  1. Anyone in the company could participate (engineering to support team)
  2. 24 hours – Thursday afternoon to Friday
  3. Typically 1-2 hack days a year
  4. 90 seconds to present (tightly enforced – two projectors, so next hack was setting up as the other presented)
  5. Many award types (Hack Most Likely to Generate $1B, Hack that Should Have Been Done By Now, Best Maps Hack, etc.)
  6. You could submit as many hacks as you like
  7. Hack teams could be one to many
  8. Hack can’t be something that is simply part of your daily work, it has to be an original hack
  9. Mashups, APIs, standard platforms, etc. all preferred vs. one off hacks.
  10. Hack Days were festive. Lots of food was provided all through the night, the preso day included tons of junk food snacks and laughs and applause were very common.
  11. Need not be restricted to Yahoo! products or platforms
  12. Judges were all from the company (I was lucky to be a judge one time, but regular judges included File, Jerry and other high profile and subject matter experts (like Larry Tessler)
  13. All participants got a very hip Hack Day t-shirt made just for that event…very collectible within the company

At the time, we had about 12,000 employees, who generated about 120 hacks (about 1 per 100 employees) As many know, Yahoo! hosted external developer Hack Days, as well. At the first external Hack Day, Yahoo! paid for Beck to play (ridiculous and amazing). For their second they hired Girl Talk.

Jump to the next story to see how we changed Hack Day for a startup.


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Categories : How To / Tips, Startups, Yahoo

Yahoo! Corp Slides Make Shit Look Shittier

21 04 2009

Quick Note: I know I have disappeared for a bit. Sorry about that, I got a bit busy with the $10M Series B closing, the new product launch and the birth of my son. I will get back to regular blogging soon.

Yahoo! has been doing badly, but looking at their corporate slides, you would think they were doing much worse. I worked at Yahoo! for over 2 years. Every time there was a quarterly all-hands, I cringed. Not because the stock was dropping, but because the corporate slides are so amazingly crappy looking. You really have to go out of your way to make these things as bad looking as they are. A lot of what the company does looks pretty darn good, but when it comes to making PPTs, they have some dude that seems to have a corner on the market of making ugly ass slides.

Let’s take a look:

WTF? These are so friggin' bad.

WTF? These are so friggin' bad.

Here are my major issues:

  1. Logos: One logo is enough. Why two? Why is the Y! so big?
  2. Headline: Sucks, it says nothing
  3. Colors: Purple and yellow! Gag, these colors look awful together. I know those are the old colors, but for charts and for today (not 1996), they look terrible together.
  4. Colors: There are two purples. Why? One for the Y! logo and one for the chart. Makes no sense
  5. Boldness and Lines! There are outlines to the chart boxes. Why? Every font is bold. Why? Why is there yet another line between the title and chart?
  6. Chart legend: Looks ridiculous
  7. 3d! I hate 3D charts. This is a perfect example of how they make data harder to absorb.
  8. What is my take-away? They know this slide is going to be reprinted. Help tell the story they want to tell.

In 8 minutes, I remade this slide. This is not a great slide now, but it sucks so much less.

It isn't perfect. But in 8 minutes, it is much better.

It isn't perfect. But in 8 minutes, it is much better.

In my revised slide, I increase the data fidelity. For example, I have added faint lines behind the bars to show the information from 12 months earlier. This added more data to the chart, but eliminated one of the bars. I have eliminated the legend. I have added a “why?” so I can tell a bit of my story. I tried to use a tone that is matter of fact, but unsatisfied (#3). I have made all the colors consistent. I have eliminated the garish yellow in favor of 75% shade of the purple. I have made the headline informative. I could have said, “Revenue is down. We are going to change that.” for more attitude, which seems like Carol Bartz’s style. Maybe added an f-bomb. The notes are smaller and in plain english. I have added a lot more white space.

For more ideas on how to make presentations that don’t look like crap, see my post: 20 Tips to Make Your Presos Suck Less.

What do you think?


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Categories : How To / Tips, Presentations, Startups, Yahoo

Note to Carol Bartz: A little less Jon Bon Jovi, I think.

26 02 2009

I am a big fan of cussing. It is the unwritten 21st tip in my 20 Tips to Making Your PPT Presos Suck Less.  I learned at my first concert (Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet Tour, Irvine Medows, April 22, 1989) that the crowd loves a little cussing. “How are you, Irivine?” got a much better response as, “How the fuck are you, Irvine?” And, “You guys rock!” was much better received as “You guys fucking rock!”

I have often wondered how “transitive” the power of cussing is. So, for example, would the passengers of a flight go nuts if the pilot got on the Com and said, “Ladies and Gentleman, this is your captain, Frank Lazio. We know you have a choice when you fly, so fucking thanks for choosing United.” Probably not. Though I guess it is a bit circumstantial, as they might appreciate or at least understand, “Ladies and Gentleman, this is your captain. You will not fucking believe this…our left engine just dropped off.” I might not cheer, but I would at least understand.

Keep reading…it gets better.

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Categories : Yahoo

Fred Wilson on Delicous search…and my reply

4 02 2008

 

Here is Fred’s blog entry on Delicious search… 

 

My Reply…

There is more. If you ever search something you care about (I think of it as stuff about which I have some passion), you will most likely find better results on Delicious search than you will on Google or Y! (or any of the other smaller search engines). Delicious results are fresher, and more interesting. Take “Amazon S3″ as a search. Google and Yahoo! treat it as an “informational” or “navigational” query. The top 10 results are dominated by aws.amazon.com/s3 results and one from Wikipedia. On delicious, however, you get results that are all about what you can do with Amazon S3, such as automated backup, top 10 hacks, image hosting, media file hosting, etc. Very cool.Google and Yahoo! treat you like a tourist, helping to point you to a place. Delicious, and its passionate users, direct you to places that help you do something meaningful. Something you care about. Now repeat this comparison with DIY home repair, music, travel, cars, computers, gadgets, games, knitting, movies, etc, etc. In all these cases Delicious returns more meaningful results.   Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Yahoo


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