Jeff Weiner, the Executive VP in charge of Yahoo!'s Network Division, announced yesterday that he is leaving the company to take up an Executive in Residence position both at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.Weiner, having served in various key leadership roles at Yahoo! in the last 7 years, helped drive the Network's Open and Social strategy and the expansion of the search engine's category-leading consumer web products, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Messenger and Flickr.
Joining two competing venture capitalist firms is unusual move, especially since he may become privy to sensitive information, but Weiner is clearly regarded highly enough by both firms for them to agree to share. As EIR he will advise the leadership of existing consumer technology portfolio companies for both firms, and help evaluate new investments.
Furthermore, it should be easier for an Executive in Residence to withdraw from discussions where conflicts may arise than it would be for a full partner. It is typically a position given to talented business leaders in-between jobs, and in this capacity Weiner will be able to find the next great start-up in need of a CEO.
No new word yet on who will succeed Weiner at Yahoo!, with his team reporting to company President Sue Decker on an interim basis. Rumours are circling of another company restructuring, with Hillary Schneider, Executive VP of Global Partner Solutions, taking over his responsibilities. There are also rumours of the company looking to replace CEO and company founder Jerry Yang, following shareholder dissatisfaction with his role in the Microsoft - Yahoo! merger negotiations, which should come as no surprise to bigmouthmedia news readers.
Accel and Greylock both released public statements on their homepages announcing the addition of Weiner to the fold. "Jeff's operational experience in scaling products, teams and revenue will help Greylock enhance our capabilities and add value to our investments," said David Sze, General Partner at Greylock. Theresia Ranzetta, General Partner at Accel was quoted as saying "We look forward to leveraging Jeff's expertise regarding the convergence of media and technology for existing and future Accel portfolio properties."
Now we're just waiting to see what Yahoo! will do without him.
