Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Exclusive: Yahoo Front Page Head Tapan Bhat Leaves Company

Another longtime Yahoo exec is departing–this time Tapan Bhat (pictured here), who had purview over the Internet giant’s important front page.

News of the departure came from new Chief Product Officer Blake Irving in an internal email titled “Busy Week” that highlighted the Yahoo (YHOO) investor day that took place yesterday.

Buried at the end of the memo was a paragraph noting that “there’s always a downside to a productive week” and that Bhat had decided to leave the company.

Bhat’s team will report to Yahoo exec Jeff Kinder until a replacement is found. It is not clear what Bhat’s plans are.

Bhat joins a number of top execs who have recently clocked out of Yahoo of late, such as U.S. advertising head Joanne Bradford.

Bhat was in charge of a range of products at Yahoo, most importantly, the most recent redesign of its powerful homepage a year ago.

Yahoo has since confirmed the departure.

“Tapan Bhat, SVP, Integrated Consumer Experiences, has decided to leave Yahoo!. Tapan has been an integral leader within the Products organization since joining Yahoo! more than five years ago and we value his many contributions and wish him well. His last day will be June 15.”

And from Bhat:

“Leaving Yahoo! has been a difficult decision to make because I’m incredibly proud of the work that’s been accomplished by my teams over the last five years, particularly related to the Yahoo! homepage, My Yahoo!, our content optimization engine and most recently, our Mobile and iPad apps. I’m looking forward to new challenges that lie ahead and am confident that I’m leaving Yahoo! on the right path, and with the right leadership in place.”

According to some sources inside and outside of Yahoo, Bhat has clashed with CEO Carol Bartz at times and has long been considering a new move.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik