To what extent did the departure of Business.com CEO Jake Winebaum contribute to last week’s crash in shares of R.H. Donnelley? The stock fell some 60 percent last week on news of a coming revenue miss and the resignation of Winebaum, who was serving as the company’s interactive head. A spokesperson told The Deal that the departure was not a surprise, though what else would they say? A report form Goldman Sachs analyst Peter Salkowski called the departure a “total surprise” and was a contributor to the sell off, but that ultimately it wouldn’t have much of an impact on the trajectory of the company’s digital efforts.

—On its conference call, management added some color to Winebaum’s departure, and from the perspective of CEO David Swanson, and it definitely doesn’t sound like this was all business as usual: “As it pertains to Jake, there were certain things obviously in Jake’s employment agreement that he walks away from. There was… we had a lot of ups into Jake, but one other thing that I’ll remind you, Jake remains a very large shareholder in R.H. Donnelley. One part of the agreement was that Jake had to buy a significant amount of RHD shares which have a three-year lockup and that’s obviously still in place. Anything else, all of the other retention hooks that we had, Jake has foregone. But just a couple of more comments on that, I’ve been discussing this whole thing with Jake for the last several weeks and the bottom line is, this guy has had a very, very intense life, the last seven years and with the building of Business.com, he has got children that are approaching college age that he just hasn’t spent much time with in the last seven years. And we both agreed if his heart isn’t a 100 percent into this job day-to-day that he should step down, that is he is not going to be able to, it wouldn’t be good for either one of us. So, listen we think are we disappointed? Yes.”