THE YAHOO DIASPORA: Where All Its Amazing Talent Ended Up

Then: VP, Advanced Development Group

Now: VP, Product, Google+

Horowitz spearheaded the acquisition of Flickr and oversaw in-house projects like Yahoo Pipes, a tool for easily connecting disparate Web services. His departure in 2008 for Google was a big blow. His vision of Google+ as a "social layer" throughout Google's services in some way echoes the idea of uniting a host of innovative Web startups—Flickr, Delicious, Upcoming, and others—under Yahoo's umbrella.

Then: Senior Director, Advanced Products, Yahoo

Now: CEO, Etsy

Besides running Yahoo's experimental Brickhouse, a corporate incubator for new products, Dickerson created Hack Days at Yahoo, a predecessor to the hackathons now popular at companies like Facebook and at startup conferences. These freewheeling coding sessions aimed to unlock creativity by forcing engineers to code and ship a working product in a single day.

Then: SVP, Community, Communities, and Front Doors, Yahoo

Now: CEO, YouSendIt

Garlinghouse was CEO of Dialpad, an early, Skype-like VOIP startup acquired by Yahoo. He was part of the entrepreneurial blood Yahoo wanted to infuse. He aired his frustrations with Yahoo's lack of focus and decisiveness in a 2006 memo dubbed the "Peanut Butter Manifesto." He's since discussed what he got wrong in that memo. Yahoo's lack of focus, he said, wasn't the real problem—it was just a symptom of a deep-rooted cultural problem.

Then: Leader, Technology Development Group, Yahoo

Now: Chairman, Etsy; CEO, Findery

Yahoo put Flickr's cofounder to work making core products like Search and Answers social, anticipating Google and Facebook's similar efforts nearly a decade later. But she left in 2008, like many in Yahoo's social brain trust.

Fake went on to invest in startups linked to that group's tight-knit circle of innovators, like Etsy (where she's chairman) and Kickstarter. She ran product at Hunch, a question-and-answer site bought by eBay. And now she's running her own startup, Findery, a directory of memories linked to places.

Then: General Manager, Flickr

Now: President, Tiny Speck

Butterfield was Yahoo's Puck, or perhaps its Falstaff. He sent a fantastical resignation letter to Garlinghouse, to whom he eventually reported, comparing his work at Flickr to "tin-smithing." He also left in 2008, putting his knack for playful delight to work at Tiny Speck, which launched an online game, Glitch. Last year, he ended up closing Glitch, putting most of his team out of work. Now he and a small crew are working on a secret new project at Tiny Speck.

Then: Founder, Delicious

Now: CEO, Tasty Labs

Schachter's work at Delicious, which let users save, categorize, and share Web links, anticipated everything from Twitter to Evernote and Pinterest. It brought concepts like tagging to the mainstream of tech. (Yahoo eventually sold it YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.) At Tasty Labs, he's rolling out products like Human.io, a set of tools for making apps that collect data and coordinate group activities.

Then: General manager, Flickr

Now: CEO, Tomfoolery

Srivastava ran Flickr's operations in its early days as part of Yahoo, then became its general manager. She's now joined with other Yahoo and AOL veterans to reinvent enterprise apps at their new startup, Tomfoolery.

Then: Cofounder, Upcoming.org

Now: Advisor and former CTO, Kickstarter

Baio, a coder and journalist, created Upcoming.org to help you find events your friends were going to—long before Facebook and Eventbrite came along. After leaving Yahoo, he helped kickstart Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, as its CTO.

The Yahoo Pipes team included Daniel Raffel, now CEO of Snapguide, an app for making how-to guides, and Pasha Sadri, founder of Polyvore.

Cameron Marlow and Danah Boyd of Yahoo Research are now researchers at Facebook and Microsoft, respectively.

And we haven't even talked about the teams working on search—chief among them, Qi Lu, who now runs Microsoft's online services group.

The talent once gathered together in Sunnyvale is staggering.

Can Mayer match it?

Meet The Graduates Of Marissa Mayer's School For Geniuses >