What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold | Hacker News Reader

What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

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305 pointsjessaustin255 comments

Heh, I remember Jelena from discussion on devel-random. I would like to correct (mildly) a couple of anecdotes in her article, because I was there and closer.

> A friend relayed this story: The Sunnyvale campus had a building with redundant turnstiles, which required a badge scan seconds after employees had scanned their badges to open the main doors. People complained about it when the building was remodeled years before, and kept complaining through several CEOs. After Marissa read an email griping about the turnstiles, they were gone the next day.

I remember it a little differently. This was Building D, where the executives sit. Before Marissa got there, there were plans to put an additional set of card-activated turnstiles inside the door. (This building is also where the Yahoo store is, and the main reception desk). Yahoo was plagued with leaks, and some people thought that adding an additional turnstile will keep people from tailgating in.

When Marissa got there, she took one look at the turnstiles and said, "this is stupid", and ordered them removed. Not only that: there were card-activated gates in the parking lots, and those were gone too immediately. She didn't want barriers to coming in to work.

And about devel-random, or "d-r": I was pretty active on that. No one told Marissa about d-r, but just a couple of days after she got there, on a Saturday IIRC, she responded to someone on d-r. This sent shockwaves throughout the upper echelons, and soon senior management were clamoring to get on d-r. Most of them dropped out, exhausted by the volume; but she stuck around.

Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers.

It's the small things that mattered a lot to the battered egos at Yahoo; and Marissa did a lot of good. She was the best CEO of all the ones Yahoo had seen, bar none (OK, I wasn't around during Koogle's tenure).

Were you able to post to d-r anonymously?

No. It's an internal list. But you were free to express yourself without almost any restrictions, modulo the usual workplace norms.

> Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails.

And ed as the editor? Or was it pico?

Only hardcore masochists use ed(1) ! I think she used pico, but not sure.

pico being the default editor for pine would make a natural choice.

I wonder how can someone who prefers console-based email clients ignore mutt.

If I went back to the console for email, I'd probably use pine, just because that's what we used in college.

I used pine until 2004. Then I moved on from where I was and was forced into the world of webmail since there wasn't much else for me then. Inertia is strong in my world, I wonder if I could go back?

Of course you can go back.

I still use pine, it's called alpine now, but works basically the same, and is just as fast as it always was.

It was more a rhetorical question for myself. My (and I think many's) usage of email has changed dramatically in the intervening decade. I get less of it, and what I do get I appreciate having on the go. I don't think I use that much HTML email, so that's not a huge deal, but it would require a major readjustment to how I communicate to make it worth it.

nmh ftw!

> Also: she used to use pine(1) to read her emails. That increased her stature in my eyes, and those of quite a few other engineers.

Ok, now that is amazing. That speaks more about her culture and background than a hundred random actions.

Oh wow! She used pine! Freakin' pine! She sent the company down the tubes, but... holy shit did she ever read her emails in a terminal!

Also: Way to dogfood Yahoo Mail. Shows how much faith you have in your own products - as CEO no less.

I mean, I get your point on pine, but I think the jury is still out on whether she was the cause for Yahoo's demise. I think the media definitely overhyped her, but Yahoo was in pretty dire straits when she took over in 2012

True, but, it seems that much like US presidents, CEOs want all the credit for good results and excuses for the bad ones.

It'd probably be a more accurate version of reality to accept that CEOs and Presidents have relatively little to do with either kind of results. That'd require that we give up the very human tendency to believe in Great People and force us to believe in Ordinary People involved with Great Things.

The buck stops in the C-suite. Verizon bought Yahoo for a tenth of what Microsoft offered eight short years ago. It's impossible to say this or that person was responsible for Yahoo's demise, but her job was to turn it around and in that she failed.

That's not entirely accurate.

Microsoft's offer included patents, Japan, and Alibaba. Today that is all worth more than $45B, so their current exit is technically better.

The dogfood argument is just such bullshit. Just because you make a product, doesn't mean you're the target audience for that product. It's great to dogfood where you can, but that should not get in the way of your productivity if it's not the right tool for the job (and is not meant to be).

I'm reminded of the April Fool's joke a couple years ago where the lead of the Subversion project announced they were switching to git. It was actually a really mature response, I was really disappointed it was just a joke.

Really. Is the bar so low on CEO performance that we credit them for removing turnstiles and changing the cafeteria menu?

