Headline July 23, 2016/ ''' *CAPTAIN HISTORY SIR* : THY HEADSTART YAHOO '''

''' *CAPTAIN HISTORY SIR* : 

THY HEADSTART YAHOO '''

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND GREAT JUDGMENTS are at the very core need and success of any organization. More so, at technology companies.

Few great and *greatest companies*  are ever, Built To Last. That is the very verdict of History. Yes, today! Gone, tomorrow!.  

When she started, Yahoo was fumbling in Canada. Technically, it had a separate Canada site, but it relied on the American directory for its searches

Employees asked her why the most people search term among Canadian users was the word Canada.  ''That's not a mystery,'' Ms. Meek, 41, recalled saying.

''In Canada, you do  'government'  and you get American results. So you do 'government Canada.' You do anything and then you add 'Canada' to it.''

After the dot com bubble burst in 2000, Yahoo's dysfunctions began to surface. In 2002, the company transferred Ms. Meek's job to Toronto. Less than 90 days later, it closed that office and sent her and two engineers back to the American headquarters.

She got a promotion from the mess. Yahoo put her in charge of the content, ads and business deals for Yahoo Canada

She was nicknamed Captain Canada and had a ringside seat to one of the company's biggest decisions   -dumping Google as a search partner and switching to technology from its Inktomi acquisition instead. ''They were scared to do it, they did to Canada first.''  

In 2008, she left the company, embarked on a journey through Silicon Valley's laboratory of business ideas, big and small. First she joined a tiny start-up, Picateers, that was trying to reinvent the school portrait business. It folded a year later.

From there she went to Linden Lab, the creator of  Second Life, the tech industry's first big foray into virtual reality. Players interacted with one another online in a  3-D  simulated world, where they could buy and sell things, make friends, or just gawk at the scenery.

Second Life was an extraordinary experiment in human behaviour, she said. An employee could change something in the virtual world, then just watch what happened. ''You are literally as god,'' she said.

Next for her was Evenbrite, an online event planning and ticketing company. There she worked to protect against credit card fraud.

In 2013, she abandoned the corporate life to make a movie, a still un-released Indie thriller, called  ''Veracruz'' . Now she runs her own one-person firm, Snare Labs, which helps small merchants detect suspicious transactions. Se is also working with her nephew on an app, Sharpcut, to summon barbers on demand.

And she says she is casting about for next challenge. ''It's a funny time in my life where there is definitely no script,'' she said.

Yoga And Acoustic Guitars

Working long hours in close quarters, it was inevitable that some surfers would find romance.

For Matthew Mustapick and Amey Matthews, working at  Yahoo  didn't just lead to love. The lessons they learned  -and the money they made from the stock they received as an early employees - allowed them to achieve a different a different kind of Silicon Valley dream : dropping out of tech to do their own thing  [Student Hussain Ali, to note]. 

Ms Mathews, who had a fine arts degree from Stanford, joined in 1998 after responding to an ad looking for a speaker of Scandinavian languages. ''I told them I didn't speak any Scandinavian languages  -but I speak Italian and you should have someone who speaks Italian,'' she recalled during an interview at the couple's home in Sequel, Calif.

Yahoo had an Italian speaker already, but she got a anyway. Mr. Mustapick sat in a nearby cubicle, and they eventually became a couple.

Surfers were free to reflect their personal interests in the directory. Ms. Mathew loved animals and indexed all the dogs, cattle, even miniature donkeys, she could find.

Mr. Mustapick was fond of cataloging oddities like prosthetic testicles for pets that had been neutered. Ms`Mustapick left  Yahoo in early 2002. Ms Mathews followed later that year.

Ms. Mathews, who became a Yoga teacher while at Yahoo, started teaching full time when she left, Yahoo, in fact became one of her first clients. The Yahoo stock provided a vital cushion.

''I could afford to lose money for a whole year when no one came to my class,'' she said.

Mr. Mustapick turned towards music. ''I always wanted to learn how to play electric guitar like Scott Henderson,'' he said, referring to the jazz and blues guitarist.

The interest led him in an unexpected direction   -he began building acoustic guitars with an eye towards selling them.

Having looked at hundreds and thousands of websites while at Yahoo, he had a good sense of how to market online, well before the era of Twitter and self-promotion as a national pastime.

He built a website and posted photos of guitars he was building so customers could watch the progress.

And he consciously befriended the right people, ''They just put the word out for me,'' he said. ''That was the sort of thing I learned at Yahoo that you could do.''

The Honour and Serving of the ''Operational Research on Technology and the Rise and Fall of great companies continues. Thank Ya all for reading and sharing forward. And see you on the following one:

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Startups. See Ya all on !WOW!  the World Students Society and !E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Grand Adventure '''

Good Night and God Bless

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