Martha Stewart will go back to running her company solo, as Wenda Harris Millard steps down as co-CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. (NYSE:MSO). The move is part of a reorganization the company announced Tuesday morning.
Millard is joining Michael Kassan's media representation firm
Media Link LLC as president.
Millard joined Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in 2007 as president of media (a title she retained), after spending six years as chief sales officer at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). Millard took over the co-CEO role when Susan Lyne stepped down as CEO last summer. Lyne ran the company while Stewart was in jail for insider trading and is credited with turning the company around and making it profitable.
"At the end of the day, it is Martha's company, and she needs to direct where it goes next," Lyne told The Deal last year when we asked about her decision to leave the company and join Gilt Groupe, a fast-growing e-commerce startup funded by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, former executives of DoubleClick Inc., the online ad pioneer that was ultimately acquired by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) for $3.1 billion last year.
Millard's roots also go back to DoubleClick, where she was a founding executive in the dot-com era. In The Deal's Decade of The Deal video series, Millard recently shared her memories of that era's infamous merger of American Online Inc. and Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX). You can watch the video below.
You can also watch our Behind the Money video interviews with Kevin Ryan here and Dwight Merriman here. Pipeline subscribers may read The Deal's full Q&A with Susan Lyne here. - Mary Kathleen Flynn
Inside The Deal: Linklaters' Schmidt says how regulators handled Pfizer Inc.'s acquisition of Wyeth is an outlier of how others merger reviews will be conducted.
