Yahoo Brickhouse, a new semi-autonomous business unit to foster new product development, is yet to be formally launched. They’ve been busy, though. Yahoo Pipes, which launched on February 7, is a Brickhouse project.
Tomorrow they’ll announce that Salim Ismail, a non-Yahoo entrepreneur, has been hired to run Brickhouse. He takes the operational reigns from (Flickr co-founder) Caterina Fake, who will continue to lead strategy and vision at Brickhouse (see her post here).
Ismail’s most recent startup, Confabb, just announced the hiring of a new CEO, David Dell. Ismail remains at Confabb in the Chairman role. As to recent rumors that Confabb is being acquired, Ismail says that the company is currently talking to venture capitalists about a round of financing, as well as exploring other strategic alternatives. He says Confabb is doing well, noting that they are starting to get traction with paying customers and will be powering a “major political conference” later this year.
I had a chance to talk with Ismail about Brickhouse this evening. There’s little available information about the project (see this recent Business Week article).
Ismail says the purpose of Brickhouse is to foster innovation in a startup-like environment. Brickhouse is located in San Francisco, far from Yahoo’s Sunnyvale headquarters. Project ideas will come from inside Yahoo – Ismail says Yahoo’s numerous Hack Days have generated hundreds of ideas for new products, with additional ideas coming directly from Yahoo staff. Brickhouse will tackle the most promising ideas, and plans to release 4-6 new products in the coming year.
Brickhouse employees will be recruited mostly from inside Yahoo, who may take a sabbatical from their normal jobs to work on a project. Ismail told me that Brickhouse will also hire from outside of Yahoo as necessary. They are also putting a bonus system in place that will reward employees for successful projects in a similar manner as if they were at a true startup with venture financing.
Ismail will report to Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo’s VP of Product Strategy.
Congratulations to Yahoo for hiring a seasoned entrepreneur to run Brickhouse. Bringing in new blood to stir things up is exactly what they need, and I’m looking forward to seeing the new Brickhouse projects in the near future. Pipes is an excellent start.
“Ismail’s most recend startup”…………meant to be “Recent?”
yeah thanks.
I think it sounds like a great idea, and they seem to be doing a good job with their new products.
But Yahoo needs to take a serious, serious look at their sub-par monetization ASAP. There’s just no excuse at all to not focus all resources on it, especially knowing Google’s rough numbers.
Nice! Congrats to Salim…
Morgan:
Have you ever read “The Mythical Man Month”?
Any information on what Yahoo is doing to improve their search (to be on par with Google) ?
As the other founder of Confabb, I just want to go on the record as saying that Yahoo scored a great hire in Salim.
When I first sat down with Salim a 11 months ago and explained my idea for Confabb to him (along with 3-4 other startup ideas) he immediately recognized the potential and helped steer me in the right direction. Within 2 months we had quickly formed a team made up of ex-PubSub people and a Rails developer in New York that I knew was top-notch.
Considering that we launched Confabb with zero dollars spent (each of us took an equity percentage) it is exciting to see it gain traction. Like Salim, I am busy with other projects and am still on the board at Confabb, but much of the day-to-day stuff is now handled by seasoned professionals who know how to grow a business and make it succeed.
I am excited to see what comes out of Brickhouse and with Salim in charge, I expect some amazing things.
Jeremy– Touche, got it. How about the right ones then instead of just more?
I shouldn’t talk anyway, it’s just my own personal wish that Yahoo would do better (or appear to do better, I don’t really know more than impressions from news), because it seems like they should be when I look through all the things they are creating. Could be my misperception, I do realize there are smart people working to improve every aspect of a business like Yahoo.
In the meantime, you’re right, what better way to proceed than create sweet things like Answers, Pipes, etc., and keep building up more traffic and fans to work with.
Best of luck. And by the way, the Yahoo Developer stuff is pure gold and would be platinum if we could just pay to use it more if we wanted. Thumbs up.
If Pipe’s is anything to go by then Brick house surely has a shot at turning Yahoo’s lack internal innovation around. Salim is the right guy, as I have come to know him over this last year it is it makes absolute sense that he is heading this up, ideas are one thing execution is another, Salim is the executioner…(and we know how many people wanted this job). Yahoo deserves his talents, lets see what external thinking can do and make Gerry’s baby exciting all over again.
PubSub was a great idea, lets not forget how revolutionary their technology was all those years ago. I want Yahoo to exploit their user base and community and give MSN and Google something to think about. If Yahoo can do Brickhouse as well as they do Mail then this should deliver some useful service.
Salim – make this happen mate
Yahoo hasn’t been doing so well lately maybe this is a sign of better days to come…as far as flickr was the current situation with them haven’t heard much noise of them since the acquisition.
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http://www.mrdipstix.com
hmmm, dunno…. first he gets in a fight at pubsub, then he leads confabb while not being able to generate any traffic and spreading rumors about an upcoming acquisition that never happened.
it doesnt necessarily mean he is a bad guy, but his rep doesnt seem stellar. good luck anyways.
