As you may have heard through the grapevine, after 4 years of an incredible roller coaster ride with Yahoo, the time has come to move on to other opportunities. I am bootstrapping my own stealth (for now) startup. In parallel, today I’m launching a consulting practice to provide advisory services to other startups and more-established companies. After over 8 years in the big corporate worlds of Yahoo and eBay, I’m excited about taking everything I’ve learned from my experiences at those two great companies and returning to the entrepreneurial world.

Yahoo has amazing and loyal talent, and I am very proud of what my Search team accomplished over the past four years. I obviously cannot capture it all, but I wanted to share highlights of just a few great products they delivered:
• Relaunching Yahoo! Search in Oct 2007 with industry-leading Search Assist features
• Bringing structured data into Web Search for the first time with Y! SearchMonkey
• Opening up Search technology to the world like never before with the Yahoo! Search BOSS platform
• Bringing true applications to Search with Search Pad
• Launching an entirely new Y! Search experience again in Sep 2009
• Creating incredibly engaging Image and Video Search experiences
• Integrating Twitter and real-time content in Nov 2009
• An addictive entertainment Search experience that launched this March
• And finally, the truly fun Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search app on the iPhone
 
It has been a real pleasure to work with such a talented and passionate team. I’m going to miss everyone and I wish them the best of luck. Keep fighting the purple fight, guys!

- Larry

P.S. Now that I no longer have a free coffee bar, I had to undertake the arduous task of discovering all of the best coffee in the South Bay. Here is my list on Yelp. I work hard so you don’t have to.

I have always loved live entertainment events. Concerts, comedians, music festivals; you name it. But, I have noticed an interesting shift over the past couple of years. I no longer have the patience for large venues. With the increasing quality of home entertainment systems and faster broadband pipelines, the entertainment decision is becoming harder. Do you go out for an event and endure skyrocketing ticket prices, challenging commutes and parking, standing in line, and crowded venues? Or, do you simply stay home and watch an event in HD with surround sound on the comfort of your living room couch?

Last summer, I visited the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, CA to see Brian Regan, one of my favorite comedians. The Mountain Winery is actually a pretty small venue, with incredible views of the Valley (image in this post). And, I had what I thought were pretty decent seats. But, I wasn’t in the first couple of rows directly in front of Brian. He’s a very physical comedian and I came to realize that a great deal of his impact is due to his facial expressions. I was far enough away and to the side that I really couldn’t see his expressions clearly enough. That made all the difference in the performance. After that disappointment, I decided that I would no longer go to large venues for comedy. Another one of my favorite comedians was in San Francisco recently. But, the venue was fairly large and I didn’t get tickets early enough to be in the front rows. So, I passed. Now, I won’t even bother going to a show unless I can get a great seat in a small venue. Just not worth the hassle.

Check out this Huffington Post article from Michael Kaiser, President of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he shares his own concerns that live arts will become irrelevant:

For two tickets to an opera you can now buy a computer and watch Leontyne Price and Joan Sutherland on YouTube for free! No wonder so many people have stopped going to performances. A recent study by the NEA showed that a huge number of people are getting their arts exposure on-line and fewer are coming to the theater. No wonder so many arts organizations are suffering. Without audiences we receive no ticket revenue and the audience members we lose cease to donate as well. The claim that the arts are irrelevant is getting difficult to dispute.

A recent NY Times article also highlighted this issue, specifically referring to the financial troubles the Philadelphia Orchestra has been facing. And this isn’t unique. Several orchestras in the US are suffering in this economy.

And, it isn’t just the music industry. It is pretty clear from this LA Times article that sports has been taking a hit too:

Nearly every sport and sports team took hits, from layoffs to dips in ads, attendance and sponsorships. The Arena Football League canceled its 2009 season. The NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes filed for bankruptcy protection in May.

Several sports economists blame the downturn on a trend that started 20 years ago, when many major sports leagues shifted their focus from typical middle-class fans to corporations. That shift led to bigger stadiums and steady increases in prices all around to help pay for them.

Certainly part of the problem is the economy. It is hard to justify spending a lot of money on these events if your job is at risk or you’re struggling to cover the basics. But, part of this change is also due to a faster-moving shift to online entertainment. Improved systems performance, easier online transactions, micropayments, and the ability to interact and engage with others through social models have all created a more engaging and immersive experience. And, I think that is the key. There is a critical element here that is similar to the effect in really small entertainment venues:

You enjoy an interaction with the artist, the performer, and the other audience members that simply isn’t possible in large venues. In some sense, you are creating part of the experience yourself and that is where the new value will be created. As Max Levchin, CEO of Slide, stated in this recent Forbes interview:

The things of value inside these worlds have to be primarily created by the participants. That’s where our plans are. The real open question is whether these virtual worlds are a stepping stone between the shift from real economy to a completely virtual economy.

