Entrepreneurship creates a company. Entrepreneurship is changing a business from the inside out, as an employee.
Elizabeth Funk is familiar both ways. As an early employee at Yahoo! and Microsoft, Funk Yahoo! helped advanced services like! Shopping and Microsoft Word. After thinking that online shopping would be a nice feature, he added Yahoo! wrote and wrote the first code for He does the shopping himself. He was also a product manager on the first Microsoft Word team and part of the original founding team that created Microsoft Office.
Elizabeth Funk. Photo Credit: On Her Image Photography.
Now, as founder and CEO of the nonprofit DignityMoves, Funk is working to find disruptive Silicon Valley-level solutions to homelessness, a problem that affects more than 771,800 Americans in 2024. as soon as possible.
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entrepreneur Funk was interviewed about how he demonstrated intrapreneurship at Microsoft and Yahoo!, his approach to challenges, and the lessons he brings with him to DignityMoves.
You were one of the first employees of Yahoo! and on the first team for Microsoft Office. What was it like working on these products?
Yahoo! we made it up as we went. We didn’t know how people would use the Internet or what it could do. I came from software (Microsoft) where it would take 18 months to get a new feature idea into the hands of users (back then we printed software on CDs and shipped them in packages). Yahoo! I could find a feature, put it on the web, sleep under my desk for a few hours (a common habit), and wake up to see over a million people using it, and how. he Trial and error was the main design strategy. There was very little downside risk to running a feature to see if it applied.
How did you approach the problems in these teams?
It was key that we have a very collaborative working style in both companies. At Yahoo!, we tried to have as many meetings as possible standing as much as possible. When you sit down for a meeting, you assume you’ve been there for 60 minutes. Who decided that it takes exactly 60 minutes to solve all the problems? Instead, the meeting convener will pre-publicize the issue with people individually, narrow it down to a few options, and ideally the team will stand in a conference room, discuss the pros and cons, and decide. We also did not believe in “democracy” in this environment. If you need unanimity, you will have the lowest common denominator.
What was Yahoo! The origin story of shopping?
In the early days of Yahoo! I was one of the only women. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could shop online?” I thought. The children were completely uninterested. So I went to Barnes & Noble and bought “HTML for Dummies” and wrote it [the code] myself I struggled a lot – web coding was obviously not my forte, it was terrible. It also only had three or four links (there were about as many online retailers back then). But we tried it, and in hindsight, I was right.
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What advice would you give to people who want to make a difference within the company?
If your business model can support it, use trial-and-error, “minimum viable product” approaches before putting too much energy into new features or projects.
How do you approach managing people?
As a manager, I believed in giving each person (almost) complete authority over their area. Even the smallest person would “own” a small part of the business. I believe that the entrepreneurial spirit is like a precious elixir – if you can bottle it, you can sell every drop for $1 million. There is nothing stronger than that. The secret as a manager was to find ways to instill that elixir in every employee. Magic happens.
What lessons from Yahoo! and bringing Microsoft with you as a founder?
Yahoo! we thought the global internet would be too big for people – they’d want to stay in their local communities. So we Yahoo! LA, Yahoo! San Francisco, etc. It took us a while to realize that in the past people only defined “community” by zip codes because that was their only option. Now people could define the “community” by their shared love of Beanie Babies. The same is true of how people use the Internet today: they gather in community across zip codes and borders, connecting with what makes them unique and what connects them to others.
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