This is Kamla Bhatt. Today my guest is Srinija Srinivasan or “Ninj” or “Ninja” as she is known. She is the vice president and editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Inc. She was employee number 5 at Yahoo. Jerry Yang and David Filo recruited her to organize their content when they started their company. Ninj is a bachelor in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and she grew up in Lawrence, Kansas.
Kamla: Welcome to the show.
Ninja: Thank you very much, nice to be here.
Kamla: What was it like for a Tamilian to grow up in Lawrence, Kansas?
Ninja: Well I did not know anything different so I only have some perspective on that much, much later. I can say that my father moved with the family there before I was born. He made the decision to go there before I was born. He first came to the States on a Fulbright and was teaching in Berkeley in the late 1960s and all of his colleagues in the academic world thought he was mad to think about moving from Cal (Berkeley) to Kansas. But as a matter of lifestyle, The University of Kansas offered a great opportunity for you know a tenured position in a math department where he can do some interesting things. And the community there, great public schools, supportive community in a place to raise what was going to be with kids. So, for me it was truly, it was a great place to grow up. The public schools were great. We remained to their huge Kansas basketball fans as it was the big community binder in that town. And some of my closest friends are the ones that I grew up with there.
Kamla: How would you describe your job at Yahoo?
Ninja: So in title I am editor-in-chief and in role other people have used words even
as I think may be pretenious as conscience or consciousness of Yahoo. But we’ve always talked about in
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terms of shepherding the voice of Yahoo. The notion of editor-in-chief, it is a very different kind of editor-in-chief then say at a magazine or a newspaper where there is a much more overt and may be even a heavy handed editorial task with bylines and columns and points of view ...sort of out on the page. At Yahoo it is really always been about the power of aggregation nd that even when we were nothing more and nothing less than a searchable directory of websites that recognizing the mere act of aggregation is creation. The choices that Jerry and David made even as a hobby of what to list, what not to list, what to call things, where to put things, how do we describe things? The sum total of all these seemingly minute choices adds up to an impression, to a point of view. We reveal something about ourselves in the total of those choices. So, and that is the impression that somebody takes away to the consumer or a reader takes away in using our products and services. We believe there is a real relationship there that people have a sense who or what Yahoo is and they have a sense of what that relationship means to them and then that comes from the sum total of some very, very small things.