How many ex-Yahoo managers does it take to reproduce a classic Beatles album cover? From left to right: Salim Ismail, Chad Dickerson, Scott Gatz, and Bradley Horowitz. All four were, at some point, responsible for parts of Yahoo's advanced-products group, including the Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco. The band reunited last night at the 21st Amendment bar in San Francisco's South of Market district to bid Dickerson farewell; he is leaving Yahoo to become CTO of Etsy, the Brooklyn-based marketplace for hipster-friendly handicrafts one must nod politely about. Ismail is attending to Confabb, the startup he failed to sell before joining Yahoo; Gatz is now running GayCities, a queer-travel website; and Horowitz is now at Google. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments The winner will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: Naughty Jason L. Baptiste, for "One bubble Pete Cashmore would like to pop."

Chad Dickerson, who has been responsible for Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator since December, is leaving the company to be CTO at Etsy, an online handicrafts retailer. We hear Google, where former boss Bradley Horowitz now works, had been heavily recruiting Dickerson. With this move, Dickerson has deftly dissed both Web giants. Well done, Chad! [TechCrunch]

What, exactly, is Yahoo's former VP of special projects Bradley Horowitz doing at Google? Innovating! If by "innovating" you mean spending his 20 percent time playing classic arcade games.

Severance pay and "related cash expenditures" will cost Yahoo between $20 million to $25 million, the company said in an SEC filing. Given that Yahoo laid off around 1,000 employees, crude math with these figures suggests laid-off Yahoos walked off with an average severance package of $20,000 to $25,000. Call it $7,500 a month for three months of severance pay. Annualized, that makes being a laid-off Yahoo a $90,000-a-year job.

Former Yahoo VP Bradley Horowitz left the company for Google Tuesday. Yesterday, he posted a 1,200-word explanation. Here's the readable version.

Yahoo Video has soft-launched a new website, in a move which speaks to both the potential of Yahoo and the company's utter disorganization. It has all the necessaries in the age of YouTube and Hulu: clips created by amateurs and professionals, playlists, and "exclusive" content. The latter, if true, is refreshing: Thanks to syndication deals which allow the endless regurgitation of video from site to site, most of the Hollywood-born clips on the Web are numbingly similar. The site also has a tantalizing promise: Video on Flickr.

Microsoft's bid for Yahoo has many eyeing the exits. But we hear that Bradley Horowitz, the VP in charge of Yahoo's advanced products group, has been plotting his escape long before Steve Ballmer's bear hug made it trendy. Since late last year, he's been interviewing at Google. It's not clear if he'll actually get the job, though. Google's hiring process is legendarily slow, but Larry and Sergey can get things moving on candidates they're keen on. If Horowitz was really wanted at the Googleplex, wouldn't he be working there by now? Or was Google just waiting to oust Chris Sacca, making room for another voluble professional conference attendee? Update: Bradley, we misunderestimated you. TechCrunch reports Horowitz is working on one of Google's most vaporous projects: its OpenSocial widget platform, alongside Excite founder Joe Kraus.

We hear that Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's advanced-produts czar, has finally fired Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco. Today's layoffs likely provided a convenient excuse to get rid of Ismail, a suavely incompetent liar. Ismail, a failed entrepreneur turned failed manager, was good at one thing: Getting press for products his group had not yet launched. We told you so.

Brad Garlinghouse's peanut butter memo raged against Yahoo's redundant products. For some Yahoos, farewells are equally repetitive. Scott Gatz, one of Yahoo's R&D managers until he left last month, held a second goodbye party in Sunnyvale today, as boss Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream shows. Some attendees were puzzled: Didn't this guy leave already? Just imagine what Yahoo could do if it put the same effort into building projects for the future as it did saying goodbye to the past.

Rumor has it Scott Gatz, the brain behind Yahoo's search strategy earlier in the decade, more recently heading up part of Bradley Horowitz's Advanced Products Group, will leave Yahoo at the end of the year. Our source, who claims to have failed in trying to hire away Gatz in the past, tells us Gatz always professed to be happy at Yahoo. Apparently that's changed. Why?

