Leading a company must be a tough job- long hours and sleepless nights, especially when ventures are impacting the world and CEOs themselves are struggling, amidst the proxy wars, revenue generations, unhappy investors, customer expectations and the rivaling competitors.
Life as a tech CEO is not different. The people who sit on this hot seat with Sword of Damocles above them, could face anything, even getting fired overnight. Here is a list of ten tech CEOs of that kind, compiled by Business Insider.
Dick Costolo: CEO of Twitter
Costolo sold his RSS advertising network FeedBurner to Google and joined the company in 2007. He left the search giant in 2009 to become the COO of Twitter and was promoted as the CEO in 2010.
Reason: Costolo has got to prove twitter is more monetizable, to the investors and board members who once believed Twitter would be the next Facebook. But according to eMarketer, twitter is generating four times less money than Facebook, per user and it just done $139.5 million in 2011 compared to Facebook’s $4 billion
Thorsten Heins: CEO of RIM
Reason: BlackBerry just sold 11 million Smartphones in last quarter compared to the 37 million iPhones sold by Apple and the total number of Playbooks ever sold just reached 1.3 million. The maker RIM’s revenue continues to shrink in the fourth quarter reporting a 25 percent drop from the previous quarter.Apparently Heins is on plans to sell the company, but it seems nobody has any reasons to buy it
Andrew Mason: CEO of Groupon
Reason: Groupon is struggling with the accounting issues and Mason is still not able to get the financial reporting under control. It is not the first time company is going through weird financial reporting and the last week under reported returns forced company to review the entire Q4 revenues.Adding to it, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the company, which is still running without any profit.
John Malony: Tumblr
Reason: Malony is not the CEO of Tumblr, but if the company doesn’t monetize soon, he will be the one losing his job, not the Founder cum CEO David Karp. The billion dollar valuated company has currently millions of users and the investors are pretty much thrilled with the happenings. But Tumblr is still lagging in having a proper business model.
Joe Kennedy: CEO of Pandora
Reason: Pandora is one of the biggest streaming radio services on the planet but still it is struggling to pay the royalty bills. The company is not even entering U.K fearing the streaming rates. In the recent SEC filing, Pandora had already warned the investors that it won’t be profitable in 2012 and is likely to become profitable somewhere in 2013- only if it’s under good circumstances.
Scott Thompson: CEO of Yahoo
Reason: Thompson joined yahoo in early 2012 after its former CEO Carol Bartz got fired due to her inability to grow company’s revenue. His decisions including suing Facebook and the recent layoff of 2,000 employees have invited a wide range of criticism. Recently he is under fire from Daniel S Loeb, whose Third Point LLC owns more than five percent of Yahoo. If Thompson’s measures will not rejuvenate the company, he might be forced to follow Carol’s path
Marc Cenedella: CEO of TheLadders.com
Reason: Cenedella, the CEO of job finding power-house almost ran for the U.S.Senate and according to many, he should have done that as it would have been a graceful way out of this once-promising New York startup. The unhappy investors and people are still waiting for the IPO, which is expected from the last three years.
Tim Armstrong: CEO of AOL
Reason: Tim once believed that his local blog network “Patch” will be a major turnaround for AOL’s revenue and had invested $140 million last year. But his promise to the investors is still not done and recently Starboard Value LP, an AOL shareholder wants to replace some board members after getting disappointed in company’s performance.
Bill Nguyen: CEO of Color
Reason: Nguyen is known for the various startups he founded and successfully sold. But it seems like nothing is working with Color, the photo sharing mobile app. Nguyen raised a $41 million for his app last year but it is still struggling with only a few users even after re-launch as a video status sharing app.
Tim O'Shaugnessy: CEO of LivingSocial
Reason: LivingSocial, the online business which offers daily deals and discounts has only one problem- inability to increase the revenue due to the low margin compression from competitors. Its growth is also completely dependent on market spending which ties it to the second place behind Groupon.
No comments:
Post a Comment