I bumped into some former colleagues over the past couple of weeks and the experience reminded me of a lot of the items in this post. We shared a common bond based on our exposure to the Yahoo corporate culture. Given the circling activist investors surround the current iteration of Yahoo! this maybe a capsule of a soon-to-disappear culture. Many of the things below are artefacts, totems of the Yahoo corporate culture.
- You know that Yahoo! was the brand and a Yahoo was a person who worked for Yahoo!
- You were told that you bleed purple. There were values that were ingrained into you
- You understood the struggle of constantly moving budgets and spending a quarter’s marketing budget in three weeks
- You have an address book full of friends and aquantances working at great companies in digital media. The business was a rotating door for talent, in six months you had a great Rolodex full of contacts.
Your have an old brand Yahoo! laptop bag that just won’t die. Not too sure what they made those Timbuk2 bags from but mine is eight years old, well travelled and still looks new. - Friends introduce you to former colleagues you were less familiar with by including their IM identity as well as their name.
You still have a star kicking around in a box somewhere from when you packed up your desk one last time.
Your colleagues gave you a list of tchotchkes to get from the shop in building D if you went to the headquarters campus in Sunnyvale.
You’re still using at least one of Jerry and David’s Christmas presents around the house.