 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jefferyk here with theCUBE. We are in our Palo Alto studio, really for a CUBE conversation. It's kind of a lull in the conference season, so we kind of get to mend all the gear and do some stuff in the studio work, which we're excited to do. And we're joined today by a special guest, Jim McCarthy. He's a motivational speaker. He has a lot of keynote speakers. If you need somebody for your conference, definitely look him up. It's Jim McCarthy, leadership. Jim, good to see you again. Hi, Jeff. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me back. Absolutely. So last we saw you is at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, a really great event. We're deep into planning our Grace Hopper coverage later this year, so a lot of activity there. But really the motivation here behind our conversation today was the Verizon announced purchase. I don't know if it's gone through yet of Yahoo. Right. Kind of the end of what's been kind of a tumultuous a little while. And you wrote an interesting post on it. You were there in the early days. So I wonder if you can kind of share some of your thoughts as you reflected back in what you shared in your post. Sure. I wrote a post on my website entitled The Hippy Values That Made Yahoo the Coolest Company in the World. And the day that the Verizon deal went through, I remember thinking, god, this is really a big milestone. And I didn't know what my feelings were. And I just started kind of putting it on the paper. And I came up with a blog post that I think people liked a lot. And what I wrote was I talked about how I was having a beer on an afternoon at Yahoo in 1997. I was employee 258, so I started there in July 1997. So it was a little company in Santa Clara. And I was talking to John Place, who was the first general counsel there at Yahoo. And he said, you know, Jim, Jerry and Jerry Yang and Dave File, the two co-founders, they really kind of have these hippie values. They may not even realize it. They might even deny it. But they still have this sort of hippie counterculture northern California thing about how they have approached the business and how they've built the business. And I think a lot of that has to do with what made Yahoo so special and so amazing in the early days. And I mean, today it's really not respected. The company really hit its peak in 2000, hit a market cap of $100 billion in 2000. But in those early days, it was really an amazing, fun place to be. So let's kind of go back in time, right? So the original Silicon Valley is called Silicon because of companies like Intel and some microsystems and Cisco. They were building actual silicon and microprocessor. So a very different kind of a culture. And you've always kind of had the hip culture up in San Francisco with Media Gulch. And there was a lot of early kind of web development companies. But Yahoo is right here in the middle of the valley, right? They weren't up there. So what were some of those cultural norms? And how do they communicate them? How do they build a company around them? So Dave Filo, I'm told, grew up on a commune in Louisiana and then came out to Stanford to get his PhD in electrical engineering. Jerry Yang was an immigrant from Taiwan who came here with his family at age 10 to San Jose. And they both met together and were getting their PhDs together at Stanford. And while they were kind of goofing off and kind of procrastinating and not working on their PhDs, they realized they had this new thing called the internet. There was a browser that the Netscape had built. And they were having trouble finding the websites that they wanted to find. And so Filo and Jerry, they just kind of created this hierarchy or this tree. And it's like, OK, this is a business site. This is a sports site. This is a travel site. And they kind of kept on filling it in. And people loved it. And they were crazy about it. So part of it was that Jerry and Filo didn't do this to start a business. They weren't sitting around saying, God, how can we become billionaires as fast as we can? It was purely a hobby, which became an obsession and was a passion of theirs. And from that, they created something as a gift to the world that became really amazing. And people loved it. And then, yes, they got investors and started building a proper company. But the whole approach of it was, let's create something really cool to help people out. And just their whole flavor, right? They have the purple. And even today, as I'm looking at people like you or guests, and you look at their LinkedIn, there's kind of a certain persona based on what people's personal emails are, whether they're kind of an MSN or an Outlook person. And then there's just a whole kind of class of people from the Yahoo days, where that was their primary URL. And then, of course, now we see a lot more of Gmail. But again, how do they communicate? How do they grow this company? You're 250, so still early days, but about four years into the process. And then how did it differentiate from what you're competing with? Because you had Andreessen coming in with Netscape and the IPO