Yahoo’s Anti-Spam Guy Tim Converse Leaving

Dec 18, 2006 at 5:21pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Yahoo’s lost a number of executives over the past year to small start-ups. Now count another one, especially close to home for search marketers. Tim Converse, the engineering manager who leads anti-spam efforts at Yahoo, is moving on to a start-up himself. Tim writes on his personal blog:

I’ve been mulling this one for a while, but finally had to pull the trigger. I’ll be leaving Yahoo! Search at the end of the month, and going to a small startup.

The decision was hard, because there is absolutely nothing wrong with my Yahoo! job. The people in Engineering, Research and Applied Research (the last of those being where I currently work) are both top-flight and really nice. The company has been good to me, and kept giving me more scope and new interesting problems to work on. And I am proud of the team that I’ve put together over the last couple of years….

Why am I leaving? Well, it’s mostly just that I’ve never worked for a startup before (well, except for a couple of very unfunded and very small ones :)), and have always wanted to mix it up a little betwen startups and bigcorps. I’ll blog more about the particular startup later, but suffice it to say that there’s an odd convergence of both people and subject matter from a couple of different phases of my life

Best of luck, Tim!

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

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Duane Forrester, December 19th, 2006 at 8:11 am ET:

Man, Yahoo seems to be bleeding folks these days. Still, I strangely don’t feel a lack of confidence in them that I would if this were another large company in another industry.

If, say, all the GM execs finally (wisely) decided to jump ship, it would be the end of General Motors for sure.

In the search world, however, we seem to be more environmentally friendly in that we recycle talent. Someone leaves a post, new talent fills the spot while the person leaving goes onto a new niche/opportunity.

Best fo luck to Tim, …and Yahoo.

Yahoo’s Anti-Spam Guy Tim Converse Leaving

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