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Marissa Mayer on Henrique De Castro Disaster: That Was My Bad

"There were issues there that I potentially created, and it was important for me to fix them."

TechCrunch
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.

Henrique De Castro is a very, very rich man today thanks to the little more than a year he spent at Yahoo as its COO before being shown the exit in January.

So who was at fault for such a big-name hire turning into such an expensive disaster — De Castro or CEO Marissa Mayer?

At TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference today, Mayer first offered the standard “not a fit” explanation, when asked if his hiring was her biggest mistake to date. But Mayer also eventually shouldered the blame for what many ad industry observers saw as a bad idea from the start.

“There were issues there that I potentially created, and it was important for me to fix them,” she said.

Of course, that one little answer also made it clear once again that De Castro didn’t walk on his own — he was axed.

But as onstage interviewer Michael Arrington observed, De Castro is “probably doing quite well.” Indeed.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.