For better or worse, the Head of Sales or top Salesperson is usually the highest paid person in a company.  They frequently make more than the CEO.  To pull a successful (and very highly paid) Sales exec from another firm is extremely expensive because they know they can make a lot of money staying.<p>So the failure isn&#x27;t the price paid...  It&#x27;s that Yahoo couldn&#x27;t grow their own execs.  And for the same reason that they needed to go external and overpay for the CEO, they also needed to go external and pay up for the revenue too.<p>If Yahoo was growing nobody would be complaining.