Yahoo! Pride
Why Yahoo! matters to one Yahoo! exec—and our users
By Mitch Spolan, Yahoo! VP of North American Field Sales
Pride is a funny thing. You can’t make someone be proud of something. You can’t fake it either. If you try, others will see right through you. Pride is sincere…honest…genuine.
Pride reminds you of what’s important.
I am proud of…my company. How odd! You’re reading a corporate blog and here’s someone saying they’re a proud employee? Well, yes. I am. Let me tell you why.
A new unit of measure
It’s January 20, 2009. I wander into the break room for lunch and to watch the inauguration of President Obama. Wow. I am watching history. I instantly become mesmerized by all the images of the massive amounts of people that showed up in person. I had never seen more people in one place, at one time, in my life. Image after image flashed up on the screen. People, as far as the eye could see, up and down the Mall.
I couldn’t get enough of the images. I went back to my desk and went to Flickr. I watched as photos were uploaded in real time. People…mobs of people. I came across a photo shot from space, hundreds of miles above the surface of the earth. It showed swarms of people huddled around huge Jumbo-trons up and down the Mall. A professor from Arizona State University analyzed the photo, and determined that based on the photo, the time it was taken, and the flow rates at all the checkpoints around the Mall, that there were 800,000 people that showed up in person. 800,000 people, in one place, at one time. That is a LOT of people. In fact, I believe that it deserves its own unit of measurement.
Lets say those 800,000 people, those massive amounts of people that we ALL remember seeing on January 20th = 1 Obama. A new unit of measure is born.
Do you know how many people went to Yahoo! News on January 20th? 7,500,000. Seven and 1/2 million people. That’s 9 1/2 Obamas. Nine and one-half times the number of people we all remember seeing on January 20th at the Inauguration Day came to MY company to follow history…live. I’m proud of that.
Do you know how many people in the United States come to the homepage of Yahoo! everyday? 37,000,000 people. 46 1/4 Obamas! That’s equivalent to the population of Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, and Austria, combined… plus 4,300,000 people. 46 1/4 Obamas. Everyday! More than 58158,000,000 people come to Yahoo! every month. Over half a billion! Over 726 Obamas. I’m proud of that.
Everywhere… in people’s lives.
Now that’s the “mass” part… But what about the individuals? How do we make a difference in our users’ daily lives?
Let’s take my wife, Mia. Mia has Crohn’s Disease. It’s not fun. She takes medications that can make you glow in the dark. It scares her (and me). It’s hard for me—although not comparable to how hard it is on her—because I can’t help her. I sympathize, but I don’t know the pain she feels. I have not taken the meds so I can’t tell her about the side effects. It’s incredibly frustrating for a husband to not be able to help your wife. Enter Yahoo!.
Mia goes to Yahoo! Health and learns about new treatments, clinical trials, and reads about new medicines. She talks in Yahoo! Groups with other people that have undergone new treatments or taken new medications and they share their side effects and how the treatment is working for them. Yahoo! provides Mia with a network of people from around the world that are going through the same things she is going through. It makes me incredibly proud that while I can’t help Mia, my company…can.
We love to cruise. On one of our cruises we had a WONDERFUL waiter. He was a very gentle man. He worked nine months at a time, and sent every dollar he earned back to his family. The only way he could afford to have daily communication with his wife, or hear his kids voices, was via Yahoo! Messenger. That makes me proud.
I love that people meet their soul mates on Yahoo! Personals. That makes me proud.
I love that CEO’s around the world rely on Yahoo! Finance all day, every day. That makes me proud.
I love that my son’s elementary school shares all of the art work they produce with the community via Flickr. That makes me proud.
I love that when someone asks me at a party what I do for a living, and I proudly say “I work for Yahoo!”, that I get a universal response…. “Really? That’s so cool!” It is! That makes me proud.
It may be rare for people to be proud of the company they work for. I’m a very lucky guy. And I know it.
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- What Do Women Need Online?
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What a fantastic blog entry, Mitch!
I’m a brand new Yahoo!
Being able to call you — and all of the other incredibly passionate, talented, creative, inventive and fun Yahoos I’ve met in the past couple weeks — colleagues makes me proud.
Mary
p.s. I was in Washington DC on January 20, 2009. I guess that makes me part of establishing that new unit of measure.
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