and all the hoopla around that. And then, of course, you had AOL back in the day, shipping CDs like there was no tomorrow to get everybody and really for a lot of people, kind of their first internet experience. And then Yahoo kind of moved the needle a little bit in terms of being almost like an integrated media company, not just kind of the closed, well, Garden of AOL. But then Netscape was really just a browser at that point. You used the browser to get to Yahoo. Yeah, exactly. You used the browser to get to Yahoo, and people realized that well, once you really want to go anywhere and do something, you need to, Yahoo is really good for that. I mean, and part of the culture of Yahoo that was special is you had someone like Philo, Dave Philo, who always wore jeans and a T-shirt who's often barefoot in the office, very low-key guy. He kept a sleeping bag like this. This was actually a gift to company employees at the holidays, 1999, and even got Philo's signature autograph here on it. Was that to take camping or to sleep in the office? Well, he used to sleep in the office all the time. And so did Jerry Yang. And because that was sort of part of the culture of Yahoo, so it was definitely having fun, it was being fun, being funky, but it was working very hard. But it was also a very egalitarian kind of culture. So if you were too much about title or hierarchy or pretentious or whatever, that wasn't cool. It really was about we're gonna work equally here. Anyone's ideas are valid. You have to really be able to defend your ideas very much in meritocracy in the best sense of the way for Silicon Valley. And also just keep it real, focus on creating a great user experience. The pages were created in a way that were very, very light so they could load very fast. And Yahoo wasn't trying to squeeze as much profit as it could out of every page. We figured as long as we created a great user experience, people would come back over and over again and that would make the company successful. Okay, so then you left? I left in 2001. Did a few things. Ended up at a company that got acquired back into Yahoo years later. So were Jerry and Dave still running the show when you got acquired back in? Yeah, so actually, so I said I went to a company called Blue Lithium, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $300 million. So when I started Yahoo in 97, I was employed to 58. When I left in 2001, there was about 3,500 employees. So that's sort of hyper growth. And then when it came back in 2007 through the acquisition, there was about 15,000 people there. And Jerry Yang was the CEO. The prior CEO, Terry Semmel, had left. Although those years were really tough from when the .com bubble burst in 2000, 2001. Throughout the 2000s, it was really a tough time. And then Jerry was the CEO. He's a really great guy. But I think he maybe was not the right person to continue to be leading as the CEO of the company. And then Carol Barth came in after that. So one of the topics we talk about quite often in theCUBE is kind of founder-led companies. And how do you properly founder lead? We see the aggressive moves by like Michael Dell, $46 billion take out of EMC. You know, Larry's still sitting in the cappered seat at Oracle and driving that bus. But, you know, jobs left and came back. You know, there's been all this kind of tumultuous change of the leadership and the direction of Yahoo. Are they a media company? I remember the guy came in from Warner Brothers. And it seems that they've continued to kind of stumble along trying to figure out what they want to be. At the same time, they had tons of users on the email service, still a ton of traffic. You know, so from your perspective, you know, what is kind of the cost benefit of the founder-led company, but also sometimes it's just not the right guy. So how does that guy or gal play a role, keep the soul of the company where it started and yet enable the company to grow and mature and develop to move beyond a 250-person company to a big global company? Yeah, well, I think it's extremely hard to do. I think that the leader who's able to pull that off is just fortunate and very talented and very skilled. Bezos, don't short Bezos, that's what I'm gonna say. And I mean, Jerry's an amazing guy, Jerry Yang, and I really like him a lot. But I think that perhaps Jerry was a little bit too nice when he became CEO. And by too nice, what I mean is I think he probably found it difficult to kill some of the pet projects that were all over the company. And someone needed to come in to be much more focused and say, no, no, no, no, no, yes, we're gonna place a really big bet on this. And that perhaps is Jerry's flaw. Although to give him credit, he's the guy who persuaded Yahoo to invest in Alibaba, which has been investment of the century. Right, right, better to be likely than smart is another one of my favorite things. But sometimes they pay, sometimes they don't. They didn't make the bet on Google, right? They didn't, they had early opportunities and the meme is all over the internet of the opportunities they had to buy Google, invest in Google, or eBay, or get taken out by Microsoft, I