It's not clear whether Brad Garlinghouse, the Yahoo executive who famously called for Yahoo to focus on doing fewer things well in his "Peanut Butter Memo," is out the door. AllThingsD says no, or not quite yet; TechCrunch says yes. Premature or not, Michael Arrington's epitaph to Garlinghouse's career at Yahoo is remarkable in its tone:
Now that Caterina Fake has left Yahoo and Stewart Butterfield has tendered his abstract resignation letter, what will the widely beloved Flickr cofounders do? And where will they go? Brendon Wilson, who worked in the Valley himself before returning to his native Canada, pointed us to an effort by a group of geeks to convince Fake and Butterfield to come back to Vancouver, British Columbia, where Flickr was launched. The welcome wagon even turned out a video slideshow of Flickr photos to remind the couple just how beautiful the city can be. Look, a rainbow! And it may just be working — last night, Butterfield added himself to the Bring Stewart and Caterina Home! group on Facebook. Fake may have other plans, though.
Facebook's vice president of product management, is reportedly leaving the company to join Benchmark Capital. Two possible interpretations leap to mind: Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO recently hired away from Google, is pushing out, one by one, the executives closest to Zuckerberg, leaving him increasingly isolated. Or Zuckerberg, loathe to give up control over Facebook as a product, is doing it himself. Update: Cohler is joining the VC firm as a general partner, not an entrepreneur-in-residence, as we'd first reported — a considerably more prestigious role, where he'll be investing money in startups himself, rather than waiting to get funded. He'll stay tied to Facebook a "special advisor" to Zuckerberg — which suggests that any falling-out was not with the Facebook CEO. Cohler, for his part, tells Swisher he got along well with Sandberg, and helped recruit her to the firm.
Now that Google is to run the most profitable parts of Yahoo search advertising, what's a Yahoo search scientist like Qi Lu to do? Leave the company. Sources tell BoomTown that Lu is also mapping his way out of Big Purple, following following the Flickr founders, Usama Fayyad and Jeff Weiner. It's a big blow. One former Yahoo employee who yawned over Fayyad's departure tells us: "Now Qi Lu, on the other hand. People would go to war for him."
Yahoos are still buzzing about Jeff Weiner's departure for the world of venture capital. Before he left, many of his coworkers thought he was a shoo-in for a CEO gig at Facebook. Now that he's an entrepreneur-in-residence jointly at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners — both investors in Facebook — the conspiracy theorists have changed their patter: Weiner's just in a holding pen until Accel and Greylock can boot founder Mark Zuckerberg, install Weiner as CEO, and take the company public. "Zuck is definitely out ... it's just a matter of time. It's clear as day," one tipster writes. Clear as mud, rather. It makes sense that Yahoos, bitter at Facebook's success and eager to have one of their own deliver a comeuppance to Zuckerberg, would be circulating this rumor. But here's what they don't know about Jeff Weiner and Mark Zuckerberg.
Stewart Butterfield, the cantankerous cofounder of Flickr, has, as we've noted, tendered his resignation to Yahoo, as has wife and cofounder Caterina Fake. The two recently celebrated, along with Flickr's other original employees, a "Vestfest" for their take from the $35 million sale of Flickr to Yahoo three years ago; we'd heard as long ago as October that Butterfield was ready to leave. But we couldn't have anticipated the manner of Butterfield's exit. In a long, rambling email to Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse, under whose aegis Flickr fell, Butterfield described the company as a tin-smithing concern, but found that there was no place for him as the company left its metallurgical roots. Better this entertaining nonsense than some tired cliche of "bleeding purple," I suppose. I'm also told that this email is classic Butterfield, and that his employees at Flickr would stage dramatic readings of some of his better missives at Flickr's San Francisco headquarters, which will now be run officially by Kakul Srivastava, Flickr's longtime de facto chief. Butterfield's full resignation letter:
When Ludicorp co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake sold Flickr to Yahoo, they also moved from their Vancouver headquarters to the Bay Area to take up jobs at the Sunnyvale campus of the new parent company. Their biggest innovation since was the birth of their daughter, Sonnet — which took considerably less time than adding video to the photo sharing site. Now Fake and Butterfield have joined the stampede, with Fake having left Yahoo on Friday and Butterfield due to stick around until July 12, reports TechCrunch — confirming rumors we'd heard regarding Butterfield's plans to move on. (Photo by Caterina Fake)
It's as if Yahoo president Sue Decker hasn't heard of a thing called Web search. How else to explain her mealy-mouthed memo to Yahoos on EVP Jeff Weiner's departure? Any one with any reason to care knows or will quickly find out that Weiner left Yahoo for a sweet gig spotting startups for VC firms Accel Partners and Greylock. But in her memo, Decker asked her charges to believe Weiner is leaving to spend more time with his family.
