Yahoo!'s working culture

How joint founders split their roles is always a source of interest for outsiders - and a necessary issue to be sorted out by those involved. In Yahoo's case the two founders have no defined roles - both Yang and Filo are: 'Chief Yahoos' - although each tends towards a particular side of the managerial and technical divide.

'David and I have similar roles, but he's much more on the technical side,' says Yang:

'He is the one that really is behind the way that we are organized from a technology standpoint. If you look at Yahoo we served up 385 million pages a day in the month of September - somebody has got to be in the back figuring out how to get all these pages served up as fast as we can. David is the guy who believes in being the architect of how we distribute all this information in an efficient way.'

Meetings with his other managers are a constant occurrence, chiefly because they all sit close to each other in the famous Yahoo cubicles.

'Jeff Mallett and I sit next to each other, so we talk all the time. In Yahoo, everybody has cubes, so we hear each other on everything, we yell across the cube. Tim Koogle (Yahoo CEO) is next to Jeff, so it goes Tim, Jeff, me and our CFOs next to me so we hear each other all the time as well.

'We have what we call a hallway culture - everybody has cubes, and more things happen in the hallway than in formal meetings. And that's the way it's designed to be and that's the way it should be. When you have a meeting just to make a decision then you become bureaucratic and you slow down.

'We are getting larger and you have to keep fighting these sort of tendencies of becoming more bureaucratic by really pushing down the decision making to the organization, so you do not have to sit there and make every major decision or even small decisions.'

The working culture of Yahoo has contributed significantly to the company's success. The founderslaid-back and laissez-faire attitude, combined with a rigid focus on the company's strategy, pervades the business. Where does this come from?

The working culture of Yahoo has contributed significantly to the company's success

'Again some people call it the internet culture, but when we started it wasn't. The informality is almost driven by the necessity of our business. That requires us to be responsive to our customers all the time, and everything else is built around that. That's how as an organization we got to be so horizontal. So if a customer complains then they don't have to go through four levels of people before you can give them back some answers. Because on the internet you lose that customer.'