Kids Day at Yahoo: what I learned

Bradley invited me to join him in speaking to two groups of kids today at Yahoo! The first group was 11-12 year-olds, and the second was all 8 year-olds. Bradley and I talked a little bit about what we do, what it’s like to work at Yahoo and what we wanted to be when we grew up (me: architect, Bradley: something with computers), and then we answered a bunch of questions while asking some of our own. All I can say about these kids of Silicon Valley is: WOW! Here are some relatively unstructured notes.

What some of the 11-12 year-olds said they want to be when they grow up: large animal vet, photographer, pediatrician, Egyptologist (!)

When Bradley asked the kids if they knew what “innovation” meant, one of the kids said, “inventing new stuff.” Not bad.

When someone asked how much I worked every day and I said a lot of my work doesn’t feel like work because I enjoy it (but in a more rambling way), a kid interjected, “Find a job you love and you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life.” Very succinct!

Bradley mentioned in passing the company he started before Yahoo, and one of the kids asked, “Is your old company still alive?” (Yes.) Then, “Who bought it?” (Autonomy.) I think we were about to get into preferred stock or accelerated vesting schedules before another kid rescued us with the question: “how many interviews did you go on before you got your job?”

When we moved to the group of 8-year-olds, things got even more interesting. When we asked them how many had cell phones, 50% of the hands went up (at least) — and we weren’t talking toy cell phones. When Bradley asked them how old they thought we were, we got answers ranging from 28 to 100.

In both groups, the kids were amazingly well-traveled. No one seemed all that excited about the places we had been because many of them were born in those places and travel regularly (although the wannabe-Egyptologist had not yet been to Egypt!)

We’re always looking for product feedback, so when asked what Yahoo! should be doing, one kid said: “Yahoo! Robots would be AWESOME!”

I’ll see what we can do!