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How A Tech Slogan Got Ruined: 2 Future CEOs In Yahoo's 'Kitchen'

This article is more than 8 years old.

People in tech get rich -- and rock the world -- by creating clever slogans for change. Where would our digital economy be without cloud computing, the Internet of Things, or social media? Sometimes, though, everything goes wrong. Consider the short life (and sad fate) of "Yahoo's kitchen."

The story starts in 2006, when Yahoo wanted to acquire Flickr, a gutsy little start-up that specialized in photo sharing. Flickr's managers worried that their easy-going approach to building a big user community might get squashed by Yahoo's big-company bureaucracy. Yahoo's point man on the deal, future LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner, did his best to reassure everyone.

“We want to be the best kitchen in the world," Weiner declared. "We have all the knives you need, and we'll keep the knives sharp." He spun out a rich metaphor, full of stainless-steel pots, big refrigerators and top-of-the-line ranges. Yahoo would provide all this support to Flickr's managers. They could go about their work and be "the best chefs of the world."

For Flickr's managers -- many of whom were ardent foodies -- such imagery was sublime. (Flickr's CEO at the time, Stewart Butterfield, recounted the kitchen speech for me last month; Weiner confirms it.)

Unfortunately, once the Flickr acquisition was completed, Yahoo's bureaucracy took hold. The newcomers were told to make good on a different menu packed with rigid business metrics. The chefs' creativity faltered. Once inside Yahoo, Flickr's team never found the time or freedom to shove those short-term goals aside and cook up the next really big idea.

The result, as Gizmodo chronicled in this 2012 reconstruction, Flickr's cuisine missed out  "on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social—the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along."

Flickr still operates as a Yahoo brand. Even so, its journey to obscurity under Yahoo's tenure is often cited as a showcase example of how big companies' systems of review and control can have a paralyzing effect on innovation.

Butterfield left Yahoo in 2008, focusing his attentions on building something new. He has succeeded in a huge way with Slack Technologies, a wildly popular team-based messaging service that figures prominently in a new FORBES cover story.  You can read more about Slack here and here. Meanwhile Weiner also left Yahoo in 2008, opting to run LinkedIn instead. The two men remain friends; Weiner was one of Slack's earliest angel investors.

During his final stages at Yahoo, Butterfield  couldn't resist the temptation to revisit the kitchen metaphor. "I don't think I ever sent this," he recalls, "but I had this draft email all typed up. It said we'd ended up in the crummiest Chinese restaurant on El Camino, with cockroaches on the floor and an old, electric-coil range for our cooking."

What does Weiner say? I emailed him about it a few days, and his reply is a masterpiece. "A lot of lessons were learned during that time," Weiner wrote back. "First, in theory, Yahoo had the resources to create a world-class kitchen for Flickr. However, like many large companies, Yahoo's process for allocating resources was arguably over-optimized and too linear. As a result, in retrospect, the team didn't receive the kind of investment and autonomy it deserved.

"Second, never try to out-metaphor Stewart Butterfield."