Timothy M. Armstrong
So first, thanks for having us again here, Ross. So one is I would just basically -- let me summarize at a high level then and hit some bullet points. I think, one, Artie has been a great operating partner in general. And I think from the standpoint of the changes we made last week, let me take off my CEO hat for a minute and talk to you as the largest individual shareholder of the company. The company is stronger this week than it was last week at that time period, and that is a forward-looking statement in terms of what the company needs to do to be successful. And we've made a lot of changes at AOL over the last 3 or 4 years. And I think the progress that you've seen at the company has really been built around continuing the point towards where the future is. And I think from the standpoint of the change we made last week, there's 3 really important things I think investors should think about and look at. Number one is if you look at the strength of the AOL team, I think there's a real team behind the company. And in every chair we have right now, I think we have the strongest people that we can get in their fields on a team basis. Karen Dykstra, who's in the back of the room, is our CFO and came from ADP and one of the top CFOs in the world and ranked by institutional investor. And I think Karen, specifically the amount of operating metrics and detailed financial metrics we have on the company now are significantly improved, as Karen has been able to come in to her role overall. So me as CEO, I get a report on Sunday night, so usually sometimes Saturday afternoons, that essentially pulls apart every single tiny piece of the business. Karen has also led recently our -- basically looking at every single employee position inside the company. So if you look at benchmark today, Monday morning, the amount of information we have as a management team at AOL to operate the company has probably gone up 5x in terms of that level of detail. The second piece is bringing in Susan Lyne. For those of you who know Susan Lyne, there's a handful of people, probably 10 or 20 people, in the world who have the experience of understanding the content, commerce, programming at the level that Susan does. And Karen and Susan were both board members, by the way, and I don't -- I question whether or not we'd be able to get that level of talent into the company without them having being previously involved in the company. But I would just say that at a pure talent level for the things that need to get fixed and worked on at AOL, we have an incredibly strong team and a team that's -- I -- me as an individual investor, I sleep easy at night knowing Susan Lyne is going to be in charge of content businesses now, period/full stop. The second piece is I would separate what the CFO role has been versus the COO role overall. And I think that from our standpoint as a business, going into the segments, essentially that having 3 major segments where we have strong leaders on top of each segment has just reduced the need for that -- the COO role, and so it's an area that we could change. Artie's going to be staying with us working on the Access business and the new subscription business we have overall. So from a purity of how the company gets managed, we're in a better position to manage the company today than we were last Monday, and I think that's important. And then the third thing is I would highly consider, as an investor, my job as CEO is to make changes that are going to benefit the company in 12 months and 24 months overall. And you've seen us make incredibly, incredibly difficult decisions that have ended up paying off well overall in the future. And I think the change from last week is another one of those changes. And it's -- I think as an investor, that's what you should actually be interested in is, is the company moving in a more transparent, faster, more competitive space? In general, the answer is yes right now, so I'm bullish on where we are as a business and continue to be bullish about the talent levels and those things. I think adding Susan Lyne, we just picked up another game-changing player at the company. read more »
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