Yahoo open-sourced infrastructure because its competitive advantage was in applications
Todd Papaioannou · Panel: Continuuity, Sailthru and Visual Revenue // Data Driven NYC #7 // June 2012 · Dec 5, 2013 · at 21:03
Todd Papaioannou, former VP of Cloud Architecture at Yahoo and co-founder of Continuuity, explains Yahoo's historical strategy on infrastructure open-source.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so this is actually at Yahoo, a very distinctive strategy that we adopted in the global cloud computing group, which to say, we will open source all of our infrastructure because it's not a core competitive advantage to us. The applications and the secret source on top of it is the core competitive advantage to us.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Todd Papaioannou
In 2012, Papaioannou predicted easy data tools for non-programmers by 2019
“And I think it's going to take us, like I said, five to seven years until we get to the point where you don't have to be a programmer who understands Python or R or, you know, pick your favorite, you know, language. So actually go and get that insight.”
Launching a startup as a VC EIR beats self-funding
“The best way to launch a company is not to do it on your kitchen table or in your front room with seven guys that you fly over from Europe. It's to have a VC pay you to go and launch a company.”
Founders should make their operational mistakes using investor capital
“One of the lessons I learned is that you know, it's always better to make mistakes and learn things on other people's money, right?”
Yahoo drove a 300% CTR lift by combining algorithms with human editors
“Once we moved it all to algorithm and had editors just use their, you know, what humans are good at, which is this kind of like, you know, just being able to do correlations that the algorithms maybe didn't, we were able to drive like a 300% improvement in cli…”
Anonymized healthcare data should be made openly available for research
“I would love it in this kind of, like, altruistic world if all Healthcare data, anonymized healthcare data, was made available for researchers and people to actually build applications on top of, because just imagine the efficiencies and benefits you could get…”