Entrepreneurship is starting a company. Entrepreneurship is transforming a business from the inside out as an employee.
Elizabeth Funk is familiar with both routes. As an early employee at Yahoo! and Microsoft, Funk helped pioneer services such as Yahoo! Shopping and Microsoft Word. After thinking that online shopping would be an interesting feature, she pitched and wrote the first code for the Yahoo! Bargain yourself. She was also a product manager on the early team for Microsoft Word and part of the original founding team that created Microsoft Office.
Elizabeth Funk. Photo Credit: In her image photo.
Now, as the founder and CEO of the non-profit organization Dignity movesFunk tries to find disruptive Silicon Valley-level solutions to homelessness, a problem that has affected more than 771,800 Americans in 2024. DignityMoves addresses homelessness by developing temporary housing to get people off the streets as quickly as possible.
The entrepreneur interviewed Funk about how she experienced entrepreneurship at Microsoft and Yahoo!, her approach to problems, and the lessons she's bringing with her to DignityMoves.
You were one of the first employees at Yahoo! and on the early team for Microsoft Office. How was the work on these products?
At Yahoo! we were making it up as we went along. We had no idea how people would use the Internet, or what it could do. I came from software (Microsoft), where it would take 18 months before a new feature idea was in the hands of users (back then we printed the software on CDs and sent them in packages). At Yahoo! I could find a feature, publish it to the web, sleep under my desk for a few hours (a frequent habit), and wake up to find that a million more people had used it, and how they had used it. Trial and error was a fundamental design strategy. There was very little downside risk to deploying a feature to see if it appealed.
How have you dealt with problems in these teams?
In both companies, it was essential that we had very collaborative working styles. At Yahoo!, we tried to make as many meetings as possible standing as much as possible. Once you sit down for an appointment, you are supposed to be there for 60 minutes. Who decided that all issues take exactly 60 minutes to solve? Instead, the person calling the meeting would pre-socialize the issue with people individually, narrow it down to a few choices, and ideally the team would sit in the conference room, debate the pros and cons, and decide. We also did not believe in “democracy” in this environment. If you need unanimity, you'll end up with the lowest common denominator.
What was Yahoo! Shopping origin story?
In the early days of Yahoo! I was one of the only women. I kept thinking “Wouldn't it be great if you could shop online?” The boys weren't entirely intrigued. So I went to Barnes & Noble and bought “HTML for Dummies” and wrote (the code) myself. I got into a lot of trouble – clearly, web coding is not my forte, it was terrible. It also only had three to four links (about as many online retailers existed, at the time). But we tried it, and in retrospect, I turned out to be right.
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What advice would you give to people looking to make a change from within a company?
If your business model can support it, use trial-and-error, “minimum viable product” methods to experiment before investing too much energy in new features or projects.
How do you approach people management?
As a manager, I believed in giving each person their own area of (almost) complete authority. Even the youngest person would “own” his small part of the business. I believe the entrepreneurial spirit is like a precious elixir – if you can sell it, you can sell it for $1 million a drop. There is nothing more powerful. As a manager, the secret was finding ways to infuse that elixir into every employee. Magic happens.
What lessons from Yahoo! and Microsoft are you bringing with you as a founder?
At Yahoo! we thought the global internet would be too massive for people – they would want to stay within their local communities. So we created Yahoo! LA, Yahoo! San Francisco, and so on. It took us a while to realize that people had only defined their “community” by their zip code in the past because that was their only option. Now people can define “community” with a shared love of Beanie Babies. The same seems true of how people use the Internet today: they come together in communities across zip codes and borders, united by what makes them unique and what connects them to others.