Sunnyvale, Calif., — Up until now, corporate raider Carl Icahn has not been able to break through Yahoo’s fortress, but a recent rash of executive defections must have Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang feeling pretty lonely.
Amidst the hullabaloo of Microsoft’s abandoned takeover attempt, lawsuits and a tussle with Carl Icahn, Yahoo executives are jumping ship. The latest to leave Yahoo are Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife team behind Yahoo Inc.’s popular photo-sharing service Flickr has resigned, following other top executives that have departed sin
ce the Internet pioneer rejected a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft Corp.
Fake officially departed the company last Friday, while Butterfield will leave on July 12. He will be replaced by product-management director Kakul Srivastava.
The duo intends to pursue another opportunity that they have not yet revealed, Yahoo spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten said Wednesday.
The couple sold Flickr to Yahoo for a reported $35 million in 2005, about a year after they created the Web site for showing off digital photography, and Flickr has been called “one of the few investments Yahoo has not messed up.”
Since then, both have been considered key contributors to various efforts at Yahoo to modernize the company’s technology and bring it into the Web 2.0 era. Fake, who led the effort to create Brickhouse, Yahoo’s San Francisco-based startup incubator, will not be returning from maternity leave.
Fake and Butterfield’s departures are just the latest in a veritable exodus. On their way out, they join Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network Division, who this week was appointed “executive in residence” at venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. He will start there in September.
Also last week, Jeremy Zawodny, who had been Yahoo’s chief open-source developer, and Usama Fayyad, vice president of research and strategic data solutions, announced their exits.
Flickr’s system for displaying and sharing photos attracted such a loyal following that Time magazine included Butterfield and Fake on a 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.
“These are people that are making personal decisions,” said spokesperson Karlsten. “They really are individual departures where people are moving on to new endeavors.”
Still, the exiting parades are a blow to Yahoo, which has been losing talented employees from all ranks of the company for more than two years. The Flickr founders, in particular, were seen as a source of innovative energy.
In February, as Yahoo axed 1,000 jobs, another well-known figure within the company, Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy, decided to leave and take a job with Google.
While it is common in the technology industry for high-ranking officials to leave their posts — either voluntarily or involuntarily — these high-profile departures certainly do not help calm the corporate upheaval at Yahoo.
The company, which has been trying to shake off a financial and technological funk in recent years and has undergone several major restructurings in the past 18 months, is now the target of shareholder anger over its perceived mishandling of Microsoft’s unsolicited acquisition bid, which collapsed.
“The company has been going through turmoil in the last few months,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT. With Yahoo’s annual meeting scheduled for Aug. 1, “We will be looking at weeks more of turmoil,” King continued. “It becomes very hard to accomplish anything in that kind of environment.”
Other Yahoo employees that have departed earlier in the year include Salim Ismail, head of Yahoo Brickhouse; Jeff Bonforte, vice president of social search; Ian Rogers, vice president of Yahoo Music; and Matthew Berardo, senior director of International Business and Product Management, according Tech Crunch.
Had a Microsoft deal been reached, all of Yahoo’s 13,800 employees would have been covered by a generous severance plan that would have paid them if they were fired or quit after being reassigned to a new job within two years of a takeover.