So this is Google Labs for Yahoo, right?
Any word on what Caterina will be doing next?
Have a good day
Great for Yahoo to have snatched Ismail.
Even better for not buying YouTube. By the way, YT is down. Although this is unrelated and hope its not connected with the copyright issues.
skeptic – As someone who worked with Salim I can vouch he is a brilliant guy with a lot of talent and passion. He didnt fight at PubSub, yes there was tension, but he just walked away and refuse to engage in that… a bigger man than most.
Congrats Salim and an even bigger congrats to Yahoo!
This seems to be a ‘take’ on Google Labs –
– Seems Yahoo – is starting a monopoly on all its employees’ ideas!
- If you have an idea; work at Yahoo! – Don’t you now almost have to go to ‘brick house’ instead of a better less restrictive VC?
- But then again this is a decent idea for incubation within a company. Maybe they will be able to overcome the over management at Yahoo! this way.
-Rbowles
Yeah, because mit rit fit gatech etc… Have devalued incubation on campus. Now people with pockets just snatch them for a pat on the back.
It’s not new.
It’s just lame, and a product of lazy profs and directors appointed to positions in student incubators.
It usually takes a parent with money or pull to make anything happen.
seems like the right moves at Yahoo
I listened in a discussion that Salim led at the Start-Up unconference in Mountain View a few months back. His ideas were very practical and from his experiences he’s clearly battle tested. Theres a lot that a mature company like Yahoo can gain from his background. Good luck Salim.
By the way, Confabb’s homepage claim of having the “largest database of conferences in the world” is simply not true.
I have seen this mechanism used many times by beaten-down companies struggling to reclaim lost glory. The story typically ends with the “new blood” becoming frustrated and leaving “to pursue other interests” after much money and talk are spent, with nothing to show for it.
Big companies that struggle with product development issues often have contraints or conflicting priorities that need to be addressed before anyone, outsiders or insiders, can have much impact in product development.
does anyone have any examples where this method has been successful in a company larger than 1414 people?
agree with peter stern, these efforts are pure wankage, and yahoo already has berkeley labs, yahoo research, hack days, blah blah blah. the whole thing is totally disorganized and very “peanut butter”ish
more to the point these projects tend to focus entirely on client-side wingdings and pointless frosting. no one in these efforts is bothering to experiment with server-side innovations (new monetization algorithms, protocol work, scaling etc) because this takes real brains and real work. oddly enough the server-side innovations are the ones paying the bills.
What does this mean vis-a-vis Catarina Fake? Was she always going to step aside, or was it decided at a later date that she was not the right person to run Brickhouse? What will she do next at Yahoo!? Is this a demotion?
Ted et al… Caterina created BrickHouse and is still hugely involved. It wouldn’t exist without her. One of the conditions of me joining was that she be materially involved because whatever/however she did, it worked and we want to continue that. She’s doing much more evangelism and strategic stuff with all the free time she now has (between 3-5am). Her product genius will be much in demand on the new projects.
Eventful sucks! Yelp is okay. Confab got it right.
The problem is … who’s going to maintain these projects once they’re done? Yahoo has a great history of creating and buying decent products, but a horrible history of making them better once they’ve been released. What’s the use of creating new technologies if you just let them flounder down the road?
“Yahoo’s numerous Hack Days have generated hundreds of ideas for new products, with additional ideas coming directly from Yahoo staff. Brickhouse will tackle the most promising ideas, and plans to release 4-6 new products in the coming year.”
Mike – we at Cambrian House been following Brick House for some time. Very interesting, and props to Yahoo! for trying to “spark” the feeling of a small business by creating an environment for innovators to “think big” and do what they do best: create and execute game changing products.
Hooray Salim! And to clarify: I’m not going anywhere, there is no “new role”, there is no “interim”, and will continue doing strategy for Brickhouse, and what I’ve been doing at Yahoo since I started there: new products, organizational innovation, process innovation, and in a more advisory capacity: community and social software, my longtime passions. More here.
what is wrong with Yahoo? why hasnt it learned to promote from within yet? No one listened to Brad G.? This must hurt morale again . . . nevertheless nothing against Salim, no idea who he is, but he seemed very accomplished.
Mazel tov Salim – and best of luck with Brickhouse!
great salim
Does your site somehow strip away Safari’s ability to use the “back” button? Seems to have done this to me, twice.
Whatever.
Hi Salim and Caterina,
I am very interested in joining your team. Where can I send my resume for you to review?
I live in SF. I co-founded 3 high-tech companies in the past and sold the last one recently to a very large software company in the valley. I currently work for this company and would like to move back to a startup environment. If you see what I mean…
Outstanding news for both Yahoo and Salim. Yahoo has selected a professional with the vision and passion to nurture and bring to market new innovative models. The right man at the right time.
Congrats Salim!!
>He takes the operational reigns from (Flickr co-founder) Caterina Fake,
I think you mean reins.