Yahoo! in Jewish hands
The Jew Terry Semel was CEO of the search engine company Yahoo! between 2001 and 2007.
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During his time as Yahoo! CEO Semel used his position to impress on his fellow Jews.
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For instance, Semel in the shape of Yahoo-boss appeared as one of the main speakers at the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco’s meeting, January 25, 2006, according to the organization’s homepage:
300 JCF donors gathered at the Julia Morgan Ballroom to kibbutz and build a Jewish network of business professionals.
Featured speaker Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel gave an engaging, personal talk, sharing his views on philanthropy and leadership.
The Jewish site Jweekly.com writes on the event:
Yahoo CEO talks of philanthropy, teamwork at JCF event
Friday, February 17, 2006
by Maureen Earl, correspondent
With more than 420 million users around the world, Yahoo can claim a high spot on the Internet echelon.
But it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the Sunnyvale-based company.
When Yahoo’s chairman and CEO, Jewish Brooklyn native Terry Semel, first arrived at the company in 2001, it had just lost $98 million on revenue of $717 million.
Semel was determined to put Yahoo back in the black.
His strategy worked.
Last year Yahoo earned $1.2 billion on sales of $5.3 billion – and those 420 million users aren’t bad, either.
On Jan. 25 Semel addressed 300 donors to the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation who gathered for the JCF’s first Business Leadership Council breakfast.
Semel, once one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood and now one of the most commanding leaders in Internet technology, started the keynote address by announcing that he was not a morning person.
“I prefer to take an hour to reflect and catch up in the morning,” he said.
Soft-spoken but authoritative, Semel discussed the importance of philanthropy in business.
“Business and philanthropy go hand in hand,” he said.
“I came from a lower-income family in Brooklyn, yet by the age of 10 or 12 I’d already been taught the importance of giving.
“You need to start kids off that young so that it becomes a habit.
To accomplish things, you also have to give.
At first maybe with time, then later with money, and eventually even both if you are able.
“At the age of 10 it was a dollar from his allowance; today, Semel no longer thinks on a small scale.
“I now think in terms of hundreds of millions,” he said,
“But the same principles apply whether it’s a two-person philanthropy organization or a giant like Yahoo.”
Tikkun olam, repairing the world, is how Semel operates both in philanthropy and business.
He recalled how, as an ambitious young man working as a sales trainee at Warner Bros. in the mid-1960s, his boss would arrive shouting and yelling at all and sundry.
“There and then I decided I would not do that.
How people are treated is vital.”
Semel, who graduated in 1964 with an accounting degree from Long Island University, went on to become chairman and CEO of Warner Bros.
During his 24-year career there, Semel and his business partner, Robert Daly, helped shape the company into one of the world’s largest media outlets, generating nearly $11 billion in total revenue from businesses in 50 countries.
In 1999, Semel and Daly pressed their hands into wet concrete outside Hollywood’s legendary Mann’s Chinese Theater.
With the executives thus immortalized in Hollywood lore, the ceremony marked the last day of work for the two at Warner Bros.
In May 2001, after an 18-month hiatus, Semel joined Yahoo as CEO and chairman immediately after the dot-com collapse in Silicon Valley.
“I was looking for a challenge.
I didn’t take the position for the money,” he said.
Whether he was looking for it or not, Semel has netted $403 million by exercising Yahoo options and selling shares.
He still owns shares and options worth more than $230 million.
The credit of Yahoo’s success, Semel said, goes to his staff and their practiced team ability.
“It’s always about team.
No one wins if it rests on one star athlete.
The superstar ideal will not get you to the Super Bowl, it’s not sustainable.
It has to be the team.
And we [at Yahoo] actually like each other – we love the challenge.”
Last year Yahoo added 220 people a month and now employs about 10,000.
Daniel Rosensweig, Yahoo’s chief operating officer, said,
“Terry’s a Brooklynite at heart. He expects a new fight every day.”
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One of the biggest challenges Semel faces is adapting the company to fit its users’ ever-changing preferences.
“The big change in technology is that we used to have someone else program everything for us,” he said.
“Someone else programmed television, so you watched what was on when it was on. Internet has turned the user into programmers – we want what we want, when we want, and we get it.”
On Friday evenings, Semel boards his private jet in Sunnyvale and returns to his family and home in Bel Air for the weekend.
