As most are aware, Yahoo! (YHOO) has retained an executive search firm to hire a new CEO after Jerry Yang announced they were seeking his successor. Among the names bandied about are former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller. Even former eBay top executive Jeff Jordan (now CEO of OpenTable) has gotten some attention in this discussion.

A forgotten name not being widely mentioned (anywhere I’ve read) is Rajiv Dutta, who was long rumored to be a possible successor to Whitman at eBay for the top job.  Everyone I’ve spoken to at eBay who worked for or with him says he is a spectacular executive. Some have speculated he lost the CEO job over concerns he wouldn’t ‘play well’ with the eBay user base despite his glowing credentials.

He has recently landed at the Drucker School and Drucker Institute as Distinguised Executive-in-Residence, which seems like a position from which he could be pried for the opportunity to lead one of the web’s great properties while attempting to prove to the eBay board of directors that they missed the opportunity to retain his leadership.

Note I have zero real inside information into eBay or Yahoo! inner political wrangling, but aren’t blogs meant to feed this type of speculation:)?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 11:58 am and is filed under Other Marketplaces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.