Entrepreneurship means starting a business. Intrapreneurship changes a company from the inside out as employees.
Elizabeth Funk knows both ways. As a former employee at Yahoo! and Microsoft helped Funk launch services like Yahoo! Shopping and Microsoft Word. After thinking online shopping would be a cool feature, she suggested and wrote the first code for Yahoo! Shop yourself. She was also a product manager on the early Microsoft Word team and part of the original founding team that developed Microsoft Office.
Elizabeth Funk. Photo credit: In Her Image Photography.
As founder and CEO of the nonprofit organization DignityMoves, Funk is now committed to finding disruptive, Silicon Valley-level solutions to homelessness, an issue that affected more than 771,800 Americans in 2024. DignityMoves addresses unsheltered homelessness by developing transitional housing to get people off the streets as quickly as possible.
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Entrepreneur interviewed Funk about how she explored intrapreneurship at Microsoft and Yahoo! has shown how she approaches problems and the lessons she brings to DignityMoves.
You were one of the first employees at Yahoo! and in the early team for Microsoft Office. What was it like working on these products?
At Yahoo! we made it up as we went along. We had no idea how people would use the Internet or what it could do. I came from the software industry (Microsoft), where it took 18 months to get a new feature idea in the hands of users (back then we printed the software on CDs and sent them in packages). At Yahoo! I could think up a feature, put it on the internet, sleep under my desk for a few hours (a common habit), and wake up to find that over a million people have used it and how they used it. Trial and error was a fundamental design strategy. There was very little downside risk in releasing a feature to see if it gained traction.
How did you address the issues in these teams?
At both companies it was fundamental that we had a very collaborative working style. At Yahoo! We tried to hold as many meetings as possible standing up. Once you join a meeting, you are expected to sit in that seat for 60 minutes. Who decided that solving all problems takes exactly 60 minutes? Instead, the person calling the meeting would discuss the topic with individuals in advance, narrow it down to a few options, and ideally the team would stand in the conference room, discuss the pros and cons and decide. We also didn’t believe in “democracy” in this environment. If you require unanimity, you will end up with the lowest common denominator.
What was Yahoo! The origins of shopping?
In the early days of Yahoo! I was one of the few women. I kept thinking, “Wouldn't it be cool if you could shop online?” The guys weren't intrigued at all. So I went to Barnes & Noble, bought HTML For Dummies, and wrote [the code] myself. I got into a lot of trouble – obviously web programming isn't my forte, it was terrible. It also only had three to four links (there were about the same number of online retailers back then). But we tried and in hindsight I was right.
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What advice would you give to people who want to make a difference within a company?
If your business model can support it, experiment with trial-and-error and minimal viable product approaches before investing a lot of energy into new features or projects.
How do you approach managing people?
As a manager, I believed in giving each person their own area with (almost) full authority. Even the youngest person would “own” their small part of the company. I believe that entrepreneurship is like a precious elixir – if you could bottle it, you could sell it for $1 million a drop. There is nothing more powerful. As a manager, the secret was to find ways to instill this elixir in every employee. Magic happens.
What lessons has Yahoo! and Microsoft are you bringing with you as a founder?
At Yahoo! We thought the global internet would be too big for people – they would want to stay in their local communities. That's why we created Yahoo! created. LA, Yahoo! San Francisco and so on. It took us a while to realize that in the past, people had defined “community” based solely on their zip code because that was their only option. Now people could define “community” through a shared love of Beanie Babies. The same seems to be true for today's use of the Internet: they gather in a community across zip codes and borders, united by what makes them unique and what connects them to others.
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