Timothy Koogle

Former President and CEO of Yahoo!

• Born: July 5, 1951
• Place of Birth: Alexandria, Virginia

Primary Company/Organization: Yahoo!

Introduction

Timothy Koogle was the first president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Yahoo, Inc. He was recruited by investor Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital to be Yahoo!'s sixth employee. In the company of Stanford Ph.D. dropouts, he was comparatively a wise old sage at forty-five. His folksy and reasoned style guided the company through the first six years of explosive growth on the world stage. In 2001, Koogle was replaced at the helm of Yahoo! by entertainment executive Terry Semel. A mechanic at heart, Koogle then retired to a couple of board seats and the occasional race car seat.

Early Life

Timothy Andrew Koogle (who goes by TK) was born in Alexandria, Virginia, on July 5, 1951. His mechanical interests were fostered by his father, who was a machinist. In high school and college, he cofounded and performed in two rock bands, the Tides and Paraphernalia. He attended the University of Virginia, graduating as valedictorian with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1973. This was followed with two more engineering degrees, a master of science in 1975 and a Ph.D. in 1977, both from Stanford University. Learning how to rebuild engines at an early age paid off later in life, as Koogle augmented his graduate student scholarship with income that he earned repairing other students' broken cars in and around Palo Alto. He made so much money doing this between classes that he bought his own machine shop.

Life's Work

Prior to Yahoo!, Koogle had two corporate experiences of note. At Motorola for most of the 1980s and the first few years of the 1990s, he played an operational role that evolved into corporate venturing. This gave him a solid background in risk-based decision making. For two years afterward, he greatly increased sales as the president of Seattle's Intermec, a manufacturer of bar-code-related equipment. This was also good training for the wild ride he was about to take. In his forty-fifth year, Koogle was chosen to be the first CEO of Yahoo!, Inc. which was just a few months old in the summer of 1995.

Koogle was affable and cool but not zany or off-the-wall. This distinguished him as a grown-up among the Yahooligans. Together, they made a worldwide brand and an incredible amount money in a very short period of time. As CEO, Koogle is credited with convincing founders David Filo and Jerry Yang to adopt the advertising model. Carefully, the company rolled out a 468-by-60-pixel banner ad that adorned the top of each page in the directory that used to be “Jerry and Dave's Guide to the World Wide Web.” Koogle assured them of the need to make money for their investors and explained that the ad model enabled that, while continuing to provide a service to their users free of charge.

Unlike contemporary search engine competitors, such as Excite or AltaVista, Yahoo!'s mechanism for sorting web content into a usable taxonomy was different; it was human. Under Koogle's leadership, hundreds of Yahoo! employees were paid to look at websites and make informed decisions and judgment calls about where and how they ought to be categorized. These people, appropriately called surfers, continued to differentiate the incumbent Yahoo! from upstart Google at the beginning of the twenty-first centry.

For many years, Koogle could do no wrong. Advertising sales were so fast and easy that Yahoo! was scrambling to handle the phones. Without much evidence of an eventual sales payoff, major advertisers like Ford Motor Company and Pepsi spent seven or eight figures on integrated campaigns across the site, which had branched out to provide content-themed home pages on more than forty topics, such as games and pets. In part, the motivation for these expenditures seems to have included the cachet of the Yahoo! brand.

In the late 1990s, during the period now known as the dot-com boom, the atmosphere in Silicon Valley was feverish, a purple and yellow contagion initiated by Koogle's Yahoo! Stock that might have been bought for $13 in 1996 was trading for more than ten times that amount by the end of the decade. Despite the fact that Yahoo!'s price-to-earnings ratio exceeded 1,500:1, investors and would-be employees flocked to Yahoo! and Santa Clara in droves.

