Yahoo! discusses future

Furlong: It's nice to be wanted by area

GRANT COUNTY — During his speech, Thomas Furlong showed a list of the items his company doesn't like.

Titled "The Sucks List," items on the list included bureaucracy, entitlement, bugs, shoes worn at all times, sloth, too big for your britches, formality, high horses, ALL CAPS, impossible, hurry up and wait, swashbuckling and decaf.

The list explains a lot about the approach of his company, Yahoo! Inc., Furlong, said during his presentation Thursday during the Grant County Economic Development Council quarterly luncheon.

"The story goes early on in Yahoo!'s history, our co-founders were meeting with human resources to say, we've got to put together a mission and vision for the company, we have to put together what we stand for," Furlong said. "They basically said, 'It's a lot easier for us to tell you what we don't like. And so this is their list of the things they don't like."

As the company gets larger, it continues to fight against many of the items on the list, Furlong said.

"I like to thinks we have fun," he said.

Furlong used nearly an hour to answer the questions he said he hears all the time, including the reasons behind the company's decision to locate a data center in Grant County.

The county wasn't a viable option until the Grant County Public Utilities District built a fiber network to connect to the world and until large technology companies grew to a scale where outsourcing was no longer economical, Furlong said.

"When you have that ability to look elsewhere, now you can pull it out of the box and say, I don't have to go where all the suppliers are," he said. "I can go somewhere else and just hire locally, get some minor management and just run my own operation there."

Those key developments have begun to draw growth from the major cities, Furlong added, pointing at high costs of service.

Asked how many jobs the company would provide, Furlong estimated about two dozen, but noted other businesses would come into the area to offer support services.

"Absolutely I am convinced there is a knock-on effect of other businesses that are going to come to want to serve us and the different things we do," he said. "And honestly, we haven't decided all the things we want to do."

Furlong anticipated a celebration of initial operating capability in October or November, but said he hopes to establish a "pipeline of capacity," and expects to continue to build phases once he has a complete building and a permitted site.

"What I hope you're going to see is pretty much almost constant work on that site as we add phase after phase after phase," he said. "Our demand is very difficult to predict. It is really hard for us to predict what we have to install, when we've got to install it."

Furlong covered a wide range of topics, from the cooling processes required in the center, which uses outside air to cool its machines, to the design of the center, intended to offer technical innovation, energy efficiency and flexibility in use.

"It's a lot of fun for me to work on projects in communities where people are actually happy you're there," he said.

In many places, a data center can get lost in the crowd or be a non-event, Furlong noted.

"As a person who likes to develop and likes to think we're bringing positive benefit … it really makes me feel good it seems like you all want us here," he said.