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Drainage: Flickr co-founders bail on Yahoo
June 18, 2008
Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife team behind Flickr, the photo-sharing site that sparked the Web 2.0 craze when it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, have decided to leave the struggling internet group.
I caught up with Stewart by email as he was rushing to catch a plane, and he confirmed the rumours. Meanwhile, Valleywag seems to have obtained a copy of Butterfield’s resignation letter (it’s a classic of the genre, best read in the voice of Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood).
In our email exchange, Butterfield stressed that this was a move that he and Caterina had been planning for some time, and is not related to the current Microsoft-Yahoo drama.
That jibes with what we have been hearing since February: After three years inside a big, bureaucratic company, and now that their payouts from the acquisition have vested, the Flickr founders have decided to move on to greener pastures.
Still, the decision was no doubt made easier by the collapse of the Microsoft-Yahoo talks. Kevin Johnson, Microsoft’s internet guru, is apparently a big fan of the Flickr founders, and they could have had a bright future inside a combined company.
WOW, that is fantastic. Not only tongue-in-cheek crazy, but actually well-written too.
Posted by: Dan Wright | June 19th, 2008 at 3:52 am | Report this commentWhen you’re entrepreneurial and you’ve experienced the ups and downs of running your own business, it’s tough to work to someone else’s agenda.
Entrepreneurs don’t fit easily into larger corporates because they like to make their own decisions and take their own risks. That’s how they built their business in the first place. Not many business owners do it to try and get themselves a new boss.
Having experienced the 4 stage process of “build; sell; earnout; leave”, I’ve seen it underpinned by emotions of “excitement & fear; elation and anti-climax; frustration; relief”. Butterfield and Fake are simply following the nature of the entrepreneurial spirit.
Posted by: Andy Warren | June 19th, 2008 at 10:49 am | Report this comment