There he is able to relax for a couple of days knowing that he has helped grow Yahoo into a company that has the widest global reach of any Internet site.
Not shabby for a man who, prior to joining Yahoo, had rarely gone near a computer.
Semel may constantly redirect attention to his team, but he is very much an individual.
“I would not have succeeded had I not been true to myself. I never wanted to be the guy who looks back and says, ‘I wish I’d done this, done that,'” he said.
Summing up Semel’s pre-Yahoo! career
Prior to Yahoo! – as stated in the article above – Semel worked in Hollywood where he spent 24 years at Warner Bros.
As its chairman and co-chief executive officer, Semel and his partner built the company into one of the world’s largest entertainment enterprises.
Prior to Warner Bros., Semel was in charge of Walt Disney’s Theatrical Distribution division, and he has also been in charge of CBS’ Theatrical Distribution division.
Terry Semel is a friend of Arnon Milchan, the Jewish Hollywood producer with Mossad connections,
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Of course, a Jew would have made the movie 12 Years a Slave.
Jews Have Cursed the Black Race – Library of Rickandria
and was one of the invited to Milchan’s Israel party 2008, a party co-organized by the Israeli consulate (The Jewish Journal, September 25, 2008).
Other Yahoo! Jews
The Israeli Jew Andrei Broder, a graduate from Israel’s Technion Institute, is Vice President for Search & Computational Advertising at Yahoo! Research.
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Broder also serves as Chief Scientist of Yahoo’s Advertising Technology Group.
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He has previously worked for AltaVista as the Vice President of research and for IBM Research as a Distinguished Engineer and CTO of IBM’s Institute for Search and Text Analysis.
David Goldberg was Vice President and General Manager of Music at Yahoo! Inc., since the acquisition of LAUNCH Media, Inc. by Yahoo! in August 2001.
David Goldberg is married to and has kids with Sheryl Sandberg, the Jewish Internet boss formerly with Google and presently “second-in-command” in Facebook (see our long entry on her in our Google section).
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Goldberg left Yahoo! in 2007.
The Israeli engineer Udi Manber, also a graduate from the Israeli Technion Institute and who we portray in more depth in our section on Google, was chief scientist at Yahoo! from 1998 to 2002.
Manber then joined Amazon.com where he became “chief algorithms officer” and a Vice President.
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Algorithms – Library of Rickandria
He was later appointed CEO of the Amazon subsidiary company A9.com, where he led the company’s A9 search engine work.
In 2006, he was hired by Google as one of their Vice Presidents of engineering.
Yahoo! and Israel
Semel was in Israel during the festive events 2008, celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary.
Semel appeared as a speaker on Shimon Peres’ “President’s Conference” in Israel May 15, on the topic “The Revolution of the Internet and the new media”, together with Google’s Jewish co-founder and President Sergey Brin.
Semel was here to represent his post-Yahoo! company Windsor Media, where he is chairman and CEO.
Susan Decker, the present President of Yahoo! Inc., also attended and spoke at the 2008 Israel conference.
Decker is the person that took over the Presidency over Yahoo! directly after Semel.
Yahoo! President Susan Decker takes interest in Israel
by Haaretz Staff and Channel 10
May 18, 2008
Susan Decker, the president of Yahoo! Incorporated, visited Jerusalem last week to attend the 2008 Presidential Conference.
Decker oversees one of the most popular Web sites in the world, with more than 400 million page views daily.
She is the second highest paid female executive in the United States, with 14,000 people working under her.
Decker suggests that Yahoo! exemplifies the fact that the glass ceiling she was spared is a thing of the past.
Internet giant Yahoo! to follow rivals Google, Microsoft to Israel by Raz Smolsky and Maayan Cohen Ha’aretz 14/01/2008
Internet giant Yahoo! is coming to Israel, and not only over the Net.
5G: The Great Connection Risk & Control – Library of Rickandria
The company is taking its battle for survival against Google and Microsoft to Israel on two levels.
It will open a research and development center in Haifa and will also enter the content side of the business here for the first time through a cooperation agreement with Walla! which is partly owned by Haaretz.
Yahoo! is following Google, which set up R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Haifa, as well as establishing a marketing center that also deals in joint content arrangements with Israeli portals.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has set up a sales and marketing branch in Ra’anana, as well as R&D centers in Tel Aviv and Herzliya.
Yahoo! is now negotiating office space in the Matam high-tech park in Haifa; and is expected to open its research center within a few months.
Google kicked off in the Middle East with its Haifa R&D center in July 2006, despite the Second Lebanon War at the time; the center was its first in the region and only its fourth outside of the U.S. Other well-known companies in the Matam industrial park include:
- Intel
- Microsoft
- Elbit
and Zim.
Yahoo!’s first foray into the Israeli content market is based on a strategic deal signed with portal Walla!.
The goal is to threaten Google’s hegemony in the Israeli search market for the first time and the real challenge is to compete in search-based advertising.
Under the long-term deal signed between Yahoo! and Walla!, the technology and databases will come from Yahoo!, but the search engine will be branded as Walla! Search, the name of Walla!’s present engine.
Only six months ago there were reports that Walla! was negotiating with Google in the search market, but no agreement was ever reached.
Google usually partners with a local search engine by providing the technology and the advertisements, while the revenues are split.
The joint Walla!-Yahoo! venture will continue using Walla!’s AdVantage platform.
This will allow Walla! to continue to manage the advertising itself, and it will receive a higher percentage of the revenues than in a deal that also included advertising, such as Google proposed.
According to Walla! CEO Ilan Yeshua:
“The search and advertising in search results sector is one of the fastest growing in the world, and also in Israel.
The agreement with Yahoo! allows us to offer Walla!’s surfers an excellent search product… for the Israeli user.
The agreement will help Walla! increase its market share in the search-based advertising market.The existence of another strong player in the search and textual advertising sector will contribute to competitiveness , both in the search experience and in the range of possibilities available to advertisers.”
Netanyahu trial resumes with fresh evidence from Walla CEO’s messages | The Times of Israel
Ilan Yeshua testimony in Netanyahu case concludes after six months – Israel News – The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)
Yahoo! and Walla! had previously discussed technological cooperation in the past, but nothing serious came of it. Walla!’s previous management, replaced in 2006, was never willing to allow outsiders to share its advertising revenues.
Israeli Internet advertising was estimated at $90 million in 2007, 10% of the total advertising pie.
Of this figure, search engine advertising took about half, $40-50 million, the large majority of which went to Google.
Yahoo buys no-sales FoxyTunes for $40m
by Guy Griml Ha’aretz February 05, 2008
Yahoo, the Internet giant that Microsoft wants to take over, is gearing up for its second Israeli investment: FoxyTunes, owned by entrepreneurs Vitaly and Alex Sirota.
The exact amount has not been announced, but sources close to the situation say the company will go for between $30 million and $40 million.
The Sirota brothers, new immigrants from Russia, are the big winners in the deal, along with Yossi Vardi and a group of private investors from the United States. Initial investment in the company is estimated at just a few million, and the brothers will be raking in a total of $15 million.
[…]
“We will become part of Yahoo Entertainment, and they will distribute the FoxyTunes toolbar to as many people as possible.”
More on Jewish Internet actor Semel…
Semel is currently on the Board of Directors of:
- Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation
- Emerson College
- Guggenheim Museum
But he still continues his favorite pastime, which he describes in a Hebrew-language interview in the Israeli The Globe, as:
I’m busy mostly with in searching for interesting companies in order to purchase and invest in, and I’m certain that they’ll be heard of in the coming years.
Terry’s daughter Courtenay Semel is also in the spotlight.
Courtenay Semel – IMDb
Courtenay Semel: Hollywood’s Most Wanted – CURVE (curvemag.com)
Courtenay Semel (@courtenaysemel) • Instagram photos and videos
The Jewish site Jewtastic writes:
Semel Reveals She Was Lohan’s First Jewish Gay Lover by Jewtastic Staff August 18th, 2008
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Lindsay Lohan embarked on a secret lesbian affair with aspiring actress Courtenay Semel before meeting [Jewish] Samantha Ronson, it has been claimed.
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Semel – the daughter of former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel – insists she was the Mean Girls star’s first gay love.
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Courtenay Semel Talks NOH8, Love and Loss: Interview (pride.com)
But she claims they kept their affair secret because of the actress’ fear of coming out to the world.
She said:
“Everyone thinks Samantha is Lindsay’s first lesbian love, but we were very passionate until her fear of being found out drove us apart.
At the time she was terrified her career would be over if she revealed her sexual tendencies.
But then Samantha came on to the scene and I was dropped.”