Flickr Founders Fake & Butterfield Latest To Leave Yahoo

Yahoo feels like a nation that won its independence only to see all its leaders immediately flee the country. The latest emigrants: Flickr cofounders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield. Their departure is unlikely to stall Flickr, but it gives a terrible impression of Yahoo as a company in further disarray. TechCrunch broke the news of […]

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Yahoo feels like a nation that
won its independence
only to see all its leaders immediately flee the country. The latest
emigrants: Flickr cofounders Caterina
Fake
and Stewart Butterfield. Their departure is unlikely to stall
Flickr, but it gives a terrible impression of Yahoo as a company in further
disarray.

TechCrunch

broke
the news of the departures.

Valleywag has
Butterfield’s resignation letter, where he alludes to
Yahoo being a company that had expanded beyond its core "tin" production to
the degree he felt "my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing."
Aside from Yahoo’s woes, the departures might also be due to the co-founders
coming to the end of a deal with Yahoo, as Thomas Hawk

speculates
.

It’s difficult to know how seriously Butterfield means what he says in
the letter. If it’s really that Yahoo has expanded too much — well, Flickr
was one of those expansions. A good one, of course — and one Yahoo backed to
the degree of
shutting down Yahoo Photos
last year.

Techmeme has
more discussion
on the departures from across the web.
Via News.com,
see also
what
people on Flickr are saying
about the move (the
Flickr blog still has no news — get
with it, Yahoo!).

Yahoo Loses Jeff
Weiner But Probably Won’t Replace Him
from us covers the departure of
high-profile search czar Jeffrey Weiner last week. Our
Yahoo
Employees
archives detail many other departures.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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