I’ve been mulling this one for a while, but finally had to pull the trigger. I’ll be leaving Yahoo! Search at the end of the month, and going to a small startup.
The decision was hard, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with my Yahoo! job. The people in Engineering, Research and Applied Research (the last of those being where I currently work) are both top-flight and really nice. The company has been good to me, and kept giving me more scope and new interesting problems to work on. And I am proud of the team that I’ve put together over the last couple of years.
I’m also optimistic about Yahoo! Search itself. The search-ad quality and monetization problems are real, and have been well-publicized, but seem to be getting fixed (although I hasten to say that I don’t have inside info on that part of the org, and get my news about it once a quarter just like everyone else). And I think anyone who makes a serious study of organic web search quality (you know, those listings down below the ads 🙂 ) knows that that the top two players (Y and G) are neck-and-neck. Who is going to have the highest-quality general web search a year from now? I think it’s still going to be a brutal battle between the current top three (including MSN), and the winner will be whoever can innovate and execute the fastest. I’m sorry I’m going to watch that particular game from the sidelines, because it’s definitely not even halftime yet.
As to the broader company …. it’s honestly hard for me to come away with a single opinion. Companies as large as Yahoo! are inevitably mosaics of technologies and subcultures, and even more so when (as with Y!) much of their growth has been by acquisition. Some of Y!’s strategic planning has been brilliant IMHO (including locking up Overture, Inktomi, and Altavista a few years ago); some plays haven’t been well thought through; some have been perfectly well thought through, but just didn’t happen to work. Yahoo! to its credit, is willing to experiment, and seems to be heading in a direction that will let it experiment even more aggressively. The efforts to kickstart a culture of experimentation (through Hack Days, Developer APIs) have been more successful than anyone could have predicted.
But anyway, blogs are supposed to be an exercise in narcissism, so enough about Yahoo! – back to me! Why am I leaving? Well, it’s mostly just that I’ve never worked for a startup before (well, except for a couple of very unfunded and _very_ small ones :)), and have always wanted to mix it up a little betwen startups and bigcorps. I’ll blog more about the particular startup later, but suffice it to say that there’s an odd convergence of both people and subject matter from a couple of different phases of my life (i.e. both AI grad school and the web search era). And I have tasted the secret sauce, and I have drunk some of the kool-aid, and found them to be tasty and refreshing. All of which left me thinking: “OK, so you want to work at a startup at some point – if not this one, then what? and when?” I couldn’t come up with an answer. 🙂
It’s particularly hard to leave friends that you have worked with for so long. I joined Inktomi in April 2002, so in some sense I’ve been at the same job for close to five years, which as we know is an eon in internet time units. I’ve had to remind myself that my friends will remain my friends, regardless of where I’m working, and that I can’t make career decisions based on my desire to continue playing foosball and billiards in the same place. 🙂
Tim Converse 
Sorry to see you go, Tim. Best of luck.
Best of luck at the start up. Should be exciting times for you!
Welcome to the wading pool! You are a big catfish. 🙂
We’re going to miss you, Tim. I never even got to meet you in person 😦 Best of luck – let us all know what you go do (and what anchor text you want us to link there with).
Wow, sorry to see you go. This doesn’t help Yahoo any with its battle with Google.
I hope someone can fill your shoes including a personal blog such as yours to keep us webmasters up to date.
I’ve been enjoying your posts here tremendously, like the one on aggregation, and it was a pleasure to share a stage with you at the last Pubcon. I hope that you are going to continue blogging here on topics large and small.
Best of luck with your new endeavor.
Best of luck to your new ventures, Tim! I hope you’ll enjoy the start-up life and am sure that the company will be succesful with your help!
Tim, best of luck. It was a pleasure meeting you at the shows. Keep in touch, from one search usability junkie to another.
Tim, I wish you the best of luck & all success with your new endeavor! Yahoo will definitely be at a loss when you leave.
Keep us posted on the startup (it’s so much more fun to really build something meaningful), as I’m sure you’ll be making big waves!
////And I think anyone who makes a serious study of organic web search quality (you know, those listings down below the ads 🙂 ) knows that that the top two players (Y and G) are neck-and-neck.
It is good that Yahoo is no longer trying to be an imitation of Google, and developing their own SERPs personality.
While Google is still – overall- more relevant, howeverm Yahoo is now an additonal, optional resource useful for Fully Completing one’s research to get the voids that exist by using only one search resource
Sorry to see you go.
Tim, I wish you the best of luck.
Congrats on the decision & good luck at the startup!
Well, I think you’ll do great wherever you go. But, we’ll certainly miss your reign as spam czar. 😉
Best of luck! Keep blogging. Some narcissism actually has good effects on the world. 🙂
best of luck tim! the water’s fine.. jump on in 🙂
Good luck Tim, you will have a grand old time, I am sure.
As for foosball, this is one of my personal passions. I am a former ranked pro on the foosball tour, who is in the process of coming out of retirement. Hope to see you across a table some time.
Hey, I think I can guess where you’re going. Have fun, and congratulations!
Tim,
I lift my glass of kool-aid and toast to your success and the —– to stick them out there! Cheers
Good luck with the new venture… looking forward to reading about it here…
Good luck and may 2007 be a incredible adventure and prosperous one.
Thank you for what you have contributed to the industry and hope to see more
All the best Tim, you’re one of the good guys!
Any other Yahoo people want to leave? We’ll be hiring at Tailrank soon 🙂
Looking for operations people actually…
Kevin — No! No one else! 🙂
Tim – best of luck in the new venture! It was nice to see you at PubCon and hope the new place treats you right.
Yahoo’s loss is Jimmy Wales’s gain. 🙂
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