Yahoo! exodus continues as Delicious founder resigns

by Darren Davidson, Brand Republic 23-Jun-08, 09:15

LONDON - The brain drain at ailing internet company Yahoo! is continuing apace, with the resignation of Joshua Schachter, the founder of the popular Yahoo!-owned social bookmarking tool Delicious.

Schachter, who sold Delicious to Yahoo! in 2005, blamed his decision to walk on the "decisions of my management".

He said on the S ilicon Valley website TechCrunch: "I was largely sidelined by the decisions of my management. So that was mostly the result rather than the cause, if that makes sense.

"It was an incredibly frustrating experience and I wish I was a lot more like Stewart [Butterfield] in terms of pushing my point of view."

Schachter's resignation comes hot on the heels of the departure of Stewart Butterfield, founder of photo-sharing website Flickr, who resigned in a bizarre leaked resignation letter.

His resignation coincided with that of three more senior executives at the end of last week -- Qi Lu, Brad Garlinghouse, and Vish Makhijani.

Garlinghouse was senior vice-president for communications and communities, with responsibility for Yahoo!'s email and messaging services, Yahoo! Groups and Flickr.

Makhijani, who was senior vice-president of Yahoo!'s search group, is leaving to join Russian search engine Yandex, while Lu was executive vice-president for the company.

The exits follows others and comes after the collapse of Microsoft's proposed takeover deal, which has rocked Wall Street's confidence in the firm under the leadership of Jerry Yang, its embattled chief executive.

Google and Micrsoft have wasted no time in trying to capitalise on the exodus, with attempts to hire Yahoo!'s former staff.

Microsoft took a full-page ad in the San Jose Mercury News over the weekend to tempt Yahoo! search staff to move to Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus.

Comments

George Nimeh - 23/06/2008

The significance of these departures (and Decker's impending reorg) should not be underestimated.Yahoo will be a very different company very soon. I've written about the exodus over on i-boy ... http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2008/06/exodus.html And where the hell is Jerry Yang in all this? How is it that their CEO has remained silent and virtually invisible during all this? Bad form and doesn't bode well for him in the future. And by the way, Stewart Butterfield's (co-founder of Flickr) resignation letter is priceless. ~G~