During a fireside chat with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, the Yahoo CEO joined the growing ranks of controversial tech CEOs when she told TechCrunch editor and founder Mike Arrington exactly what she thought.
Following a somewhat testy exchange between the two, Arrington asked Bartz, “Is your pitch kind of BS though?”
“Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 — the iPod came out 4 years later. 3 years after that is the first time his market cap grew. It took 7 years.” Bartz responded, “I’ve been here a few months. Give me a break. You are involved in a very tiny company.”
“Very tiny,” Arrington replied.
“It probably takes you a long time just to convince yourself what to do. ‘So f**k off!’”
Although this single two word expression will no doubt dominate every headline about the discussion, it came at the end of an interesting 30-minute back-and-forth outlining Yahoo’s plans for the future. Among the topics discussed were Yahoo’s plans for the mobile world that included the recently announced partnership with Nokia, a new partnership with Match.com, and a somewhat surprising declaration that they would not be working with Google’s Android platform despite development for other smartphones.
Bartz took over as Yahoo CEO in January of 2009 after founder Jerry Yang was ousted. Prior to taking the reins at Yahoo, Bartz was CEO of Autodesk, and served as VP of worldwide field operations and as an executive officer at Sun Microsystems.
(This article has been updated to correct an incorrect name)
You can check out the video clip here (warning: the video contains vulgar language).
