She was one among a string of bad CEOs for Yahoo. I worked there for a couple of years under another of them. In each case, people thought that this was the one who’d turn the company around. When I joined, I was pretty excited because they owned things like Flickr (still my favorite photo sharing site, long since detached from yahoo), del.icio.us (my favorite bookmark sharing site), and a bunch of neat stuff at Yahoo Developer Network (YQL and Pipes come to mind). Those all seemed pretty significant, but the company never really figured out how to turn those things into business success.

The interesting thing here, though, is that IMO Yahoo has been successful in its own way over the past few years, probably since Verizon sold it. It just doesn’t exhibit the “infinite growth forever” characteristics that make it appealing to investors. Its sports and finance sites remain very popular. It seems to have reached a point of stability as a business. But the current private equity owned company bears little resemblance to the original Yahoo and I certainly wouldn’t consider it a “tech company” in any meaningful way.

It would be kind of entertaining to see what happened if all 60k people accepted the offer, though. I’d be surprised if the company expected more than 10% to do so. Probably even less.

Out of curiosity, what field did you switch to?

That was quick!