Yahoo’s Finance Chief Jorgensen Will Leave Company

Yahoo! Inc., the Internet company reorganizing itself to compete with Google Inc., said Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen will step down.

Jorgensen will remain CFO for a transition period, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said today in a regulatory filing. Only yesterday, he addressed investors at a conference in San Francisco.

Jorgensen joined Yahoo in June 2007 after co-founding Thomas Weisel Partners and serving as that firm’s chief operating officer of investment banking. Before that, he was a managing director at Montgomery Securities.

Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz has commissioned searches for several high-level executives amid a management shuffle at the Internet company, a person familiar with the matter said this week. The reorganization is Bartz’s first significant shakeup to bolster Yahoo’s position in the online advertising market after she took over as CEO from co-founder Jerry Yang last month.

Yahoo rose 72 cents, or 5.8 percent, to $13.20 at 12:13 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.

Jorgensen represented Yahoo yesterday at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investor conference, saying the company was open to a search-engine deal with Microsoft Corp. Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offers to buy its search engine last year.

He also spoke yesterday about Bartz, saying she had brought more discipline to the company.

“She’s very interested in simplifying the company and focusing Yahoo on some of its core strengths,” he said. “She is intolerant of anyone that is late to a meeting, and that is very different than the Yahoo way.”