Yang: Why I'm CEO of Yahoo at this time

Jerry Yang concedes: "It's not the most fun thing to go through..."

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has had a brutal week, and a rough year. It started when on Monday, Google announced that it was terminating its search partnership with Yahoo, amid antitrust regulatory concerns. Then there were rumors swirling about that Yang was quitting.

Then the idea that Microsoft and Yahoo might get back to the table to discuss an acquisition was dismissed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. This despite the fact that Yang made public his desire for Microsoft to buy them, when he said, "The best thing for Microsoft is to buy Yahoo."

In this interview, John Battelle, CEO of Federated Media, and host of the Web 2.0 Summit, asked Jerry why he's sticking it out.

Battelle suggested that Yang has probably done quite nicely for himself since taking Yahoo public. To that end, why be the fall guy and why not just retire?  

Yang replied, "I wanted to make the changes at yahoo that I believed I could make... Yes, there’s been a lot of change, a lot of people coming and leaving, but the plan which we were trying to execute against from that last summer is being done.

"We’re creating Yahoo into a platform. That was the dream I felt I could achieve being the CEO."

He added: "It’s not the most fun thing to go through…. [but] it's a part of me."