FFS. Judging people based on their email client?

People usually judge others based on what they can see ("you are what you eat", but not only). Why not based on what tool they use? It contributes to establish a persona.

It's like looking into a stranger's face and seeing yourself. "omg she's one of us."

Steve Jobs famously used a Thinkpad after returning to Apple.

A Time interview from August 1997 confirms that:

http://allaboutstevejobs.com/sayings/stevejobsinterviews/tim...

In that specific case, Jobs had just come back from NeXT, and Mac OS hadn't yet incorporated elements from NeXTSTEP. It sounds as though Jobs used some early precursor version of Keynote, which may have been more easily ported onto a Thinkpad than onto a Powerbook at the time.

Also, in fairness, the circa 1997 Thinkpad was the best business machine on the market. Period. Macs had to catch up. The Macbook wasn't even a figment of anyone's imagination back then. The Powerbook 3400 (c. early 1997) was faster than the Thinkpad, but the productivity suite available at the time wasn't anything to write home about, let alone use for serious presentations.

All that is to say, I'm not as shocked on reading this as I guess I should be. From everything I've heard, Jobs only took dogfooding so far. If he didn't believe an internal product was the best for a given purpose, he didn't dogfood it. (I would be curious to know if he used Mail, for instance...)

This reminds me me that Rhapsody eventually had limited unofficial PowerBook support. I wonder if Steve Jobs ever used it.

Not uncommon in this industry, see choice of: browser, OS, smart phone, text editor/IDE, etc...

The only thing that should matter is which text editor she uses.

But did she use a tiling window manager?!

She did not use the text editor with its own email client(s), which is all we really needed to know.

But she did use an email client with it's own text editor.

Yes.

Mind you, I couldn't care less if she used Outlook over Apple Mail. Doesn't matter.

However, her use of _Pine_ indicates many things:

* Non-negligible tech expertise. She is comfortable with a terminal and confortable with an old (albeit powerful) email client WHICH DOES NOT DO HTML MAIL.

* Background: could be anything, but Pine usage is correlated with engineering and university backgrounds.

I could go on. The point is: she is no normal clueless CEO having secretaries printing out emails. And that's depressingly rare these days, even in SV.

I'm not sure what you're "correcting" in the original post.

The only difference I see is that the author said Marissa removed the turnstiles after reading an email complaint, and you say she removed the turnstiles after looking at them.

The framing is different. In one frame she appears to care about the QoL of her employees, in the other she doesn't necessary care about that so much as she cares about efficiency and her personal comfort.

http://i.imgur.com/LRGZRTO.jpg

It's an interpretation based on speculation, not a correction.

She might have looked at the turnstile and thought, "This is probably annoying to the other employees, so it has to go." We don't know, and 1024core doesn't know.

Or maybe the OP was correct, and an email complaint really did contribute to the decision. Without further evidence, or unless 1024core is actually Marissa Meyer, we simply don't know.

Speculation is how we judge other people, and our social space doesn't have objective truths. Narratives are all there is, so narratives are what matter most. It's legitimate to correct offending narratives that conflict with your version of reality.

> It's legitimate to correct offending narratives that conflict with your version of reality.

You're not "correcting" someone's interpretation simply by stating a different interpretation, unless there's some grounding in evidence and objective truth. Core1024 may have evidence that supports his interpretation, but he didn't present it. As such, it doesn't qualify as a correction.

> You're not "correcting" someone's interpretation simply by stating a different interpretation

But that's how people use the word, that's what politics is. There are no objective truths to social narrative, and facts aren't the only things that have the property of correctness. Perspectives have correctness, as in moral perspectives etc. It's not an objective scale, but people don't have to conduct their lives scientistically.

You've now brought value judgement and morality into the discussion, and neither apply here.

The blogger said Meyer acted on an email complaint about the turnstiles. The commenter said that's incorrect, that Meyer decided to have them removed on her own accord.

There's no value judgement. There's no appeal to moral authority. It's not politics. Core1024 is claiming to be objectively correct about Meyer's internal motivation for removing the turnstile. In this case, it's acceptable to ask: what evidence do you have?

If he says "She told me herself" or "It was a water cooler rumor," then great, we have our answer. If he says, "It's my strong suspicion based on [...]," then he passed off suspicion as fact. And if he says, "There is no evidence, this is a social narrative I've constructed without regard to objective truth," then we have a serious problem.

