Looking to show it s a real business and not just a place to hold Alibaba stock, the e-commerce division that Yahoo is spinning off later this year just hired a new management team.
Luminate, formerly known as Yahoo Small Business, is being spun off from Yahoo into the newly formed Aabaco, which will be the repository for Yahoo s 15 percent stake in Alibaba worth more than $20 billion. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer earlier this year called the division, which helps small businesses sell wares online, a legacy, ancillary business when she announced it would be used as an instrument for the tax-free spinoff of Yahoo s 384 million Alibaba shares.
But now Yahoo is sending a different message about the importance of the e-commerce venture after the Internal Revenue Service expressed concerns in recent weeks about such transactions.
And so Luminate just hired a new executive team: Yahoo veteran and former military bomb expert Chris Wayne becomes Luminate s head of IT and infrastructure; another Yahoo veteran, Matt Cokely, will be head of customer care; and Brandon Cruse, formerly of Intuit, will run HR. The hires were announced Thursday by Amer Akhtar, who already heads the small business division.
Above: Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2015. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)
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