Brad Garlinghouse, President of the Applications and Commerce Group and head of AOL’s Silicon Valley operations is leaving the beleaguered online service AOL (s AOL), according to multiple sources. Garlinghouse is well known in Silicon Valley as the author of the 2006 Peanut Butter Manifesto that outlined many of the problems with Yahoo (s YHOO).

Various sources inside AOL say that the company is focusing more of its resources on “media” or rather a web media approach championed by the Huffington Post team and less on applications.

We have followed Garlinghouse’s career since his days as an executive for Dialpad, a VoIP service that was eventually acquired by Yahoo. He joined AOL’s west coast operations in 2009 to help revive the company’s fortunes through new applications and new services. AOL is going through internal convulsions and is still trying to stabilize under the leadership of CEO Tim Armstrong.

 

Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. More....

31 thoughts on “Key AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse to leave”

  25. WikiOrgCharts has an up to date org chart of AOL including a place holder for the now departed Brad Garlinghouse. We predict David Temkin will become the next head honcho of AOL Product because of his success in mobile. Garlinghouse’s departure will also mean that ex-Yahoo exec like Trent Herren, Eric Van Miltenberg, and Joel Sears will also leave soon.

    See the org chart here: http://bit.ly/pZKfJg

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  26. He was totally useless at Yahoo. Known for being a blowhard and self-promoter who may have fooled Arrington etc but didn’t fool anyone at Yahoo.

    Brad presided over all the potentially breakout social apps at Yahoo (Mail, Messenger, Photos, Groups) but did nothing but let them wither and lose market share while the social networking revolution was taking the Valley by storm. Wait – Mail, Messenger, Photos, Groups – doesn’t that sound like the key ingredients for Facebook?

    Brad sat on this stuff but was not a product guy and let it all slip away. From the comments here, looks like he didn’t do much better at AOL.

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  27. “AOL is going through internal convulsions and is still trying to stabilize under the leadership of CEO Tim Armstrong.” hmmm… as soon as Tim stabilizes, the rest of the company will follow…

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  28. Im curious as to who thinks this is a big loss for AOL? This guy was a do-nothing ass who surrounded himself with Yes Men. This is perhaps his greatest single gift to AOL – Leaving! Thank you Brad for that! Drama Queen extraordinaire. Perhaps if you just interview folks in the insular Valley (where he rarely showed up to work anyway) he was viewed as a moderately tolerable, but to old timer AOL folks, and even the fancy New York Crowd he was just a self-important jerk who accomplished nothing.

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