Jerry Yang was a co-founder of Yahoo!, previously served on the board of directors for Yahoo! and Cisco and is currently a board member of Workday, Lenovo and Alibaba. His firm, AME Cloud Ventures, has provided funding to more than 50 startups, including BetterWorks. Yang recently sat down with our CEO Kris Duggan to share his thoughts on the landscape of business today and why he thinks data is \u201ceating everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kris: What attracted you to investing in Betterworks?<\/strong><\/p>\n Jerry Yang: For those of you who don\u2019t know, I left Yahoo! in 2012, and I\u2019ve been a private investor, primarily focused on early-stage companies and on data-driven companies. To see companies evolve and to live vicariously through our entrepreneurs has been really fun.<\/p>\n I always thought that this space, whether it\u2019s performance management or human capital management, was a huge issue for any company that\u2019s growing in the Valley\u2014especially for Yahoo! in the 2000s where Yahoo! went from 50 people at the IPO to about 14,000 or 15,000 people when I left. It\u2019s a very different organization. It\u2019s a very subjective process about how you reward people, how you manage them, how you help them with performance, what are our philosophies. Then, when you get to 15,000 people, there\u2019s no one size that fits all. It becomes even more of an art.<\/p>\n What BetterWorks is doing\u2014using data, but also using tools to help people manage performance and manage goals\u2014is a really important thing, not only from a monetization perspective. What I always say to my companies is, \u201cYou want to build in these practices early. You don\u2019t want to wait till you\u2019re two thousand people and putting in new processes.\u201d For companies that really want to grow in scale, building good processes early is extremely important. That was what attracted me to BetterWorks both with my big company hat on, but also with my current data-investor hat on.<\/p>\n Were you always goal oriented? Was that natural for you or is that something that you had to work at in the early days of Yahoo!?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think when you\u2019re a startup\u2014and BetterWorks is in that phase\u2014it\u2019s large \u201coverall\u201d goals. These are usually company goals, or all-for-one, one-for-all type of stuff. When you get to a few hundred people, I feel like there\u2019s a point where companies have to go through sort of \u201ccell division\u201d. It\u2019s like any biological living organism. You\u2019re going to have specialize. Then pretty soon you have a bunch of goals that may or may not relate to each other as you get bigger, because you\u2019re specializing so much.<\/p>\n I\u2019m always about the big goal. I\u2019m the \u201cvisionary\u201d. I\u2019m the guy that pushes on where we want to be in five, 10, 50 years. But when you starting getting smaller goals that may or may not obviously relate to each other, that really frustrates me. At Yahoo!, I was the guy that always said, \u201cAre we really tying all the goals back into the bigger goal?\u201d That is not the easiest thing to do, because a lot of it is very subjective. A lot of it is management styles of certain leaders that want to do something a certain way\u2014and it really ties into the cultural aspect, too. That\u2019s the other thing: the culture is really important for everybody, and making sure your goal setting ties into your corporate culture is not a very easy thing to do, especially as you get bigger.<\/p>\n How do you get the companies you invest in to think about these things?<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the things we\u2019re talking to people about is getting good systems in place early and being able to have goal setting as a cultural exercise where you\u2019re not building goals in a vacuum. You\u2019re building goals in a context of the three or four other things you might care about, both in terms of hard-core business metrics, but also the softer metrics around culture and teamwork or leadership or whatever. Those are things that, in the heat of battle and the heat of growth, a lot of people just forget. Then they try to put it back in, and it\u2019s really, really hard.<\/p>\n Have you seen any difference between how a company like Alibaba sets goals versus how a U.S. company does?<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the things about companies like Alibaba\u2014and I think they\u2019re at 30,000 people now\u2014is that there is a lot of emphasis on developing generations of leaders, and there is a very well understood path of growing within that company. Just like any other big company, you sometimes may have the left hand not talking to the right hand, but overall, they\u2019re a very people-centric company. There\u2019s a real emphasis by Jack Ma, Alibaba\u2019s founder, about building that partnership, building levels of trust and building teams. So then when it comes to goal setting, it\u2019s not a long process, not like you have to sync up your religion and then decide what you want to do. They have done so much work to align themselves before those decisions are made\u2014they really work on teams.<\/p>\n How would you compare Cisco to other companies relative to their execution, goal setting, alignment, focus?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to change corporate culture\u2014that\u2019s the thing I\u2019ve learned, because I always thought you can change everything. You can go in there and you can brute-force and say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to take a sales company and make it a product-driven company.\u201d Cisco is built around a great sales culture. Now that I\u2019m an investor, I have companies that go out and try to sell in the marketplace, and you realize what a great thing it is to have Cisco\u2019s sales channel. That\u2019s so hard to penetrate and so hard to compete against.<\/p>\n What I say to a lot of our companies is, \u201cPick what makes you strong.\u201d Cisco, it\u2019s sales, and Alibaba, it\u2019s people. Pick your strength and build around it. There\u2019s no right or wrong. It doesn\u2019t mean that if you\u2019re a sales culture, you\u2019re bad. I think the Valley has this idea that, \u201cOh, if you don\u2019t have the great Mark Zuckerberg product technology founder, you\u2019re not going to be great.\u201d I totally disagree with that. At the end of the day, a great sales company will do great. A great technology company will do great. If you\u2019re mediocre across a bunch of stuff, that\u2019s when you\u2019ll fail.<\/p>\n The Betterworks team would like to thank Jerry for taking time to share his thoughts on goal setting. Stay tuned for part 2 of the Q&A!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang talks about why he invested in Betterworks and his views on goal-setting and alignment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":77013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"featured_location":[],"industry":[],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strategic-alignment"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n