Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo – but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.
Fake officially left last Friday. Butterfield (who still officially runs Flickr) will leave on July 12. Kakul Srivastava, the director of product management for Flickr, will take over Stewart’s role as general manager of Flickr. Sara Wood will take over Kakul’s previous position.
From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last from either of them.
Butterfield and Fake created Flickr in 2004. It began as a photo-sharing feature of a gaming project, has since blossomed into one of the premier photo sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. In June 2007 Yahoo shutdown Yahoo Photos, making Flickr their exclusive photo sharing website. Today Flickr hosts over 2 billion images.
titanic sinking
all jumping off
Huge respect for those guys (Flickr), it’s a shame after losing so much shareholder value, Yahoo is losing so much talent too.
wow..good people. They’re very entrepreneurial so I guess they’ll start a new company.
Yes, I heard a lot about the couple Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield.
About how innovative and inspiring they are. They are real tech people
Hmmm.. time to sell my yahoo.. before i loose more.
Cheers, Nag
This is a shame. Flickr is quite possibly my favorite service out there, and its future is indefinite, and it’s really not at any fault.
If it was me, i’d be finding away to seperate it from yahoo. Too much awesome in flickr to let it sink like that.
Since you posted this I bet they’ve both already had offers. It won’t be a hard migration 1-3 miles up the 101 for a lot of Yahooers.
I fear for Flickr’s future.
Hope to hear from them soon… Flickr is an amazing site… why they don’t join Facebook and create photo-magic ?
don’t worry, its ok – flickr are outsourcing to picasa web.
@jorel314 I fear for them as well. With how things have been unraveling for Yahoo I’m scared for the future of all their entities. Flickr is an amazing app – I pray it doesn’t go down with the rest of the ship.
wow! If anyone didn’t recognize before what’s going on any big Y, this one should help to get the big picture.
No need to worry about the future of Flickr – it’s well-protected from the uppings and downings of YHOO and will continue to be awesome. Kakul is actually better than me anyway — ask anyone on the team.
@ Steward
Good luck with whatever you’re going to do next and thanks for the insight. Good call on making a move now
Yahoo – deadpool in 12 months
um, i think caterina left 8 months ago, and stewart left 6 months ago. nice work getting the scoop.
Stewart, what’s next for you? Interested in joining an exciting startup?
Best wishes to both of you in whatever your next endeavors are!
That is sad to hear. M$ is to blame for this whole thing.
Hi Stewart I hope you did created a tool to move photos out from flickr b4 ur departure. I am not much interested doing it now but just in case.
They didn’t create flickr. Their programmer did, and they marketed it.
Yahoo! is a dying giant. Dying slowly, because it’s still a freaking giant! They lost vision years ago and had to save some mindshare acquiring companies. But in addition to his vision, Jerry has lost his mind. And talented people would rather quit and collect unemployment (yeah, right!) than work for a clown.
Ditching Yahoo for Etsy? If so, a great move, well at least financially.
I am starting to feel bad for yahoo all of a sudden. Pity.
Mike it seems to me that your posts of late are written more to incinerate rather than illuminate.
@Dave Dugdale: Oh, really? And how? By offering 60% premium that only an idiot wouldn’t take?
Flickr has been going down the tubes since Yahoo bought them. I have had a number of friends had their Pro accounts cancelled and Flickr is horrible about responding to commercial key requests even though their website says “2 weeks” as the response time. I hope Flickr dies because of Yahoo.
@Nikolay: I agree — some people choose to blame Microsoft for everything. It’s pretty lazy, if you ask me. Sure, in some instances, it’s accurate, but in this case? MS offered a huge premium to acquire the company. Yang delayed, refused and erected all kinds of poison pill defenses. Then, essentially decided that Yahoo could become Google’s “b*tch” for at least a temporary period, completely handing over the keys to GOOG and disrupting their ability to sell integrated ads across all their properties.
Remember the Borland days when Microsoft buyout Borland employees instead of buying the company itself. Basically Microsoft is using the same tactic this time but not as monopolistic to get the attention of the Justice Department.