I've brought neither value judgment nor morality. I merely said that it's legit to think about perspectives as having degrees of correctness, just as it's legit to think about moral philosophies as having degrees of correctness. It's fine if you want say, "I don't believe you," and that would be a valid interpretation on your part. But it is politics in the true sense, and you're participating in it with this conversation. You're attempting to assert that your interpretation of a word or a concept or a situation is correct and that mine is not, even though there are no objective truths to be said about either perspective. As far as I can tell, OP doesn't claim that he is correcting the specific fact-claim about the turnstiles but that he is correcting the anecdotes as a whole. What I believe the OP wants to correct is the framing or the tone of the anecdotes, not any particulars facts inside them.

> What I believe the OP wants to correct is the framing or the tone of the anecdotes

Fair enough. One person frames it as "Meyer was motivated by empathy," and the other frames it as "She was motivated by self-interest." Neither person can prove their claim conclusively, but I assume there's some evidence that led Core1024 to contradict the blogger. The best we can hope for is to hear evidence from both sides, and come to our own conclusion.

It might be common for people to say "You're wrong" without providing evidence or rationale. But unless "You're wrong" is accompanied by some justification, it's devoid of value. All we now know is that somebody on the Internet thinks Meyer is self-serving, and we knew that already.

> it's legit to think about perspectives as having degrees of correctness

Can you provide an example where one perspective on a person is correct (or more correct), another perspective on that person is incorrect (or less correct), and the relative correctness is not based on objective truth or an appeal to moral authority?

> The best we can hope for is to hear evidence from both sides, and come to our own conclusion.

I don't think the principle of evidence-based decision-making applies to most social situations. For one, there usually is no evidence. With the Mayer situation, while everyone might agree that the turnstiles are no longer there, we have no video footage or recorded conversations to examine. So in a real sense, narratives and hearsay are all we have. For another, we care about other people's opinions. Like with online reviews, people find value even in reviews that don't give any explanations, or for food product reviews that amount to nothing more than, "Five stars, because it tastes good."

If someone makes an accusatory statement about another person, I agree that there's definitely a burden of proof. But Core1024's comment doesn't seem to me to be accusatory or an attempt to frame Mayer as a selfish person. I think the comment reframes Mayer's actions as being motivated by efficiency as opposed to empathy, which I think is a much more neutral view.

> Can you provide an example where one perspective on a person is correct (or more correct), another perspective on that person is incorrect (or less correct), and the relative correctness is not based on objective truth or an appeal to moral authority?

Any interpretation you have of a social situation. Any opinion you have of your work environment or social circle. Your beliefs about what defines a certain culture. We understand intellectually that these are all opinions and that opinions are subjective, but there's no sense in which we would ever behave as if our beliefs are not true. Otherwise why would we believe them in the first place? I think it's disingenuous to look for objectivity in social interpretations. And anyway this isn't a criminal trial, or something like that. It's pure gossip.

To answer your question: I heard it from her directly. Now, I don't remember if it was in a small setting, or it was in the weekly TGIF. But I do recall her saying that she wanted these barriers gone.

But it's been 4 years...

Actually, I heard it from her directly that she was appalled at the barriers, and wanted them to go. Now, whether it was in a TGIF or in person, I don't recall.

I meant no offense by issuing the correction. I heard it from MM's mouth that she wanted to get rid of these barriers to entering Yahoo. My point, which is minor, is that she evaluated the situation herself and made a decision to get rid of the barriers, rather than responding to someone's complaint.

She didn't want barriers to coming into work because she was about to eliminate the work from home program.

>She was the best CEO of all the ones Yahoo had seen

So the best CEO Yahoo! has ever seen couldn't turn the ship around. does that say more about the state of Yahoo! or the competence of the CEO?

> Marissa was able to vanquish the chronically poor self-esteem in the organization for a little while, but eventually Yahoo’s organizational depression took hold again.

That summarizes my experience at Yahoo pretty well.

The company was broken when she took over. Deep in its structure, in its hiring, in its middle management, it was broken. Marissa did not break it, but she was also unable to fix it.

Probably more about the state of Yahoo. Mayer really was quite talented, by all accounts. But Yahoo's problems really were quite fundamental - down to the fundamental questions of what its line if business could have, or should have been - beyond simply issues of morale and revenue.

So another spin on the whole sage might well be, "If Marissa Mayer couldn't turn Yahoo around -- maybe no one could."

