Around the Net
Reports: Garlinghouse Out At AOL
- Bloomberg, Thursday, November 17, 2011 12:37 PM
According to multiple reports this week, Brad Garlinghouse is on the way out at AOL. President of AOL’s applications and commerce group, and head of its Silicon Valley operations, Garlinghouse came on in 2009 to help revive growth at the struggling Web company. “The turnover deals a blow to AOL’s comeback effort, led by Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong,” note Bloomberg. “Already the company has struggled to hang on to users and advertisers, which are increasingly flocking to social-networking sites, such as Facebook Inc. AOL shares lost 37 percent this year before today.”
Garlinghouse previously worked at Yahoo where he famously penned a critical memo to management. In what came to be known as the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” Garlinghouse said Yahoo had spread itself too thinly across many businesses. “Brad’s a really strong manager and when you lose strong people, it’s never a good thing for a company,” Geoff Ralston, a partner at educational start-up incubator Imagine K12, who worked with Garlinghouse at Yahoo, tells Bloomberg. Separately, Sarah Lacy, a senior editor at TechCrunch, the technology blog that AOL bought last year, is also heading for the door, Bloomberg reports, citing a source.