People who left Yahoo are probably being paid to leave. The severance package is very attractive if in the event Yahoo lays the employees off. However, I’m really surprised these guys left leaving behind the big severance package. I guessed there’s someone else that’s giving these guys more money than the severance package to fold Yahoo’s hand into Microsoft so the acquisition can easily be completed.
I am no doubt this is Microsoft doing. When people think positively about Microsoft, I wonder if these people are smart or have even graduated from college or have done their homework. In any event, the greatest threat to Yahoo is the threat of internal chaos caused by Microsoft offering nice cash rewards for top managers to make the move to leave the company; not necessarily come to Microsoft. Remember this … Borland had a bidding war with Microsoft for its project manager. Microsoft ended up outbidding Borland, and put that project manager on a year vacation so they can beat Borland to the market with its Microsoft Visual C++.
If history is any lesson, when a strategy works before, it ought to work now. And most people are too dumb to recognize this.
Oh well … evolution is moving fast enough.
good the dead energy is shaking out … yahoo will be fine
@Sanity >> What a trip… I guess you picture Ballmer exactly like Dr. Evil (from Austin Powers), with his little finger next to the mouth ordering: “BUY THEM!!! BUY THEM!! HUHUHUHAHAHAHAH!!!” =D “DEVELOPERS!!! DEVELOPERS!! DEVELOPERS!!!” … “YEAH BABY!!! YEAH!!!” xD
So she left months ago and didn’t return from maternity leave, he’s been gone for almost a year, and Kakul has been running things there for months.
A little behind the times today, Techcrunch?
At least Yahoo is cutting back on their executive salary costs!!?? Stewart Butterfield was money. Check it out http://www.read...ex.php?rta=blog
..the followers join the herd because it’s no longer ‘cool’ to be at Yahoo. what’s next for them..my guess is that nothng less than a ‘flicker-like success’ – which was a fluke btw, will be the objective for many yrs to come…
Yahoo btw, still has strong assets and earns revenue!
Microsoft ruins everything.
I wouldn’t read too much into their leaving. Any real entrepreneur isn’t
going to be happy at a huge acquiring company. They stay until the value
of their golden handcuffs drops below the pain of working for a large
organization. Staying for 3 years after acquisition is more than I would have expected.
If Microsoft bought Yahoo!, it is pretty unlikely it would change their plans.
While Yahoo! isn’t nearly as “cool” as it was 5 years ago, a Microsoft owned
Yahoo! would be about as cool as working for MSN.
If this is true (if!), then I just want to take another opportunity to say that it was a pleasure working with you guys and thanks for everything. You are class acts. You are a blessing upon this earth. You made Yahoo a better place for having you. Go forth and do something great!
“Mass-exodus” being the key words for that punchy headline to create panic.
Well done a-ring-tone, well done.
M$ must be proud of you
@35 – so, so lame. “Blessing upon this earth?” Are you serious?
see… i just want to tell those people who made anti MS statements in flickr when MS was rumored to buy Yahoo! they said they will leave flickr if MS buys them. This is really ironic, when MS refused to get Yahoo, the founders leave. Now, what would those stupid users who protested the acquisition do? I think techcrunch did an article on that flickr protest.
i hope these guys come up with another kickass web product.
arrington, do some research
caterina has been on maternity leave for a year and stewart hasn’t been running flickr for 6 months.
When is Rasmus going to leave? i bet within 3 weeks.
Good Luck Stewart! Look forward to your next cool startup.
Cool! So we can expecting a great product like Flickr soon
ValleyWag publishes a pretty bizarre resignation letter of Butterfield
http://valleywa...letter-to-yahoo
and quotes co-workers that Butterfield writes stuff like that all the time.
If that is real (ValleyWag), Yahoo management must be happy to get rid of this distraction. No company of the size of Yahoo has the time for stuff like that.
And would Flickr be profitable on its own? I rarely see an ad.
Cool! So we can expecting a great product like Flickr soon
If Yahoo screws up Flickr after they’re gone, there will be some hell to pay….
I never understood the popularity of flickr myself. Went there a few times and was not impressed.
They vested a few months ago, right? Of course they’re taking off.
Why do I have the feeling that the only thing Yahoo! is losing here a couple of massive T&E accounts?
It’s sad to think that even the founders of Yahoo’s most successful site have left. There is a need to evaluate Yahoo’s performance.