Analysis: Has Yahoo cloned Susan Decker?
Yahoo (YHOO) watchers are familiar with Susan Decker, the company’s president and the heir-apparent to the CEO suite. But after this week’s management shakeup, many are probably wondering: Who is Hilary Schneider?
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| Hilary Schneider (left), Decker’s fast-rising deputy, has key similarities to the Yahoo President – and also some helpful differences. |
Schneider, an affable former newspaper executive who joined Yahoo just a year ago, might seem to have come out of nowhere. Still, the reorganization leaves no doubt about her new clout: She now heads the Global Partner Solutions division, which includes all ad sales and basically every publisher relationship Yahoo has. That makes Schneider the most important field general at Yahoo, the person most clearly responsible for making sure the dollars come in the door.
What’s less obvious from Schneider’s bio on Yahoo’s website is that she and Decker are very similar. Not only are they about the same age – both women are in their mid 40s – both are also Harvard MBAs who were econ majors at elite New England colleges before they earned their stripes on Wall Street. Before Decker became a Silicon Valley executive, she was a highly rated stock analyst with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, where she specialized in media and advertising companies. Schneider, meanwhile, was an investment banker at Drexel Burnham Lambert, where she also specialized in media companies.
NOT THE SAME
But there are also notable differences between the two. Most important, Schneider has actually run a traditional media company. As a senior vice president at Knight Ridder, a newspaper chain that McClatchy (MNI) bought last year, she was one of two executives in line for the CEO seat. Several publishers from the largest newspapers in the chain reported to her, as did the online division. (I worked for the San Jose Mercury News, which reported to Schneider.)
From that vantage, Schneider got a unique look at some of the challenges she now faces at Yahoo. As a newspaper executive, she struggled with how to leverage a local paper’s strengths in a digital world where companies like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo had the biggest audience and the smartest engineers. Now that she’s at Yahoo, Schneider has access to plenty of engineers – and she also has the know-how to convince traditional media companies that teaming up with Yahoo is in their best interest.
If Schneider can convince newspapers to do that, it could be very good for Yahoo. Taken together, the nation’s newspapers have strong brands and loyal local audiences. They also have something that Yahoo alone can’t match: payrolls full of local experts who keep tabs on crime, schools, government and more.
PARTNER POWER
Now that Yahoo, Google and Microsoft (MSFT) are clamoring anew to win the battle for online display advertising, newspapers have a special allure. If Yahoo can partner with the right newspapers, the company could potentially have access to a treasure trove of information about its audience's interests, including whether readers are into sports, business, obituaries or education. That data could then be used to serve up ads to the people who are most likely to be interested in them. Eventually, that could mean happier advertisers, and more money in Yahoo’s coffers.
Schneider herself may be uniquely positioned to make these partnerships happen. She has the rare quality of being a numbers person who also knows how to speak the language of journalism. At Knight Ridder, where newsrooms pegged some corporate executives as bean counters who didn’t appreciate the importance of journalism, Schneider won over quite a few editors and publishers.
But there’s a lot of work to do before Yahoo and Schneider get to reap the potential rewards from those kinds of partnerships. To be most effective at Yahoo, Schneider will have to win over the leaders of her divisions, including the salespeople who until this week reported to departing sales chief Gregory Coleman. Schneider might also have to win the respect of engineers who would be suspicious of her background – unlike Decker, she doesn’t have a double major in computer science.
If Schneider can pull it off the partnerships, though, she’ll have done something else that Susan Decker never did.
Schneider may have been good at wooing the poor publishers at Ridder. Unfortunately, the RealCities network was a dog in the Internet boom and she never figured out what to make of it once she got it.
It seems like she has another plum product that may not know where to go. Pinning hopes on the poor dying Newspaper buddies you couldn't leverage before seems like an ill fated "strategy".
You left that whole part of her bio out of your piece.
Google continues to rock. Schneider and Decker will get a higher bump on their options when they gloss Yahoo up for acquisition.
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Yahoo is considered dirty by all. No one wants to work with it. Free the folks in China…maybe that would help.
Yahoo's intended direction is what is crucial here. There are plenty of capable people who could get them there.
What I've seen of Yahoo and Google is a startling lack of creativity and an apalling lack of empathy. They are capitalized with billions and these 'geniuses' can only come up with this mediocre, derivitive, and uninspiring trash? Even television and Hollywood do a better job holding interest they these firms. It seems to me love isn't the only thing money can't buy.
Google and Yahoo are being bled of those who predisposed to join cliques by MySpace and these other me-too sites.