So, what are the venues going to do to survive? Basically, for large venues, they better start creating new and engaging experiences that offer much more than a consumer can get from the best high-speed, HD, surround-sound experience. Give us a reason to attend. Create an experience that we can only truly enjoy if we are physically there. And, instead of packing larger and larger audiences into mega-venues, I believe they should also focus on expanding into smaller, more intimate venues to acquire broader, more local audiences.

And, what are entertainers going to do? Some are already embracing the shift to online. Rather than bemoan the drops in attendance at physical venues and complaining about digital piracy, they are engaging with the game industry, social sites, etc. to weave themselves into new forms of performance art. And at least one orchestra that I know of is dynamically responding to these shifts in consumer behavior by providing a service where the audience becomes part of the experience. Literally. At a recent Yahoo! offsite, we had a surprise performance from a small orchestra that was seated amongst us. I have never enjoyed classical music in such an up close and personal experience before (well, not since when I used to play). Nothing like standing right next to talented musicians as they pour their souls into their instruments. That was indeed a transformational experience and they accomplished their goal of reminding all of us of the beauty of live music and pulling us back into an intimate venue and off our couches.

After I missed a few critical email messages recently, I spent a good part of today simply trying to get my email inbox under control. Over the past decade, the “email problem” has slowly grown into an unmanageable beast. I looked at my work inbox today (this isn’t even counting my personal email accounts) and noticed I had over 18,000 emails in the Inbox alone, with over 3000 marked unread (and I file and filter even more than that). Ouch. Staying ahead of email, responding to one as several more come in, has become a Sisyphean task. Quite simply, email is failing us. The system hasn’t scaled with the volume and variety of communication we deal with today.

I’m obviously not alone in reaching this massive point of failure in the email system:

• Lawrence Lessing publicly declares email bankruptcy
• TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington returns from a trip and decides to simply delete his entire inbox
• Andrew Baron starts over as well, telling everyone to resend their email if it was important

This initial blessing has become a curse, as with many technology solutions. In some ways it reminds me of music CDs. When digital music on CD first came out consumers were thrilled, and they should have been. CDs were a huge improvement over cassette tapes. But, much like email, CDs simply didn’t scale. It might be fine for a person with a moderate music library to have dozens of CDs. But, for heavy music lovers, having hundreds or thousands of CDs was ridiculous. Finally, along came MP3 players and the beloved iPod. Now, you can fairly easily manage a music library that scales.

So, what to do about email? There are many, many people offering a host of tips, tricks, and tools for supposedly managing your email. Yes, I know all about filters and autoresponders and etc., etc. Have tried them all, used them all. Too much work. Some recommend time management strategies. For example, Timothy Ferriss’ tip that you should only check email twice a day. Good tip for not letting email addiction fragment and destroy the rest of your day. But, still doesn’t solve the massive volume problem.

One approach is already in play: Big changes in how existing email applications work. At CES this year, Jerry Yang showed the future of a smarter email inbox that could prioritize the most relevant connections in your life. Leveraging the knowledge of who you care about and interact with the most holds promise for making all of your communications easier to manage (email, IM, SMS, file sharing, etc.). Xobni is yet another solution promising to enhance your existing Outlook email application to give you “effortless email management”.

I’m sure that these approaches will make email better. No doubt about that. But, who is going to come along and “iPod” the whole thing? Give us a whole new way to manage our communications with others? That is what I’m looking forward to.

The final whitepaper has been published by Enquiro Research for Search Engine Results 2010. In it, they

cover what search engines may look like in the future, thoughts on personalization, universal search, eye tracking research, and interviews with leading industry experts such as Marissa Mayer, Jakob Nielsen, and Danny Sullivan.

I was recently interviewed by Gord Hotchkiss over at Search Engine Land on the future of Search. The meta question was: “What will the search results page look like in 3 years?” The full article is posted here: Search in the Year 2010.

He interviewed a very interesting list of folks:

• Jakob Nielsen, one of the biggest names in the Usability world
• Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of user experience and interface design
• Michael Ferguson, one of the UE architects at Ask.com
• Larry Cornett (me), the VP of search experience at Yahoo!
• Justin Osmer, Product Manager for Microsoft Live search
• Chris Sherman, Executive Editor of Search Engine Land
• Greg Sterling, another industry analyst
• Danny Sullivan, the search engine guru and founder of Search Engine Land

I won’t bother summarizing the article here, so read it!