He invented The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Have you friggin' heard of it? Dan Lyons, the Apple CEO impersonator whose identity so bedeviled us until he was outed last year, is leaving Forbes for Newsweek, taking the place of Steven Levy as Newsweek's house technophile. So much for a brave leap into the unknown world of the Web. Lyons had made no secret of his discontent at Forbes, where the website is run separately from the print magazine and the two sides hate each other; high-level strongarming was required to get Forbes.com to link to Lyons's blog, which he will now take with him to Newsweek. (Photo by Mark Coggins)
Scratch another name off ex-Yahoo Bradley Horowitz's list of Yahoo's doomed and departed. Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner, the man in charge of core products like Yahoo.com, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger has resigned from the company, a person familiar with the situation told the LA Times. He's accepted a new role as an entrepreneur-in-residence shared between venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. That means he'll get an office (or two), a big paycheck (or two) and a charge to think up big ideas — a great gig for a new dad. It's an unusual arrangement, but both firms are stuffed full of ex-Yahoos who probably see an angle in helping Weiner out. The LA Times's source says Yahoo will not immediately replace Weiner, but instead delegate his responsibilites to group of execs. Kind of the way you spread peanut butter over toast, you know?
If Jeff Weiner, head of Yahoo's search, community, and media properties, leaves the company, who's left to run things? An outside hire seems unlikely, Michael Arrington points out, given Carl Icahn's fight with the Yahoo board. That leaves a battlefield promotion for one of Weiner's direct reports, shown here from left to right: Brad Garlinghouse, Scott Moore, Vish Makhijani, and Tapan Bhat. Here's our handicapping of this horserace:
WASPy, blonde Martha Stewart doppelganger Susan Lyne has stepped down as chief executive of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and will be replaced by new co-CEOs Robin Marino and Wenda Harris Millard, the popular former Yahoo sales chief. As Gawker pointed out, the stock price is tanking, but Lyne did bring the company's books back to black after Stewart's obstruction-of-justice conviction. (Photo by AP/Mary Altaffer)
Venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, both laden with ex-Yahoos, and with plenty of consumer Internet startups in their portfolio, have offered Yahoo's Jeff Weiner a chance to bail on the company. Kara Swisher cites VC sources, who say Weiner could very well turn his extended paternity leave into a departure from Yahoo altogether. Unusually, the firms are said to be offering Weiner a chance to split his time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at both firms.
Sun Microsystems chief researcher John Gage will leave the company and join venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Gage, who joined Sun in 1982, will focus on "green" investments. Meanwhile, Sun wilts. After corporate clients slowed their tech infrastructure investments, Sun reported second quarter losses and Gage is the second top executive to leave the company in the last two weeks. Rival Hewlett-Packard poached Sun's top salesman Don Grantham. Sun says as many as another 2,500 could follow the pair out the door, though executive suites HP and Kleiner Perkins do not await them all.
Perhaps my weekend sojourn in Hollywood left me jaded. But an email anonymously tipping Valleywag about YouTube's "head of monetization" and former Google Web search lead Shashi Seth leaving the Googleplex to become COO at multimedia browser developer Cooliris smelled fishy. Seems we weren't the only site that got a tip, which suggests that our Yahoo Mail-using correspondent is probably a flack using the time-honored entertainment industry trick of a publicist "leaking" a detail to the press. My guess? Someone representing Cooliris. Though hiring the guy who was ultimately accountable for the failure of YouTube to make any money doesn't seem like a real "top talent" poaching from Google.
COO Freddy Mini will be taking over Krim's job, with Krim staying on the board, as the Paris-based personalized homepage company changes focus to widgets. "No concrete reason for his departure was provided," writes Caroline McCarthy. Surely our tipsters can alleviate the circumspection and tell us why. [CNET] (Photo by Doc Searls)
We won't have Katie Hafner (pictured here in a 2000 appearance on PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer) to kick around anymore. Her former colleague Sharon Waxman, who left the paper in January, mentioned in an aside to an ode to fellow hacks hurt by the decline of the fishwrap business that Hafner had been laid off. If it were up to us, we'd have given "Blog 'Til They Drop" author Matt Richtel the pink slip. Just imagine: He might have to blog for a living, with all the perils implicit therein.
Maybe you don't know who Engage.com's Julian Brass is? Odd. Because the 43 people tagged in the farewell-to-San Francisco video Brass uploaded to Facebook do. One of them forwarded it to us with this note: "This is the most painful shit I've ever seen in my life from Engage.com's Julian Brass." Really, how would we not share it with you after such a cold tribute from a so-called friend? Our favorite part is when Brass points the camera at his Francisco Street home, where he lived for all of a year and a half, and says, "I always just said: It's the pink one guys; it's the pink one. Ha ha." After viewing our excerpt, go check out Brass's full seven-minute video, slideshows and all. We're out of words to describe it, having previously banned them all.
Microsoft's in-game advertising executive Carol Koh Evans has left the company, rejoining wedding-planning site The Knot as its COO. Prior to Microsoft, Evans led The Knot through its IPO in 1999 as the company's head of corporate development. Evans is the second major media executive to bolt Microsoft this year. She follows Joanne Bradford, who left the company to join Los Angeles-based ad agency Spot Runner in March. Evans's departure is another blow to Microsoft's plan to grow its online business internally — "organically" as part of "Project Granola," as the company calls it — following the company's failed bid to acquire Yahoo.
