Newsmaker: Yahoo goes punk with a Zen twist

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I've been calling you Yahoo's Web 2.0 guru, given what seems to be your focus on spurring innovation and bringing that start-up feeling back to the company. What exactly is your mission?
Horowitz: Well, I run a group here called "Hack Yahoo"--and by Hack Yahoo, I don't necessarily mean "hack it down at the root with an axe." I basically mean help Yahoo break its own rules for its own good...uniting these like-minded people around the spirit of change and this start-up culture.

What's interesting: When I came to Yahoo, I didn't find an innovation deficit. It's not as if this company had grown complacent or sleepy or anything like that. But I think it was undercelebrated, both outside the company and inside the company.

So my mission has basically have been very much akin to a roadie and the group that looks after this for me is run by Catarina Fake, who is the co-founder of Flickr. It's called the Technology Development Group. We built the stage, we worked the soundboard, we get the drugs--in this case, sugar and caffeine--and we hand the microphone over, we hand the spotlight over, to our 10,000 best and brightest employees. We think of what we're doing as kind of introducing these jam sessions into the company, and unlike other companies and other programs, it's not prescriptive.

So you've had a number of Yahoo Hack Days. How have those gone, and are you planning more?
Horowitz: Oh, absolutely! It's become a cultural institution here, and we'll be doing these at least quarterly internally. We've taken the decade of technology and infrastructure that we've built, exposed it to the outside world and basically said come to Yahoo. You can also virtually come onto our Web site, look at these APIs and innovate, build something and use it in ways that we never anticipated.

You've got an interesting background. You worked on computer graphics, image processing and other things as a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab. You founded Virage and took it public. You've also spent time on maybe more philosophical and other pursuits, like meditating in India and doing yoga--am I correct?
Horowitz: That's right.

What are your other passions, and how are you bringing a more holistic perspective to Yahoo?
Horowitz: I hope that I can apply some of the other extracurricular pursuits that I am passionate about in a business context. So if you think about things like meditation and my own experiments with yoga and spirituality, I think that they do color and inform my management style.

In addition to the yoga and meditation, I think my experience as a musician--back to the kind of punk rock roots that I have. There's so much that I love about that culture of punk rock, which is the spirit of "can do," "do it yourself," that everyone has something to express that is somewhat irreverent and counterculture. All of those things I think color who I am at work, and it's the reason we do things like bringing musical artist Beck here to Yahoo (for the Yahoo Hack Day last month).

I think that that was significant; it wasn't just entertainment. We didn't just bring a major recording star. We brought Beck specifically because we see Beck as the hacker musician, someone who gets it. His most recent album was released as remixable tracks, as opposed to a big monolithic recording, and that is very, very sympathetic to the hacker ethic of giving people the tools and the pieces to recreate something wonderful.

So, I do think that my musical background, and that of the people on my team who share this, definitely bleeds over into my work life.  

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