We Were Yahoo! by Jeremy Ring

Author:Jeremy Ring [Ring, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Posthill Press
Published: 2017-12-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Terry Semel: Old World Failure

On April 17, 2001, Yahoo! announced that Terry Semel had been hired as the new CEO. Semel’s very successful career culminated with his rise to become chairman and co-CEO of Warner Bros. Studios.

Within a few weeks of Semel’s hire I resigned from Yahoo! I chose to leave for several good reasons, but in the end, I knew it was time. I’d accomplished as much as I could and had no interest in trying to prove myself to a new management team. Coinciding with the arrival of the new CEO, Anil had also resigned, and Jeff Mallett, another mentor, who was the inspiration and drive behind the first six years of Yahoo!’s existence, was going to be less influential in a Terry Semel-led regime.

When I walked out of the building the last day, I was proud of all my accomplishments but I did have two regrets. The first was that we hadn’t developed stronger relationships with large, more traditional marketers, and second, that myself and the Sales Programs team I led had lost the internal debate to develop a paid search program.

The lifeblood of any organization is the continuation of the corporate culture that inspired its greatness from day one. Yahoo! had a first-rate culture. Employees arrived at work energized, long hours at the office went by too quickly, there was a shared belief in the purpose, goals were clear and achievable yet aggressive, co-workers became family, we learned from an endless collection of brilliant minds, and Yahoo! afforded us an ecosystem that allowed us to gain interest in topics miles outside our own experiences. What was most important and fulfilling each day was to have a role in changing the lives of the more than 7.5 billion people on Earth.

This was the Yahoo! culture. Even if we had different ideas on how to achieve our goals, each and every one of us came to work each day with the pride and excitement that we were making the world better. And we did. Yahoo! revolutionized the way the global population accesses information at its fingertips. That’s a pretty good place to grow up!

By the end of my Yahoo! tenure, that culture had eroded. How could it not have? Revenue was dramatically decreasing. Google had demonstrated it was far more formidable than Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, or some other lost soul of a business we beat back with ease. Enthusiasm over earlier acquisitions, such as the Mark Cuban-founded Broadcast.com had been extremely disappointing, and most notably our stock price had cratered.

However, at the core of all the negativity was comfort knowing that with Jeff Mallet remaining and Jerry and David still intimately involved, not all hope was lost. My close friend Bob Greenberg had a history of world-changing success right out of dreams and fantasies. At Harvard in the mid-seventies Bob’s arch nemesis for smartest kid in the class was Bill Gates. After graduation, Gates called Bob and asked him to join his early start-up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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