The Former Yahoo Exec Who Wrote The 'Peanut Butter Manifesto' Is No Longer CEO Of Hightail
His LinkedIn profile verifies the move. He's written "Goin' fishin'" as his current title and shows he left Hightail this month.
About a year ago, Garlinghouse rebranded the 10-year-old company YouSendIt, changing its name to Hightail, a name that was the subject of some criticism. He also raised another $34 million to help Hightail compete with Box and Dropbox, bringing the total raised to $97.4 million since its inception in 2004, according to Crunchbase.
But, where competitors like Box and Dropbox have grown mighty and are marching to their IPOs, Hightail is far less visible. Cloud storage has become a difficult market, with companies like Microsoft and Google giving ever bigger chunks away of it to their users for free.
Garlinghouse is known in the Valley. He was formerly AOL's president of commerce and applications and the head of its Silicon Valley office, a job he left in 2011. He previously worked at Yahoo, overseeing products like Mail.
At Yahoo, back in 2006, he famously wrote a memo about Yahoo's problems called the "Peanut Butter manifesto," which was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. It accused Yahoo of not having focus and spreading itself too thin, a criticism that has stuck with the company over the years.
Brad Garlinghouse is also part of an "it" pair in the Valley. His sister, Meg Garlinghouse, is also well-known in the tech industry. She also worked at Yahoo for nearly a decade and now works at LinkedIn, heading up a program called "LinkedIn for Good," the company's employee philantrhopic effort.