A History of Yahoo!'s Six CEOs
Did Yahoo!'s (YHOO) Marissa Mayer fail at leadership? According to TheStreet's Jim Cramer, the 41-year-old chief executive did not succeed in inspiring her employees.
After 20 years as a public company, Yahoo! will no longer be an independent company once Verizon Communications (VZ) - Get Report completes its acquisition of the former Internet giant. Paying $4.8 billion, Verizon plans to incorporate Yahoo! with its AOL division.
Despite its historic place in the country's tech boom-and-bust cycles, Yahoo! has had six CEOs since it incorporated and each executive had a similar set of challenges -- primarily, to stave off the growing competition from Alphabet (GOOGL) - Get Report , Facebook (FB) - Get Report and other tech behemoths that passed by the company.
According to data from TheStreet affiliate BoardEx, Yahoo! has also had 47 directors since 1995, which is considered a high level of turnover. It has 11 directors right now, which includes Mayer and the Chairman Maynard Webb.
Here's a brief overlook of each of Yahoo!'s chief executives through the years.
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August 1995 to May 2001
Tim Koogle was Yahoo!'s first CEO, appointed in March 1995, shortly after meeting with co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo. The former Motorola executive became chairman in 1999.
As the Internet sensation's first CEO, Koogle was at the helm when Yahoo! went public in 1996. Yahoo! priced shares at $13 per share, but the stock opened on its first day of trading at $24.50. The stock reached an intraday high of $43 and closed at $33 on its first day.
Koogle was also in charge as the dot-com bubble swirled higher -- and when it popped in 2000. Ultimately, it was the Internet bubble's crash that facilitated his removal as CEO. He stepped down in March 2001.
Yahoo! shares underwent four different stock splits between 1997 and 2000.
May 2001 to June 2007
Following the dot-com crash, Terry Semel was next to take the reins. Appointed Yahoo!'s chairman and CEO in April 2001, he officially started his job on May 1, 2001 and remained CEO for six years.
At the urging of co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, Semel tried to buy Google in 2001. After meeting with Google Co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Semel proposed to buy the search competitor for $3 billion, but a merger between the two never happened.
Yahoo! also tried to buy Facebook back in 2006.
Semel resigned in mid-2007 amid shareholder pressure over the company's performance and about his compensation. (His 2006 compensation comprised of stock options worth $70 million and a $1 salary.)
Semel passed the torch to Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang in 2007, but remained the company's chairman until January 2008.
Shares of Yahoo! rose 152% under his tenure. (Yahoo! had a two-for-one stock split in May 2004.)
June 2007 to January 2009
David Filo and Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo! in 1995. Yang served on the board of directors of the company he founded since March 1995, but stepped into the CEO position in June 2007 following the firing of Semel.
As Yahoo! was feeling the pressure from Google, the company was approached by Microsoft
with a $45 billion takeout offer in 2008. Yang and Yahoo!'s board ultimately turned down the offer, much to investor criticism, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Yang stepped down from his role as chief executive in early 2009 and returned to his role as "Chief Yahoo!," a title appointed to him shortly after he and David Filo created the Internet website, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web."
In 2012, Yang resigned from Yahoo!'s board and severed ties with the company he helped to launch.
Separately, Yang also directed Yahoo!'s $1 billion investment in Alibaba in 2005, prior to becoming CEO.
Shares of Yahoo! sank 130% during his tenure.
January 2009 to September 2011
Carol Bartz joined Yahoo! as chief executive on Jan. 13, 2009 and stayed until Sept. 6, 2011. As the previous executive chairman of design software and services company Autodesk
(she was also CEO of the company for 14 years), Yahoo! hailed her as a "veteran technology executive" in a press release announcing her hiring.
Just four months into her new role, Reuters cited Bartz for "upending the organizational structure, replacing executives and cutting costs including 675 jobs, or 5% of the workforce," it said.
But her no-nonsense attitude wasn't enough for Yahoo!, which was having trouble deciding if it was a media company or a technology company and in the meantime losing talent and ad sales to Facebook and Google.
Bartz was fired by phone in September 2011 by Chairman Roy Bostock. The board was reportedly "growing impatient with the lack of turnaround results," according to The Wall Street Journal.
Shares of Yahoo! rose 6.4% during her tenure.
January 2012 to May 2012
Scott Thompson was hired as Yahoo!'s fifth CEO in January 2012. But after just five months on the job, he was fired from Yahoo! after it was discovered that the 58-year-old executive embellished his resume. Activist investor Dan Loeb sent a letter to Yahoo!'s board of directors citing Thompson's "accounting and computer science" degree from Stonehill College. However, the College did not offer a computer science degree at the time.
The former PayPal
executive's big accomplishment while CEO of Yahoo! was initiating a restructuring plan which included a workforce reduction. Some 2,000 employees (of its 14,000 total at the time) lost their jobs under Thompson.
Thompson's "deep understanding of online businesses combined with his team building and operational capabilities will restore the energy, focus, and momentum necessary to grow the core business and deliver increased value for our shareholders," Yahoo!'s then chairman Roy Bostock said at the time of his hiring. "The search committee and the entire Board concluded that he is the right leader to return the core business to a path of robust growth and industry-leading innovation."
Under Thompson shares of Yahoo! fell 1.7%.
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July 2012 to present
Marissa Mayer was hired as Yahoo!'s chief executive in July 2012.
Mayer, 41, a veteran of Google, was tasked with righting the Internet giant's sinking ship. She initiated a focus on MaVeNS, an acronym that stands for mobile, social, native advertising and social.
Under her helm, Yahoo! also spent $2.2 billion in acquisitions, including the purchase of Tumblr in May 2013 for $1.1 billion. The company acknowledged earlier this year that the microblogging site had fallen by $230 million since it was acquired.
Shares of Yahoo! have surged 152% over her tenure through Friday's closing price. However, the rise in stock price has to do with Yahoo!'s 15% stake in Alibaba
, the Chinese e-commerce giant that listed its American Depository Shares in the U.S. in 2014 rather than an improving business. Yahoo!'s stake in Alibaba is worth roughly $30.5 billion as of June 30. Yahoo! shares fell 33.7% in 2015. Yahoo also has a 36% percent stake in Yahoo Japan worth $967 million and $6 billion in cash, according to CNBC.
The company expects to generate 2016 revenue (excluding traffic acquisition costs) of $3.4 billion to $3.6 billion, down 18% to 23% from 2014. Operating income is expected at $175 million to $275 million, a fraction from the $755 reported in 2014.