think it was 45 billion a few years ago. So, you just never know how these things are gonna work out. But just to kind of stick with the story, I remember distinctly when Google started to get some traction and Alta Vista was gone and Yahoo had won and Webcrawler got sucked into AOL and like, I think it was like us, there was a bunch of them. But the game was over, right? Yahoo had won, what happened? What did Google come in to do to basically undercut what looked like a finished game? I think Google did a couple things brilliantly, just amazingly well. So for one thing, and you're right, people did think that Yahoo was the big winner, they had fended off everybody else. But what Google did is they cherry picked the absolute most profitable and monetizable part of the whole value chain, which is search, right? Because Yahoo did search, but they did a whole bunch of other stuff as well. But if you knew that someone was searching for a digital camera or vacations in Hawaii or whatever, that was a very, very valuable instant that you could find that person and then bring them to your website to sell them something. And Google realized that's what they were gonna focus on. So out of all the stuff going on at Yahoo, Google realized that search was really where the money was at. That was one. Two, Google figured an amazingly scalable way to monetize that. And correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was a company in LA who kind of invented that model of, was it overture? I think? I think it was overture. So, but Google figured out that that's the model, that you create this platform and people are bidding for the keywords and it's a dynamic marketplace. And once they did that, that became infinitely scalable. They could build that all over the world in countries all over the world. And I remember actually working in 2003 in an office like a mile from here at a company and I wanted to do some advertising for this software company. And I went online to Google, I'd never been there before and I realized that I could run a credit card and I could run a $200 keyword campaign. It would be live within a matter of hours or maybe even minutes. And I could start driving traffic and see exactly what the ROI was of that campaign. I was blown away. And then I called Yahoo and I had to talk to a salesperson who didn't get back to me for three days and I wasn't spending enough money and they had no time for me. And this was in 2003. And once that happened, I realized, oh my God, Google is just gonna destroy Yahoo because they're better, faster, cheaper and amazingly scalable in how they sell advertising. And I think that's always, Google always had a very clear focus that we are an engineering company. We're gonna do everything that is massively scalable. And Yahoo never really kind of realized that. They were still kind of very much the 1990s in terms of their ad sales approach. Well, and two, their editors were still people, right? Wasn't that kind of the early days? Early days, yes. Yahoo's, people are driving what's on that tree and the recommendations that they're making as opposed to a machine. And that's a really interesting story, especially when you look now at what Amazon is doing and AWS specifically in the enterprise infrastructure space because it's the same, you just told the same story. You can swipe a credit card, you can have infrastructure up in minutes and you can start working. And even if you wanna call the other guys and you want to do it the old way, so we answer the phone, it takes a long time. Once you get through to them, it still takes a long time to spin up the instances. It's a completely different way and just as disruptive on that space as it is, in this instance, and then now we're hearing with the recent Walmart acquisition of Jet, it's really coming in hard on the retail side as well. So, Revenge of the Machines, I guess, continues as we just got back from Ford. They're talking about having an autonomous fleet vehicle ready in production by 2021, five years, kind of laying down the Apollo mission challenge, if you will. Yeah, amazing, amazing time. So then they kind of wandered and again, I remember when the guy came in from Warner Brothers, well, we're gonna be a media company and it just none of those other things really ever took and it seems to have just kind of bounced along and then the guys came back, went in, went out. Yeah, I mean, a media company is gonna get a valuation and a multiple, which is just not the same as an amazing technology company. I mean, just the economics of it are not the same. Right, right. And you can understand that someone like Yahoo would wanna be valued as a technology company, but when they're hiring people like Katie Couric and paying her a lot of money to do interviews, well, that's okay. That's nice, that's okay as a media company, but you're not gonna get a $100 billion valuation from hiring people and generating content that way. So I wanna just kind of go full circle here as we kind of run out of time. You know, you didn't motivational speak you're now about happiness, specifically happiness. And I wanna contrast that to