Hayyyyyyyyyyy. Just found this & created a realname account to say hello...

I don't know who you are from the 1024core username but if you were a d-r'er I certainly trust your corrections! I'll place a note in the article.

I picked a random username to stay anonymous. :-)

Like you, I also enjoyed the burst in energy when MM landed. I just wish she had not trusted the middle management so much; but these people had entrenched themselves over many, many years like barnacles, and it's not easy to get rid of them.

Good luck, wherever you are!

It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty?

I was at Yahoo from 2004 through 2015. I saw some seriously stupid CEOs. One of them being Terry Semel. He made more than $200M in just one year (and even more, according to rumors). Here's an article from around that time; I wish I had time to dig up more: https://3qdigital.com/analytics/terry-semel-you-owe-1000-yah...

But you never hear his name ever brought up. Because he was a white, male CEO?

He also didn't invest a lot of time and energy on self-promoting PR. You knew who he was, but nobody else did.

Meyer did and has for years. She wants this attention as part of a broader personal branding effort. Everyone knows that Yahoo was a dead man walking, and the details of her tenure will be forgotten quickly -- but lots of people know who she is. Anyone who watches CNBC knows who she is, and many other people do as well with the corporate nursery stories, stories about her being a woman, etc.

Good for her.

Wasn't Yahoo essentially unsellable when she took over? Tying the company's future to her personally may have been pretty much the only way they could disturb investor sentiment and inertia.

Ballmer is white & male (well, like Semel, probably not white enough for white supremacists, but apparently white enough for the purposes of this discussion), MS market cap didn't shrink under his tenure, but he gets a lot of criticism for missing growth opportunities that others capitalized on.

Why is he criticized more than Terry Semel? I dunno, probably 'cause nobody cares about Semel any more?

Because Yahoo pissed off fewer people than MS of that era? CEOs are proxies for their companies, for better and worse.

> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years

Why? That is $50mil/year which is an insane amount of money for any one person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes per year to fail.

It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already failing when she came in and nobody could turn it around!" She was hired to turn it around. She did fail at the job she was hired to do. It doesn't matter if it was impossible, she took it on and she's getting tons of money despite failing. For me her compensation is one thing but the truly objectionable part is the $50mil golden parachute. And it's not just her, tons of execs that fail at their jobs get these golden parachutes and it's awful. She's just the latest high profile example.

If I take a developer position at a company with terrible project/team management, terrible culture, nasty legacy codebase, etc. and I do a bad job I'm still going to get fired. I'm not going to get a massive golden parachute. I might get two weeks severance. I'm not going to get a full year's severance.

Combine that cushy parachute with salary that is so out of sync with what the average person makes and yeah, people are going to go "What the fuck?" It shouldn't surprise you.

>She's just the latest high profile example.

She's attracted an order of magnitude more vitriol than any of the other "tons of execs." It's her that HN chooses to complain about. It matters which instances you choose to be vocal about.

And it's extremely suspicious, to say the least, that an industry which insists it has no sexism problem because men are just better at it, spends a great deal of time and energy attacking a woman who presides over a collapse but glosses over or barely acknowledges the men who have done the same.

I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s. but personally my objections to her pay are the same as every other executive. I can't speak to anyone else's motivations.

>I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misogyny on the internet recently with the MRA b.s.

I'm not going to deny there's a rise in misandry on the internet recently with the feminist b.s. but personally I have no objections to her pay in particular, I feel CEO''s in general are completely overpaid. She took a sinking ship and tried to right it and failed - I don't really think anyone could have realistically turned around Yahoo anyway.

That's a slippery slope right there. I don't care about Yahoo or celebrity CEO culture at all. But I also feel like people should be able to express their opinions on a CEO and not be worried that doing so constitutes being labeled a sexist if the CEO happens to be a woman. There have been many males CEOs that have been derided as well - Bezos, Jobs et al so lets keep this in perspective. Star CEOs with their insanely outsized pay packages and their carefully cultivated public images make them targets for derision, not their sex.

I think this issue the other poster is referring to is whether we should act to decrease sexism (their argument) or ignore sexism (your argument).

There's no right answer, but the other commenter has a point that if sexism is what causes Mayer to appear more often in stories about underperforming CEOs with exit packages (sexism), and we comment negatively on all stories of the like (neutral), then we become complicit in generating a sexist culture. Essentially because sexists chose the only things we saw to comment on in the first place.

