So for this weeks case we had to read about Yahoo! and how they got their start. Yesterday I was looking around the New York Times and came across this article saying that the board is going through a complete overhaul following the resignation of Jerry Yang, one of Yahoo's co-founders. Check out the article
here. From what I have read, it seems like the other co-founder of Yahoo, David Filo, will remain on the board but it goes to show how it is a different world when you first create a business and then start to run the corporation.
Yahoo was highly criticized back in 2008 when they denied a buy out from Microsoft that would have been worth 44.6 billion dollars. Yang was not only opposed to this deal, he was also criticized by investors that he did not do enough to make the stock grow during the time when he was CEO. I have to imagine he left under poor circumstances and probably did not like the direction the company was headed.
I am always amazed by the CEO/owners that do not take these gozillian-dollar deals on wall street. I think partly because people form a great emotional attachment to their job, but I think mostly that some of these guys have too many ideas for their company. As it was repeated to us so many times in class, your company cannot be all things to everyone, and an entrepreneur must know when to cash out and move the ideas elsewhere. Who knows, may be if Yang have cashed out, he might have given his remaining ideas a better chance.
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