where Samir had a quote, I don't know why she, she says she's working 130 hours a week for some odd number like that at Yahoo, for Lord knows how long, but you know, you do the math, that's not leaving much time for sleeping, commuting, going to the bathroom, or she also has a couple of kids. When you look back at kind of the happiness of the culture that was there, and now you look at this 24 seven, we're always connected. I was joking earlier, there's a great poster at the Computer History Museum next to the autonomous Google car. Well, what are they doing with the autonomous car? They're not on their phones, they're not doing email, they're playing Scrabble, it's a family Scrabble game on the autonomous car. One of my favorite pictures of all time. Now, what's gonna happen? We're just gonna work more, right? We're connected more. So when you look at the happiness equation and the happiness formula, share a little bit of your experience and what you share with people when you're out on your speaking circuits and your consulting. So I mean, what I say is that at a certain time it might make sense in your life for a new career to work very hard. Whether that's for a week or a month or a year or even a few years. But long term over the course of years and years and years, it's absolutely not sustainable. Your health will start failing. You will develop diseases or get ill or fall over from a heart attack or fall asleep behind the wheel when you're driving home at 1 a.m. because you've been working all day long. And that happens all the time. So I'd say if I think my approach is if you do work that you love it's better to go slowly in the right direction than fast in the wrong direction. And so maybe you don't get that promotion until you're at a company for three years rather than two years. Or maybe you're making $200,000 versus $150,000 or you're making 100 versus 80 or whatever. But if you have time to see your partners, see your kids, see your friends, see your family, exercise, get enough sleep. I think Ariana Huffington wrote that if you come into work sleep deprived it's like coming into work drunk. So you can be there but you're not mentally at your best. You're not gonna be creative, you're not gonna be patient, you're not gonna be analytical. And pretty much there's a professor from Berkeley who says anything that's good in life is better when you have enough sleep. You wanna be happy, you wanna be healthy, you wanna be creative, you wanna be smart, you wanna be analytical. All of those things are better when you have enough sleep like literally seven or eight hours a night. And if you do that, then when you're at work you're much more focused and you're not just trying to do all sorts of stuff. It's like, no, there's a lot of nonsense there. What are one or two or three things that are really gonna move the needle? And when you really focus on those then the other stuff doesn't matter. And so trying to work 130 hours a week I think is crazy. Yeah, but I'm sure people push back and say, yeah, Jim, that sounds great but I got a jam, there's an opportunity, I'm competing for a spot, whatever the reasons are. How do you respond to that? Well, I mean, there are times when you might need to acknowledge that someone's gonna work harder than you. I mean, I've done coaching with people where they're working from 10 in the morning until eight o'clock at night and they have a colleague that works until 11 every night. It's like, okay, you know what? If you wanna work until 11 every night and I go home at seven, all right, go ahead, you'll get promoted. But I'm gonna have a life, I'm gonna have my health, I'm gonna have my friends, I'm not gonna have a quarter-life crisis at age 26 because I've been working nonstop, 130 hours. Quarter-life crisis. 130 hours a week for year after year and people hit the wall and they just completely crash and it's not sustainable. So I'd much rather be going more slowly, do work that I love and then you're not just trying to retire as fast as you can. You actually could work until you're 50, 60, 70, 80 and be loving what you're doing rather than completely burning out and I mean, a lot of very miserable, unhappy people from the stress of working all the time. All right, Jim, well, we're out of time, I wanted to give you the last word. How can people reach out to you, learn more about what you're up to, potentially have you pay a visit to their conference or show their off-site? They can reach me at JimMcCarthy.com, so that's J-I-M-M-C-C-A-R-T-H-Y dot com. And send me an email at JimMcCarthy.com and they can find different images of me speaking and find out more about testimonials of my workshops and keynotes that I do. So I'm very grateful to be back here again, Jeff, and thank you for the opportunity. Pleasure, so thanks for stopping by and sharing some of your stories of early Ahu days. Thank you very much. Absolutely, so Jim McCarthy, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE, we're coming to you live from the Palo Alto studio. We'll be back with our next, I guess not our next segment, will we, guys? We'll catch you next time. Thanks for watching.