Terry Semel: making fortunes from the web

摘要

Four years ago Yahoo was in bad shape. Terry Semel took over and turned the losses into vast profits. Kate Bulkley looks at the lessons for television. Terry Semel came from a hugely successful career in the movie business. His new-media credentials were few. His secretary at Warner Bros used to print out his emails, which Semel would annotate and return for her to type replies. At 58, he was twice as old as the average Yahoo employee. To many of the tech elite, the luddite from Hollywood seemed an odd choice to lead one of Silicon Valley's signature start-ups. But four years later, those doubting Thomases who poo-pooed Semel's background and his expansionist forecast for one of the internet's most famous brands should prepare their apologies. In 2001, the year that Semel joined as chairman and CEO, Yahoo lost nearly $93m on $717m in revenues. The company - founded in 1994 by PhD candidates in electrical engineering at Stanford University, David Filo and Jerry Yang - had gone from internet darling to one of many net companies suffering from the advertising downturn that had accompanied the dotcom stockmarket crash in 2000.