Yahoo Brickhouse, the two year old San Francisco based Yahoo business unit to foster new product development, is to be shut down by the end of the year, says a source. The announcement may be as early as Wednesday.
The unit has managed to launch some quality (or at least thought provoking) applications like Pipes, FireEagle, Live (deadpooled) and BravoNation.
But Brickhouse has also had a revolving door at the top (mirroring the general executive exodus from Yahoo). The group was originally led by Salim Ismail and Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake – neither remain at Yahoo. Next up was Chad Dickerson, who left to join Etsy in June 2008. The current lead is former Jumpcut CEO Mike Folgner.
It was always a little unclear exactly where Brickhouse began and Yahoo ended. Yahoo has other innovation groups, such as the Advanced Products Group, which launched Kickstart a year ago. And why would a company create and promote aculture where innovation is only supposedly coming from one group. Innovation should be embedded into the very fabric of Yahoo in general, not outsourced to a small group of people in San Francisco.
We’ll update as we hear from back from Yahoo.
I hope this doesn’t affect Yahoo Pipes. I’m a huge fan. It’s great for RSS mashups.
Pipes was launched before Brickhouse was formed so they get no credit for that. FireEagle is the only sort of interesting project they worked on but the execution on that was unbeleivably poor, even for Yahoo! standards.
They supposedly looked at thousands of hacks presented in hack days every quarter all over the world and BravoNation was the best idea they could find?
Quick heads up for Michael..When I click through to see this post (read more), I see a much smaller article. The earlier section seems to be chopped off.
Bummer. The question is what will become of the people there? They are some of the most brilliant folks I’ve ever worked with. If “brain drain” is a concern, then it should be important to find a way to keep them. They are awesome. We’ll see.
sad day…
As I understood it, Brickhouse was not supposed to be the source of all innovation, it was supposed to be an additional source of innovation for project ideas that wouldn’t be developed in the other business units.
Is there anything left in Yahoo what wasn’t closed?
Really sad if this is true. Yahoo! Brickhouse was a source of inspiration for others like NASA to do similar things.
Sad to hear that. I think FireEagle is good.
Whilst innovation should be in every fibre of a company like Yahoo!, there are many talented people who don’t want to work within the bowels of a large corporate. Brickhouse is a great way to embrace these people who would otherwise be lost to the company. Ok there has been a rotating door there but it doesn’t mean that the Brickhouse idea is bad.
Once you start killing your new product development, you might as well go home.
Michael is right when he says that innovation should be embedded into the very fabric of a company, not only outsourced to a small group of people focused on new product development.
Having said that, in a large, mature organization (like Yahoo), there can be advantages to establishing “disrupter groups” like Brickhouse tasked with thinking about things in a new and different way.
The two goals (having innovation something everyone does; and having dedicated disrupter teams) do not need to be mutually exclusive.
For those interested in this innovation topic, I had a chance to conduct a one-on-one interview with Marissa Mayer of Google. and she had some interesting observations about the challenges of deploying disrupter groups. Article is here:
http://www.davi...ew_with_ma.html
Good points, David.
For those interested in how leaders can best create environments in which different types of innovation can thrive — particularly over the long haul — I highly recommend Judy Estrin’s (former CTO of Cisco) new book, Closing The Innovation Gap: http://www.thei...novationgap.com
(Disclosure: Judy is a client of The Conversation Group).
The original goal of brickhouse was to not spend so much on buying startups.
The idea was to give employees who come up with great ideas (e.g. something they showed at one of the corporate hack days) a year to develop it “as a startup”. The idea being that this way they wouldn’t lose the person and they could “acquire” the new company after the idea has some significant meat on it’s bones.
There were actually a lot of ideas that went there to grow, some succeeded, many didn’t but then that’s true for any startup.
As you note, the problem, however, was that a great many folks didn’t understand what Brickhouse was supposed to be. Like folks here, they thought that was the only group responsible for innovating instead of just a sandbox for developing ideas. They were jealous about the folks working there instead of coming up with an idea that could be launched there. Also, since many of the hackers and innovators were also the most valuable team members, managers didn’t want to lose their top people for a year to “chase rainbows”. None of that was the fault of the folks heading Brickhouse, who spent most of their time making sure that the folks who were supposed to be developing their ideas weren’t getting distracted by all that other crap. It’s why they set up shop in SF instead of sunnyvale.
Brickhouse was a really good idea that just couldn’t escape the corporate web. I’m kinda sad to see it end, but a lot of folks worked hard to make sure it never got off the ground.
Really sad news, there are some amazing people there.
When the seat at the top keeps revolving like that, there’s usually a reason. Sad development though; innovation and thinking outside the box is what’s needed from a lot of companies right now.
From my knowledge of the people who work(ed) there, the main impediment to the successful launch of exciting new products was always Yahoo politics. Looks like those politics finally won. Sad for the team – they deserved better.
I thought Bradley Horawitz started the Brickhouse thing, didn’t he leave too and go to Google? Sounds like a giant revolving door.
eh, you guys are talking about brickhouse like it was xerox parc. trim the fat and burn it down.
That is a real pity. It was something else… but it terms of personnel turnover it was strange as well. I hope the advanced product group takes fireeagle and pipes and develops them more
Yahoo can’t seem to execute anything; with this move they even closed (what is hopefully only one of) their internal mechanisms to address not being able to execute. Maybe they should just freeze everything as-is until their new CEO comes along?
Any confirmation yet?
It would be sad that the talented people at BH would learn this here first.
I think these tweets pretty much confirm it.
http://search.t...ch?q=brickhouse
friend that works there confirmed that the whole place is getting shutdown. not sure if they plan on keeping anyone from there and moving them somewhere else.
they have a group meeting soon.
Re Pipes:
As pointed out in earlier posts, Pipes was created prior to Brickhouse (using a similar model of incubation). Pipes has little or no connection to Brickhouse, and moved in the platform (and now Y!OS) group well over a year ago.
Jonathan
Hey Brickhouse folks?
We’re right across the street – and we’re hiring.
Maybe it’s time to come work for a cool startup?
I ALWAYS choose my next job based on how close it is to my current one. Riiiight. Then again Yahoo wasn’t exactly a brilliant choice to begin with (in the last year).
Brickhouse was a flawed concept from the beginning. Yahoo needs a way to harness the ideas and innovations originating from throughout the organization, not some central nervous system of creativity.
innovation is partly idea, partly execution.
brickhouse was long on ideas, short on execution. yahoo would’ve been much better of dishing out the brickhouse money into a corp venture fund.