Yahoo!, over the years, had been the king of the banner ad.
I came in as an engineer and worked on artificial intelligence at Google. I worked on related sites and matching advertising to queries with some of our earliest ads.
I took a computer-science course to fill a prerequisite at Stanford, and I realized that every day was a new problem, and every day you got to think about how to solve something new, how to reason through something new, how to develop an algorithm to solve for something you hadn't worked on before.
When people think about computer science, they imagine people with pocket protectors and thick glasses who code all night.
Blackberry is a great product and really useful. But I think that Yahoo!'s future is going to be rooted in mobile apps. And we know that we need to have apps on some of the core platforms, and so iOS and Android, probably the two most important platforms for us.
One of the interesting applications of symbolic systems is artificial intelligence, and I spent some time thinking about how to create a brain that operates the way ours does.
Beyond basic mathematical aptitude, the difference between good programmers and great programmers is verbal ability.
I loved Stanford and symbolic systems. For me, I came to Stanford assuming I would be a doctor and got really deep into chemistry and biology, but I noticed everyone who was on the same track as me was taking the exact same classes. I wanted to do something more unique.
I really wanted to be a doctor, until my freshman year of college when I realized that while I was good at chemistry and biology, I really wasn't feeling challenged by it.
Walmart is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and, as one of the world's most powerful brands, touches millions of lives every day.
I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that's how you grow. When there's that moment of 'Wow, I'm not really sure I can do this,' and you push through those moments, that's when you have a breakthrough.
I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you're giving up that makes you resentful.
I think that burnout happens because of resentment. That notion that, 'Wow, I worked 100 hours last week, and I couldn't even have this thing that I really wanted.'
Product management really is the fusion between technology, what engineers do - and the business side.
I think, you know, a fellow CEO said to me that the interesting thing about being CEO that's really striking is that you have very few decisions that you need to make, and you need to make them absolutely perfectly.
I don't think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that I certainly believe in equal rights, I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so in a lot of different dimensions, but I don't, I think have, sort of, the militant drive and the sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that.
When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.
Before Google, I spent the summer building a program that would look at what websites you would go to and what websites other people would go to - and built a collaborative filtering program that helped you find related sites to look at.
I like to do matrices. One option per line, different facets for each column. Salary, location, happiness index, failure index, and all that.
Shifting toward management meant greater responsibility and influence, but it also meant giving up programming day-to-day in my role, which was hard because it took me out of my comfort zone.
