Yahoo’s new CEO, Scott Thompson, yesterday garnered attention
for telling the Securities and Exchange Commission – and Yahoo’s
board of directors – that he had a computer science degree from Stonehill College when he does not
have one.
“You guys might want to cover this before he resigns tomorrow,”
one reader emailed TechCrunch yesterday. That’s a reasonable
prognosis, since this could cost Thompson his job.
While other companies such as Facebook are busy advancing the
world forward in innovation, this gentleman is bringing a lawsuit
against the social megalith concerning some old patents that
supposedly are infringing on the almost-obsolete web portal.
Formally, Thompson has a Bachelor’s of Science in Business
Administration (Accounting). For more than a decade of his career,
Thompson has said that he earned a computer science degree from
Stonehill College, which is outside Boston. Yesterday, that
discrepancy finally was exposed by Daniel Loeb, a Yahoo shareholder,
whose firm discovered that Thompson actually had gotten an
accounting degree. Loeb is the hedge fund manager of Third Point,
who is also in the middle of a proxy war against Yahoo. This latest
episode represents a trend of activist investors such as Loeb,
frustrated at Yahoo’s blunders and trying to come up with a better
plan for the company’s survival.
When Thompson spoke at Web 2.0 in 2010, the screengrab said:
“Scott received a bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer
science from Stonehill College.”
It’s debatable whether statements like this deliberately were
misleading. Thompson’s primary concentration in college was
accounting.
An important question is: Does someone need a computer science
degree – especially from the ’70s – in order to be competent in a
technology field now? Or does the principle of complete honesty
override even the greatest competency?
A technology degree isn’t a job requirement in a world where
anyone can learn to code, where even college dropouts are having a
huge impact on the tech industry – case in point, Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg.
But it probably was more important earlier in Thompson’s career,
while he was advancing the ranks of companies at his past jobs.
Before he joined Yahoo in January, he was the president of PayPal
for seven years and before that he was chief information officer at
Barclays Global Investors, “where he implemented a new strategic
technology platform and global infrastructure.”
It’s possible that Thompson demonstrated the appropriate
technical skills in these past positions, even if Yahoo failed to
completely vet his background. On both Yahoo’s website and in the
SEC’s regulatory filings of the company, Thompson is described as
having a degree in both computer science and accounting from Stone
Hill College.
Yahoo’s response is that his misleading bio was “an inadvertent
error.” If that’s true, it still doesn’t do much to help the
already-ailing internet company whose biggest success was during
the dot-com boom of the late-’90s. It’s ironic that a search engine
company would not know that even Thompson’s alma mater still
describes him as an accounting major.
Yesterday afternoon Yahoo released a statement that its board
will “review” the evidence that was presented against its CEO, then
make an “appropriate disclosure” about what happened.
Yahoo said in full in its statement:
“In connection with the statement the company made earlier today
about Scott Thompson, the Yahoo! board will be reviewing this
matter, and upon completion of its review, will make an appropriate
disclosure to shareholders.”
Depending on what is discovered about how the error got into
Yahoo’s records as well as the SEC’s filings, Thompson himself may
not personally be responsible for the misinformation. It’s
uncertain right now whether there will be any legal implications,
and the resolution may be as simple as Yahoo correcting the
information with the SEC.
Scott Thompson’s LinkedIn profile does not presently specify
what discipline he earned his Bachelor of Science at StoneHill
College.