"For big clients, Jerry was the man, " said Greg Coleman, a former top Yahoo executive.

WSJ: Jerry Yang Resigns From Yahoo, the Company He Founded

"At the end of the day everybody was on board to sell for different reasons, " says Greg Coleman.

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"There was a bucking bronco whenever someone said, 'No, you can't do that, '" says Greg Coleman, HuffPo's chief revenue officer at the time, who wasn't offered a job at AOL after the deal.

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Armstrong himself ran U.S. ad sales for Google before joining AOL. One of his first moves upon arrival was to push out Coleman--the same Greg Coleman who then went to HuffPo--and replace him with Jeff Levick, another Google veteran, who brought in his own team.

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