First there was Scoble, then Om, then Gates and now my good friend David Beach is leaving Yahoo! to work for social search startup Wink. I heard a rumor that he was leaving, so I called Beach on his cell phone to confirm the news (as Scoble recommends, always call first before blogging) and Beach told me that he in fact gave notice last week at Yahoo! and will be taking on the position of Director of Product Management at Wink. Congratulations to Beach and to Wink founder/CEO Michael Tanne, who is quite fortunate to be able to add Beach to his team.
Beach had this to say about the move:
I love Yahoo!, it was a difficult decision, but i feel that Wink is doing something very special in the social search space, and I couldn’t turn it down. It’s an indie search engine…like the Sub Pop of search.
Beach has been doing amazing stuff on the web from the very beginning when he was the Art Director for the legendary Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), one of the very first influential music websites. In 1995 he co-founded LVL Interactive, an early pioneering web development company, which is where I met Beach, when I worked there from 1997-1998 (Beach is my metaphoric bridge from Web 1.0 to 2.0). LVLi was way ahead of it’s time and produced the online magazine i-STORM as well as developing the first full website for Burning Man in 1996, before it was brought in-house by the Burning Man organization. Since 2001, Beach has worked at Yahoo!, primarily in Yahoo! Shopping where he headed up social commerce application development. Here’s Beach’s personal bio.
UPDATE: Beach has posted about his Yahoo departure on his blog.
Related Posts:
- Toni Schneider Leaves Yahoo for Automattic
- Wink 2
- Yahoo Launches Y! Mash, A New Social Network
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I just looked at the wink site, and I must say that it is a cool idea with a good feel. I would imgaine the addition of from page people photo searches it would become quite popular, like an embedded myspace people search. With additional good people on the team there, these guys will have something.
That’s a huge win for Wink. Beach brought a lot of great ideas to Yahoo! Shopping, including the recently launched Y! Shopping Blog.
Yeah that looks interesting, with creative technolgy industry devolping alot from the last 30yrs of computing tech, events, seminars and conferences are a must!
I would have liked to see the london artist and shem speak there, I was at the techarte 06 art & technolgy conferenc speaking. His work and research are quite conceptually informed. check the site…