AOL’s Tim Armstrong Says He Isn’t Thinking About Yahoo At All

While on-stage today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Europe conference, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong dismissed the latest rumors that Yahoo and AOL might merge.

Specifically, Armstrong said AOL has a board meeting tonight (I guess he’s flying back to New York really soon), for which he’s prepared what he described as a 30- to 40-page presentation outlining his plans for 2015.

“I don’t think Yahoo is mentioned once in that deck,” he said.

The idea of combining AOL (which owns TechCrunch) and Yahoo is an old one, with the current round of speculation brought on after investment firm Starboard Value suggested that a merger would be a good move for Yahoo.

Armstrong argued that the current AOL is doing just fine, thank you, since it took “the worst merger in history and turned it around into growth.” He didn’t offer too many details about what is in that presentation for 2015, but Armstrong did say he has “a clear strategy” for how to grow AOL as “a standalone company,” including getting more aggressive in video and in programmatic advertising.

“I think every single executive I know at the company wants to transform ourselves rather than doing something else,” he said.

But here’s a rumor that Armstrong didn’t dismiss — he said he’s open to the possibility of spinning out our startup database CrunchBase as a separate company, as we covered in a separate post.