14 DAY TRIAL // The latest one to up and leave the Yahoo! team is Andy Baio, founder of event planning site "Upcoming". Despite it's only been two years since the site was acquired by Yahoo, he decided to call it quits and this is happening at the worst time possible for the Sunnyvale based company as he is just the latest one in a pretty long line to do so.
The break up between the two was amiable and he comments on the recent exodus from Yahoo! saying that it is not a trend to find the next best thing or the next hot ticket but more like a need to fulfill a pragmatic entrepreneurial calling. "I think it's part of the natural ebb-and-flow," Baio said of entrepreneurs moving from big companies back to startups. "Entrepreneurial types are always itching to build something new, and that often means starting from scratch." For Baio, a departure from Yahoo means picking up the reins full time at his chronic side project, Waxy.org.
The last to leave the Yahoo! ship before Baio was the VP of Sales Strategy, Jacki Kelley who left for Martha Stewart's Living Omnimedia, following in the footsteps of sales lead Wenda Harris Miller, who had made the switch to MSLO earlier in the year. According to All Things D's sources, Kelley left mostly because of all the travels required by the recent New York to Sunnyvale reorganization.
It seems troubling that Yahoo! is off-loading people in high ranking positions and even more, young talent that is quite rare to find, but to be doing this in a period of rebound after the happenings that concluded with the coming to helm of Jerry Yang seems more like a madman's policy rather than the normal changes implied by any lead management switches.