Welcome Salim to the Brickhouse team! We couldn't be happier to have him join us. I had the headcount open to hire an operational lead for Brickhouse for a long time, but it was a hard role to hire for. You need someone with big company know-how, and entrepreneurial know-how -- two things you rarely find together, or a least it's rare to find someone who does both supremely well. For this role you need to be able to talk geek, and talk product, and run a team, and manage people with C's in their titles. You need to evangelize through the organization, often the biggest challenge. It's a wide and varied skill set, and the talent didn't present itself until Salim came along. He is a smart, inventive, seasoned entrepreneur. He's worked at consulting firms and big companies and was the founder of several startups. I was psyched. Salim is a great catch for us.

Brickhouse began a year and a half ago when I was charged by Jeff Weiner to "figure out a way to build the next Flickr at Yahoo!" My response: "It ain't ever gonna happen." He said: "Let's figure it out." And Brickhouse is the answer to that question. We've already scored a major success with Pipes. And there are a lot of other things cooking. As for how it came about, and what my thinking was, I'll go into it more in a later post.

Also: "interim head" of Brickhouse? Geez, TechCrunch. Way to diminish me. I've been nurturing it for a year and a half. It's my baby. We needed an operational lead. I will be concentrating on strategy. There is no "other role" I'm taking. There was no "interim". I'm going to be doing the same thing I've always done since coming to Yahoo: new products, organizational innovation, process innovation, and in a more advisory capacity: community and social software, my longtime passions. Bradley writes on this too.

Salim is the man! We look forward to many new, exciting things to come out of Brickhouse as we grow. Cheers!

LINK | 1:59 PM | TB

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .