With Yahoo now looking for a new leader, Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor game is picking a new CEO for the embattled company. Plenty of names are being bandied about, from former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (whose non-compete with Time Warner expires next March) to OpenTable CEO and former eBay superstar exec Jeff Jordan. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is also being thrown out as a possibility, but she is not interested.
Other strong candidates include Google senior VP Tim Armstrong (who heads up North American ad sales), former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig (as we’ve noted before), and Marc Andreessen. Mark Cuban would have been interesting too, but he has other things to worry about right now.
Less likely names, in my opinion, are current president Susan Decker, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson (who tried to buy Yahoo when he was at Microsoft), or Carl Icahn’s hand-picked board members Frank Biondi, Jr. and John Chapple. News Corp president Peter Chernin is also mentioned as a perennial candidate, but he seems better off where he is running Murdoch’s empire.
What Yahoo really needs is new blood, most likely someone not on the list below. Picking an old-media executive like Biondi or Chernin would risk repeating the same mistake Yahoo made when it put former Warner Brothers CEO Terry Semel at the helm. But it can’t pick a green startup executive either. Yahoo is a huge organization that requires a leader with at least some serious management experience. Vote below for who you think is the best candidate, or nominate your own in comments with your reasons why he or she should be considered.
(Flickr photo by Paul Fisher).