Very few people on this forum spend alot of time looking into the leadership of the myriad of ineptly run companies. Mayer is deliberately high profile, and the company she runs is a household name. Criticism of her is the low hanging fruit; its precisely because most of us can't be assed to get interested in inept CEOs that the ones we do criticize are already the most (in)famous.

Yeah, everyone here criticizes her because she's a woman. We only root for men. Get over yourself.

MM was hyped beyond reason when she was hired, made a ton of money and ended up being an apparently mediocre CEO. And yet, people are still producing articles about the "great" work she did at Yahoo. That's why she is criticized.

Executives have [employment] options. If you believe you need a talented executive to have a chance at turning around your company and your company is in dire straits, you may very well have to offer a golden parachute package to have any hope of engaging the services of the talented exec you seek, particularly when that's the norm at that level.

Failing to offer such terms amounts to forfeiting any chance to hire the talent you think you need. Offering such terms is totally rational under that set of (reasonable, I think) assumptions.

Yeah, yeah this same excuse is always used to justify insane executive pays but it's baloney. It's a self perpetuating cycle, "Oh WE Have to pay more because companies X, Y and Z are offering $N million!"

Executive pay has skyrocketed in relation to worker pay over the last 30 years and it's not for any good reason like executives are so much more important or talented. It's because the executive pay is decided by boards that are full of friends of the executives, people who are executives at the same or other companies, and want everyone involved to hook them up when their pay is being decided.

The only way it's going to get fixed is regulation, and I hope it comes sooner rather than later. The greed displayed by boards and high level executives is revolting.

Market supply and demand is another big part of it. And you are responsible for the fate of mega $$$ corps.

If you can create something more efficient you would outcompete those companies.

I get that a lot of people think that's how the real world market works, but it isn't. Look how long it took Yahoo! to die. It hasn't been relevant for over a decade but it has coasted by on pure momentum, and even as its dying it throws 1% of its purchase price to the CEO as a parting gift.

Entrenched corporations have a lot of momentum and a lot of power. Taking them on is nearly impossible. Tesla has only been able to do what it has done so far because Elon Musk was already a billionaire and willing to risk his entire fortune on it. The Model 3 is obviously in high demand but even so the future of Tesla is far from assured (they have an enormous ramping up of production to do. I have hope they can do it but it's far from guaranteed.)

Verizon and Google made attempts at competing in the telco industry and have basically both failed miserably. Comcast, Charter and TWC continue to dominate the entire country and instead of competing with each other grant each other regional monopolies and try to merge.

The game is rigged and it's not in the favor of the average person.

What sort of regulation do you propose?

This is the problem. It's very unlikely that regulation will improve the matter.

If executive pay really is an outcome of market supply and demand, regulation will act as a price ceiling, which will reduce the quality and quantity of executives available. In addition to the well known fact that price ceilings create shortages, these executives don't need to work for a living. Mayer was already set for life before joining Yahoo. Why would they work for less money than they currently ask for, especially if they really are worth it according to market demand?

If executive pay is an outcome of nepotism and corruption, and people on boards helping out their buddies, then they will simply continue to do so. If pay is capped, they will find another way to reward their friends. This cannot be prevented through regulation. It can only be stopped when the shareholders decide that they've had enough of it and appoint board members who behave differently.

I think this looks to be the more plausible reason for massive executive pay than anything else. I remember watching a documentary about F1 and there was a comment about Bernie Ecclestone made everyone understand that they have to work together to make the pie (F1 earning) bigger so that everyone's share become bigger.

It seems that executives are essentially doing the same. Making and perpetuating the myth of extreme compensation being essential and justified for such responsibility. I would agree that it can be an extremely complex responsibility to bear and be compensated similarly. Depending on the company I can understand 5-10 times the salary but 10s of millions sound absurd.

> 5-10 times the salary but 10s of millions sound absurd.

and that seems to be regardless of whether you're any good or not.

I think the market for CEOs is more like the market for sports stars (MLB pitchers, NFL quarterbacks, and the like).

If the Yankees are offering $100MM over 5 years, why would an MLB pitcher sign for $5MM over 5 years with a second market team? Even $1MM/year seems absurd for someone to throw a ball 65' a couple hundred times per day for a few dozen days a year. Conversely, why would the Yankees pay that much to someone when there are hundreds of minor league pitchers who would all jump at the chance to pitch in the show for the league minimum? Because it's important to get the best (or among the best), rather than someone who is simply adequate and meets the minimum requirements.

