Yahoo confirms big plans for Bellevue

Sometimes tech companies open satellite offices because they recruited a hotshot who doesn't want to move to the mother ship.

On the surface, it looks like Yahoo did that when it hired Dave Sobeski away from Microsoft last November and set him up in a Bellevue office.

It also seemed to be a Googlesque tactic to lure more talent from Microsoft.

But Sobeski, while finally confirming Friday that the company is expanding in the Puget Sound region, said there's much more to the story.

Yahoo's going big in Bellevue, where it will work on one of the three pillars of the company's new strategy, according to Sobeski, senior vice president of platforms and architecture.

"We want to build a big presence up here," he said. "We want to be one of the top employers up here and have people excited about Yahoo up here."

Sobeski wouldn't provide growth projections, but he confirmed that the 115,000 square feet on three floors that the company leased for eight years in the One Twelfth@Twelfth building can accommodate 500 to 600 people.

"We wanted to ensure we had space to grow. We'll figure out how to grow it and what the plan will be," he said.

Yahoo now has about 50 employees on another floor while the former Nortel Networks space it has leased is given the funky Yahoo touch.

"We are Yahooizing the work space," Sobeski said.

Those 50 employees mostly come from a previous Seattle sales office and DMX Group, a small Eastside data-mining company that Yahoo acquired.

DMX was co-founded by Usama Fayyad, a former Microsoft researcher who now heads Yahoo's research group and helped recruit Sobeski.

Sobeski said he's hearing from former co-workers at Microsoft, where he worked nearly 14 years on products ranging from Visual Basic and Internet Explorer to Windows Vista.

But he's also hoping to attract stars from Amazon.com, Adobe, the University of Washington and smaller companies in the area.

Exactly what he'll do in Bellevue is undisclosed, but Sobeski's enthusiastic about helping to further transform Yahoo into a platform for developers.

Sobeski noted that reaching out to developers is one of the priorities outlined by Chief Executive Jerry Yang, along with serving as a great launching point for the Web and connecting advertisers and publishers.

"One of the things we definitely think about is how do we turn things into a platform, how do we go build that great ecosystem," he said.

Will Yahoo provide hosted developer services similar to Amazon's Web Services?

"We won't say no and we're not officially saying yes, but we believe it's interesting," Sobieski answered.

Sobeski, 39, said Yahoo was attracted by the talent in the Puget Sound area.

"It wasn't actually me coming that got the ball rolling, there were other people that said, 'Hey, there's talent,' " he said.

He reiterated that several times: the main reason for a Bellevue office is to attract software developers who can help build the Yahoo platform:

"We're going to go build the right technologies up here and the right services. What is up here is just the talent that we care about, which is really technical people who can solve problems fast and efficiently. That's what you want."

Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com