Yahoo's Ex-COO: "I Was Fired and That's OK"

PARIS – Henrique de Castro just spoke publicly for the first time since being ousted as Yahoo's COO. And he took the high road.

I was fired and that's OK. Being fired is part of your career options."

Much has been written about de Castro's exit. When Marissa Mayer took the head of Yahoo in 2012, she brought de Castro along from Google. Not because they were both Google alums but because Google dominated ad sales and it was logical to look there, de Castro said. But his hiring was controversial: his compensation put him among the highest paid men in corporate America and set equally high expectations for him to turn around Yahoo's troubled advertising business.
De Castro was let go after a little over a year on the job, with ad sales as dreadful as ever. Wild figures circulated about his generous severance: it turned out to be nearly $58 million, including $16 million in performance bonuses that, were I a shareholder, I'd have a hard time to swallow. (De Castro refused to confirm figures – he's under quite the stringent NDA, host Loïc Le Meur warned – but said his kind of pay is "normal:" "These are jobs that pay well because there's a high risk." By this token, nuclear plant workers and firefighters should be billionaires.)
"To be the COO of a non-growing business is a difficult position," de Castro explained. "With hindsight, I don't think a COO was needed."

If you're a company that needs very fast movement, you probably don't need an aggregation of functions under a COO. You need the CEO to have his or her hands in everything."

That's a polite way to refer to rumors that Mayer and he simply did not get along. But he does laud her work. "Search, mobile, video and media are not today what they'll be in the future," he said. "Marissa and the rest of the managing team have done a great job positioning the company to capture these future trends." He compares Yahoo's current situation with Apple in 1998: everyone was leaving and calling time of death on the company, when it was in fact readying to take over the world.
"Now, he says, the question is, will they catch the trends on time?"