Is there some amount of board collusion in some company somewhere? I'm sure of it. Is board collusion driving CEO compensation across all industries? I doubt it.

The only way it's going to get fixed is regulation...

Well yes, but maybe not directly. A quick way for corporate executives to be paid less would be if suddenly corporations became really terrible investments. A quick way for that to happen would be for society to stop bending every law and regulation to benefit giant corporations over normal-sized private firms. Can we envision a scenario by which that could happen? Maybe!

That is the stated narrative: that it's hard to hire CEOs who are good, and we need to give them every dollar we can.

But there's a darker, and (IMHO) more accurate narrative: corruption or nepotism. Company A's CEO serves on the boards of companies B and C; and company B's CEO serves on the boards of A & C; and C's CEO on A & B. When the time comes, CEO_A votes for a big raise for CEO_B (and so does CEO_C). Now, when their turns come, they point to CEO_B and say: "look, the market is valuing CEOs so much! You've got to do something!". And CEO_B and CEO_C express outrage and vote to give CEO_A a huge raise. And the cycle repeats.

Of course the connections are not as direct, but the club is a very exclusive club, and they all know how the game is played.

> She did fail at the job she was hired to do.

But did she? The market had valued Yahoo's core assets at -7B (that is, negative 7 Billion), if you added all of Yahoo's assets and compared it to the market price. But she sold those same assets for +5B. That's a decent turnaround, isn't it?

This right here. Saving Yahoo was impossible. If I had been an investor I would be quite satisfied paying the CEO $200M to secure $12B increase in valuation.

No, because nobody knows who Terry Semel is.

I think back to AT&T CEO John Walter who was barely at the job 11 months before he was forced out. He made a nice tidy sum of money plus a new house for his efforts.

" Under the terms of his contract, Walter, 50, will receive separation payments totaling about $3.8 million, AT&T said. This is in addition to the $22 million provided to replace salary, pension and bonuses Walter forfeited when he left R.R. Donnelley & Co. last October after nine years as the publishing company's CEO."

article: http://money.cnn.com/1997/07/16/companies/att/ article 2: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/17/business/after-9-months-at...

EDIT: added another link.

This is in addition to the $22 million provided to replace salary, pension and bonuses Walter forfeited...

Shouldn't investors at any company that does this be angry at having to reimburse executives for opportunity cost?

It's not reimburse. It's just negotiation. Why leave something near guaranteed for something uncertain?

Last time I changed jobs I negotiated hard using my current situation to leverage a decent signing bonus. This is no different.

Was your signing bonus a ~5x multiple of your annual salary? It just smells to me like the company is effectively paying for two employee positions, one at another company.

Back of the napkin calc says John R. Walter's compensation + forfeited shares in 1997 added up to maybe $7MM (being generous, perhaps $10MM if he had stayed through vesting), so the reimbursement by AT&T was easily 2-3x the real-world numbers.

Thats probably why.

Agreed, from everything else I've read Yahoo has serious internal issues that no CEO is going to be able to fix without a lot of help from those inside the company, and those inside the company seemed to be just riding the ship down to the ocean so they didn't need to jump.

>It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years. The spotlight has always been on her, and her failings are magnified beyond reason. Is it because she's young woman and pretty?

I'm amazed people get so angry when others point out Mayer failed to turn Yahoo around. Is it because she's a young woman and pretty?

From a non-insider perspective, it certainly looks as if MM accomplished the mission. Stock price went up, and she locked it in with a well-timed sale. Her compensation package appears to have been designed to produce exactly this outcome. It's not Steve Jobs' return to Apple. But she did help the investors salvage a respectable outcome.

It would have anyway - its the management at BABA you can thank for that...

Had they sold earlier during her tenure the company could have easily gone for twice as much.

Was it down to luck more than anything else? She made a few bets. Most failed. One did spectacularly , yet seems to have very little to do with Yahoo as a company.

She inherited a depreciating asset in core yahoo, managed to hold the line on further losses. She is also managing a "strategic transaction" that could go very wrong if done poorly. I would guess that (if successful) this deal will be thought of as a success, and probably comes as a relief to the board and officers. But again, I only know what I read on the Internet which surely is missing some important facts.