Perhaps the greatest compliment to Koogle's leadership style and ability was paid in an academic journal article. In David Thomson's Leader-to-Leader piece entitled “Inside Outside Leadership for Exponential Growth,” the Yahoo! pair of chief operating officer Jeff Mallet and CEO Koogle are held up as exemplars. According to the author, working together on these distinct internal and external leadership elements is what makes such a pairing so effective.

Under Koogle's leadership, Yahoo! made several acquisitions. Rebranded, this intellectual property extended the company's product and service lines to include Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger, among others. When acquired, the shares that employees had held in these smaller companies typically converted into Yahoo! stock and vested immediately. In this fast-moving melee, many people made more money in a few months than their parents had earned in an entire lifetime. Legend has it that at least one customer service representative made more than $10 million “answering phones” and that many a foosball game was played to win or lose a $10,000 bet. Koogle himself was outed for splurging on late-night eBay purchases that included a new $130,000 Aston Martin, a Versace wallet, and an Armani jacket.

What Koogle did not buy might have been more important, ultimately to his future and to Yahoo! shareholders. In the spring of 2000, news emerged that Yahoo! was holding meetings with eBay. Nothing ever came of this promising Internet commerce conversation. Instead, the story goes that a merger of equals was blockaded by egos.

Had he made or publicly championed any such bold or strategic moves, Koogle might have held onto the reins longer or been remembered differently. Unfortunately, after the overheated NASDAQ crashed in April of 2000, neither the company nor his reputation as a charming and reasonable leader would ever be the same. The equity that was once part of the plot of the Hollywood film Frequency (in which the main character travels back in time and implores a friend to buy stock at the IPO price) fell. Almost a year later, after an unpopular one-day trading embargo, Koogle resigned as CEO. Soon after, YHOO was trading below its intial public offering (IPO) price of five years earlier.

Koogle began working as an investor and was a board member at Kasha Global in 2022. Kasha is Africa's leading platform for pharmaceuticals and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs). Koogle was also making private investments as of 2024.

Personal Life

Previously divorced, Koogle was remarried to Pam Scott, an advertising and marketing professional who cofounded The Curious Company. Together they share a passion for beautiful mechanical things and have attended prestigious car shows and racing schools.

Koogle remained on the board until 2003, when he stepped down as chairman of the board. He was a director of the social networking firm Friendster, having served as interim CEO there in 2003–04. He then became chairman of ecofriendly cleaning supply purveyor Method Products and the cochairman of Room-to-Read, which establishes libraries in developing countries. He continued to take part in a variety of other ventures over the years, including founding a philanthropic organization and a land development company as well as investing in and serving on the board of other companies.

Bibliography

Ackman, Dan. “Top of the News: Koogle Quits.” Forbes 8 Mar. 2001. Web. 19 Aug. 2012.

Himelstein, Linda. “Tim Koogle: The Grown-Up Voice of Reason at Yahoo!” Business Week 7 Sept. 1998: n. pag. Print.

---, Heather Green, Richard Siklos, and Catherine Yang. “Yahoo! The Company. The Strategy. The Stock.” Business Week 7 Sept. 1998: n. pag. Print.

Koogle, Tim. “Public Profile.” LinkedIn.com. Web. 19 Aug. 2012.

Lardner, James. “Search No Further.” U.S. News and World Report 18 May 1998: 49–53. Print.

Modise, Ephraim. "Endowed with $21 Million, Kasha Wants to Transform Healthcare in Africa." TechCabal, 27 July 2023, techcabal.com/2023/07/27/kasha-ceo-feature-joanna-bitchsel/. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.

Sherman, Josepha. Jerry Yang and David Filo (Techies). Brookfield: 21st Century, 2001. Print.

Taylor, Chris. “Yahoo! Lowers the Net.” Time 19 Mar. 2001: 54–55. Print.

Thomson, David G. “Inside-Outside Leadership for Exponential Growth.” Leader-to-Leader 40 (2006): 22–29. Print.

Weston, Michael R. Jerry Yang and David Filo: The Founders of Yahoo! New York: Rosen, 2006. Print.