Techcrunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are leaving Yahoo. Fake & Butterfield and their seven employees moved from Vancouver to Silicon Valley in 2005 after Yahoo acquired Flickr for a reported $30 million.
Photo sharing site Flickr is one of the leading lights of Yahoo - but cofounders (and husband/wife team) Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield won’t be around to keep driving the product forward. They are both joining the mass exodus of executives from the company.
From what we hear, neither has imminent plans to work on any new projects, but I suspect we haven’t heard the last from either of them.
Should be interesting to see where they end up - revisiting a Inc.com co-interview from December 2006 leads you to believe that they're now finally free to do it all over again.
Butterfield: We shouldn't have sold when we did, but you don't know that until after the fact. And it's not like we have some tragic life story. We're on the cover of Time magazine and the cover of Newsweek. Reid Hoffman [an early investor in Flickr] said, "You can always do it again. And the amount of money that you'll make on this will change your life in a way that…"
Fake: "…you'll be able to be entrepreneurs the rest of your lives."
Rob Lewis
Rob is the President of Techvibes Media Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Techvibes.com.
His diverse background includes stints in International Trade Finance, Web Development, and Enterprise Software and he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University.
When not blogging on...[more]
