The executive who helped drive the launch of the very successful Yahoo Answers product has hit the eject button and landed in the world of venture capitalism.
Search Exec Punches Out Of Yahoo
Andrew Braccia dropped his Yahoo VP of consumer web search business cards into the wastebasket earlier in April. He has reemerged as a principal at Accel, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Matt Marshall at Venture Beat reported the move. Marshall also cited Yahoo’s recent search market share woes at the hands of Google; Yahoo’s losses have been Google gain.
Yahoo did gain during Braccia’s run, especially on the social media side. He helped the company bring del.icio.us and Flickr into the fold, and worked on the integration of Overture, which is now Yahoo Search Marketing.
A Yahoo spokesperson said Vish Makhijani will take Braccia’s role with the company. The former Inktomi executive was Yahoo’s VP of Yahoo! Search Marketing International and International Monetization. Prior to that role, Makhijani was Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo!’s consumer International Search business.
Among Braccia’s big ideas includes the concept of the phone conversation as a novelty. He told Marshall people would be “connecting our brains together” instead.
It won’t be long before Accel has Braccia out with some of Accel’s investments, and talking about the future of digital media. Braccia is one of several Accel staffers who will moderate events during the Stanford Accel Symposium tomorrow.
A number of Accel’s investments, like BitTorrent, MetaCafe, and Facebook, will have speakers present for the Symposium. Facebook was one of their more difficult deals; it took Accel about three months to nail down a meeting with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2005.
Accel has also been on the scene historically with some now-legendary Internet names. They backed UUNet, which was the first Internet connection to the World Wide Web for many, and Macromedia, now part of Adobe.
