Entrepreneurship is starting a company. Intrapreneurship is transforming a business from within as an employee.
Elizabeth Funk is familiar with both paths. As an early employee at Yahoo! and Microsoft, Funk helped pioneer services like Yahoo! Shopping and Microsoft Word. After thinking online shopping would be a cool feature, she pitched and wrote the first code for Yahoo! Shopping herself. She was also a product manager on the early team for Microsoft Word and part of the original founding team that created Microsoft Office.
Elizabeth Funk. Photo Credit: In Her Image Photography.
Now, as the founder and CEO of the nonprofit DignityMoves, Funk strives to find Silicon Valley-level disruptive solutions to homelessness, a problem that affected more than 771,800 Americans in 2024. DignityMoves addresses unsheltered homelessness by developing interim housing to get people off the streets as quickly as possible.
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Entrepreneur interviewed Funk about how she displayed intrapreneurship at Microsoft and Yahoo!, her approach to problems, and the lessons that she’s bringing with her to DignityMoves.
You were one of the first employees at Yahoo! and on the early team for Microsoft Office. What was it like working on these products?
At Yahoo! we were making it up as we went along. We had no idea how people were going to use the Internet, or what it could do. I was coming from software (Microsoft), where it would take 18 months before a new feature idea would be in users’ hands (back then we printed the software on CDs and shipped it in packages). At Yahoo! I could come up with a feature, put it out on the web, sleep a few hours under my desk (a frequent habit), and wake up to see that a million plus people had used it, as well as how they’d used it. Trial and error was a fundamental design strategy. There was very little downside risk to putting out a feature to see if it appealed.
How did you approach problems on these teams?
At both companies, it was fundamental that we had very collaborative working styles. At Yahoo!, we tried to do as many meetings standing as possible. Once you sit for a meeting you’re presumed there in that seat for 60 minutes. Who decided that all issues require exactly 60 minutes to solve? Instead, the person calling the meeting would pre-socialize the issue with folks individually, narrow it down to a few choices, and ideally the team would stand in the conference room, debate the pros and cons, and decide. We also did not believe in “democracy” in this environment. If you require unanimity you’ll end up with the lowest common denominator.
What was Yahoo! Shopping’s origin story?
In the early days of Yahoo! I was one of the only females. I kept thinking “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could shop online?” The guys were completely not intrigued. So I went to Barnes & Noble and bought “HTML for Dummies” and wrote [the code] myself. I got into a lot of trouble– clearly, web coding is not my forte, it was terrible. It also only had three to four links (about as many online retailers existed, at the time). But we tried it, and in retrospect, I turned out to be right.
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What advice would you give people looking to make a difference from within a company?
If your business model can support it, use trial-and-error, “minimal viable product” approaches to experiment before investing a lot of energy in new features or projects.
How do you approach managing people?
As a manager, I believed in giving every person their own area of (almost) full authority. Even the most junior person would “own” their small part of the business. I believe that the entrepreneurial spirit is like a precious elixir — if you could bottle it, you could sell it for $1 million per drop. There is nothing more powerful. As a manager, the secret was to find ways to instill that elixir in every employee. Magic happens.
What lessons from Yahoo! and Microsoft are you bringing with you as a founder?
At Yahoo! we thought that the global internet was going to be too massive for people– they were going to want to stay within their local communities. So we created Yahoo! LA, Yahoo! San Francisco, and so forth. It took us a while to realize that people had only defined “community” by their zip code in the past because that was their only option. Now people could define “community” by a shared love of Beanie Babies. The same seems true for how people use the internet today: they gather in community across zip codes and borders, united by what makes them unique, and what connects them to others.
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