Now Google and Yahoo will have to come up with a scheme to attract people back and win loyalty. They need to hold a person's attention for more than 2 minutes. The only way this will be posible is to convince local populaces and local entertainment entities to produce content for them at a pitiance. A pitiance because that is the reason Wall Street is so high on such stocks: Wall Street, Google, Yahoo, and the like see you as someone willing to devote your time, money, and talents for free to their corporate bottom line. Bluntly: they are leaches.
Well people, don't be a fools, the cost of entry into this field is so low and the potential rewards so high that you would be a clown to hand over any of your efforts to Google or Yahoo.
The comments would be hilarious if they were also not so sad. It amazes me that so many "analysts", think that its "people-skills" and "deal-making" and "media background" that are needed to run and yet when they value Yahoo!'s stock, they compare it to internet "technology" companies (GOOG, MSFT), not to media companies.
Decker is smart, and would be a great CEO for a bank or a newspaper. She's a terrible choice for Yahoo! And the fact that her clones are filling the ranks is even sadder for Yahoo! stockholders.
Susan Decker worked out of Donaldson Lufkin and Jenrette's SF office, where I was based for over ten year. Most of us on the sales side, particularly those West Coast based, were treated with disdain by our East Coast brethren, particularly the bankers and analysts. A heady and truly arrogant bunch who brought deal after deal of "bankrupt in 3 year companies" in..it was staggering. Upon her arrival as our Media analyst, Susan Decker was a breath of fresh air. Her door was always open…she displayed very little ego…was always professional and knew her stuff. She was not in to titles or hierachy…though clearly she made alot of deserved money….and contributed greatly to the firm's culture, particularly restoring some of the lost faith and luster of the firm's research department after some inexcusable fiascos and instances of self dealing. "Adult supervision" comes to mind as a narrative of her style. Ultimately, as the firm began to dress itself for sale to Credit Suisse, an exodus of the firm's very best personnel took place. No fault of Susan. So for those of you that want to bet against Susan..do so at your own peril. I am long the stock and bought after seeing Susan at the Milken Conference last year.
she needs to preside over the building great products. anything short of this will lead to more rapid failure for Yahoo. Yahoo suffers from a crisis in product vision. this is a critical skill set that they seem to have lost. Case in point: Panama. 1) if so great, why did it come so late? 2) If so great, where's the financial upside? They guided lower last quarter and for the full 2007.
You left out an important segment of Sue Decker's CV: Not only was she a highly-regarded analyst at DLJ, but she had a successful tenure as Global Head of Equity Research before being hired away by Yahoo! She demonstrated excellent management skills in a notoriously difficult slot, in which she had to supervise her former colleagues (of which I was one), a task that included helping to determine bonuses and helping them manage the increasingly conflicting demands being placed on analysts at major Wall Street firms in the late 90s. Few successful analaysts (as a class, a group notorious for strong egos and suspect people skills) were equipped to be such good managers.
Sue's success at Yahoo! is no surprise to most of us who worked with her. If she's found a near-match in Hillary Schneider, she and the Yahoo! stakeholders will be lucky indeed.
"The writer does not own or otherwise trade any individual technology stocks"
I'm new to this web site, but could not find that you identified the writer at all. Was this intentional or an oversight?
Both of these young ladies seem to be fairly sharp to me. I have never met either one, but somehow I feel they may make a pretty good pair.
I have met some of the senior folks at both Google and Microsoft, Yahoo's two main competitors … if not eventual owners.
For this very reason, I think the new Yahoo team has a better chance in this race than most of the juornalists I follow seem to think. Sure they've stumbled a bit (no one has handled China right thus far … in my opinion, anyway).
But they don't have nearly the number of arch-enemies that Microsoft has (especially here in the U.S.), and they have proven their ability to fend off Wall Street and weather a number of tough storms and attacks (some not justified in my view). Terry was a huge mistake in my opinion, as he demanded far too much compensation not tied directly to his performance. But that's all gone now.
Google is the new shining star, but from what I can tell, the star may have grown far too fast (in both size and arrogance) and could be in for a rude awakening as the Internet enters this new phase.
In short, Microsoft has too many enemies (especially among "consumers", where they see much of their growth) and Google has become far too fat, dumb, and arrogant in just over three years as a public company. Too many legal issues, too little respect for copyrights, too quick to turn their heads to human rights offenders, too quick to BS new product "tests", too many high priced lawyers, and too much stock being dumped into the market by its CEO, lead venture capitalists, and others close to the all important "inside information".
Yahoo has a good shot here. I say either Susan or Hilary could be a very good match against either Eric or Steve. I wouldn't bet against them.
All that being said, you should know I am biased. I am in the middle of some huge copyright infringement "issues" involving both Google and Microsoft.
But I have been at this game for over 25 years and have made some excellent long shot calls along the way.
We'll just have to wait and see about this one.
George P. Riddick, III
Chairman/CEO
Imageline, Inc.
griddick@imageline2.com