It was an odd venue for a tech party — a greasy diner by day, the Grill sits on a corner near the ballpark, neighborhing Border's, McDonald's, and dozens of men in Giants windbreakers asking passerbys if they need a ticket. They say open source is about software that's free as in "free speech," not "free beer," but the open bar featured plenty of the latter.

Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz has joined the Yahoo Alumni group on Facebook, Mashery CEO Oren Michels notes on Twitter. Now, anyone can join that Facebook group, so it could just be that Horowitz wants to stay in touch with departed colleagues. And we hear Horowitz is working closely with Yahoo president Sue Decker on a project, so every indication is that his star is on the rise. Still, the voluble Horowitz, normally a ceaseless status-caster on Twitter and Facebook, has yet to elaborate on his move.

When you can't take market share, take credit. That's the unspoken motto of Yahoo since Google overshadowed the Web pioneer, and no one has mastered the art like Salim Ismail, the desperately unpopular VP in charge of Yahoo Brickhouse, the San Francisco incubator charged with inventing the company's future. One Yahoo insider calls him "notoriously slimy," and points to Ismail's recent announcement of Fire Eagle as an example of how Valleywag's latest and lamest Silicon Valley Tool does his work.

Really, we're confounded. David Hornik's Lobby conference is ostensibly an invite-only affair. But some of the attendees had us scratching our head. Spotted, Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz, Brad Garlinghouse and Kiersten Hollars enjoying some sun instead of participating in Jerry Yang's 100-day turnaround of the company. Then there's Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham from Y Combinator. There's nary a 22-year-old wantrepreneur in sight, so what's the draw of this conference for them? Other inexplicables: Kara Swisher from AllThingsD, and TechCrunch heavyweight Michael Arrington, two notoriously gossipy hacks. Wasn't this event supposed to be off the record? And does Arrington even know what that means? (Photo by bradley23)

While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "stepped-up" LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman; FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, who's rolling in Googlebucks; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale; Evan Williams from Twitter; Mashery's Oren Michels; and
Kevin Rose (and his new haircut) from Digg with Joshua Schachter from the Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us. One question: Is this really Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg? I don't recognize him looking so unnerdly. (Photo by: bradley23)

Everyone's heard of Kevin Rose, the genial, constantly drinking founder of Digg and host of the Diggnation webcast. And everyone's used to his sleepy-eyed, mopheaded good looks. Well, forget the mophead. From this Valleywag spy photo pic we spotted on Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream, Rose got a buzz cut before flying to Hawaii for VC David Hornik's exclusive Lobby conference. Does this have something to do with that Captain America comic? How will his online-video fans react? Will his Diggnation numbers plummet? And will women continue to ask him to sign their breasts? (Photo by bradley23)

Earlier today, we asked about Yahoo's Brickhouse — the ostensible incubator of innovation in San Francisco's South Park charged with reviving Yahoo's reputation for Web cool. Departures from the Pipes project, the only notable product release from Brickhouse, raised questions about the operation. Brickhouse head Bradley Horowitz thinks his group is "thriving," but a recent ex-Brickhouse employee reports otherwise. His complaints range from the petty (the office "smelled like dirty socks") to the more troubling (Horowitz, he claims, "suffers from god syndrome and needs to get over himself"). The full email, after the jump.

"It's the difference between practicing piano after school in a regimented way versus smoking pot and jamming with your friends in a garage," — Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo's Blogger Appeasement Group, talking about the difference between growing innovation internally within a company verses a one-off stunt like last month's Yahoo Hack Day. [San Francisco Chronicle]

I never intended for the blogger-baby story, which began with the birth of Ollie Kottke to A-list bloggers Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan, to become quite such a saga, but news has a way of happening. Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield are no longer expecting a baby — they have a daughter, Sonnet Beatrice Butterfield, according to fellow Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz. Here's the rundown on the rest of the couples mentioned in yesterday's baby poll, which — well done, readers — you guessed correctly.