"if I’m ever in a position like Marissa’s, I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the house."

I'm grateful for this article reminding me why I never really will fit in with the techie fanatics. Yesterday I went home at 5p, after a very productive day, and trimmed plants in my garden, not checking my work email until the next day.

(Well maybe for $200M over 5 years you could convince me to do that. But then it's back to books and gardening and developing pictures)

Also oddly reminiscent of this post from yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168718

It really sucks when your manager thinks this kind of work ethic is healthy.

Yes. I am very lucky to have a manager that will frequently tell me to just leave if I stay too long after 6p, and actively encourages me to do less work (which I find quite frustrating - I feel like I'm already not doing that much!).

I work at a very profitable, well known company FWIW, in a fairly core role with plenty of people depending on my productivity.

In general, people aren't productive working more than 10 hours a day. Unfortunately, some people are -- and those people very often find themselves in executive positions, surrounded by other people with exceptional stamina who wonder why everyone below them is so lazy.

Fortunately, a lot of companies have realized this and started making employee retention a metric (because recruiting is expensive, especially for tech positions.) Keeping people happy is still important.

Coding is different from normal work though, isn't it? I mean, if I have 3 hours of data entry ahead of me, I get in the zone almost instantly and crack through it at high speed with little difficulty, take lunch, then go on to the next thing. I've never had 3 hours worth of emails or administrative work to do, but I imagine it to be the same. 3 hours of solid code, on the other hand, takes a special day of the office being unusually quiet, at least half an hour to get in the zone, and at the end of it, I'm done for the day. It's not just my own arrogance, is it, to say that "code" work and "admin" work are two completely different categories that ought to be evaluated differently?

I think you're right and people aren't productive working 10 hours a day.

Occupants of executive positions aren't expected to actually produce anything.

Most people are lucky to squeeze 3 hours of actually-useful work into a single work day. In your average office, the rest of the 8-or-10-hour work day is burned on socializing with colleagues, responding to and reading emails, attending interviews, trainings, or other rote meetings not specifically related to one's job, traveling around the building, eating, taking restroom and Facebook/reddit breaks, and so on.

I don't think this number goes up as you expand the requisite work hours or push people against their will. I think people just find increasingly creative ways to avoid real work while still filling the butt-in-chair requirements.

I think even in the case of people who appear to be productive that long (and I'd argue most people aren't productive more than 4-5 hours a day, if that) in executive positions only appear as productive as they do because of extensive support networks.

It's a lot easier to be productive long hours if you e.g. has executive assistants that manage your calendar so you don't need to think about it, people to delegate all the menial stuff to, staff at home ensuring you don't need to worry about coming home to a messy house that needs cleaning and so on.

Doesn't mean it won't still be hard, but it's not as hard as it may seem when looking up from a position you have to handle 100% on your own.

Another factor is that while e-mailing late nights when you're low down the hierarchy generally means you are working long hours, e-mailing late nights when you're high up the hierarchy can mean that, and it can also mean that you have sufficient freedom to structure your day that you've chosen to e.g. spend that day taking a long lunch and chill in the afternoon and catch up on e-mails late at night instead, possibly realising that this ironically will make it seem like you're working harder.

A lot of people who are not used to have that freedom automatically assume it's the former, and then end up falling into trying to live up to that. My advice is don't. Carve out time. Appear busy. Seeming busy ironically often makes you seem harder working even if you just say you are and use it to give you breathing room to work less.

I've seen several folks who would save email drafts only to send those later after midnight.

[One of them admitted doing so and added that it helps.]

I've seen folks have emails stream out starting at 4am so they could leave at 1 as well.

Oh, I usually save my emails as drafts after office hour, and send them during the day, in order to not encourage others to work late.

A culture were you arrive at work and find a 20+ emails back and forth from the previous night is not good.

Especially since decisions are sometimes taken without essential input from people that actually have a life.

In the end, everyone will just be stressed about never being able to look a way from email for more than 20 minutes.

I think this has less to do with the tech industry and more to do with a culture where your value is strongly tied to your work. Work more = have more value.

The difference is that she was getting paid tens of millions each year to do that job. (Sorry if I'm making a wrong assumption about your salary!)

The original post makes Mayer sound like one of the most people-centric CEOs in the business. The contrast to someone like Léo Apotheker at HP is stark (just to pick a random tech CEO who seemed like the exact opposite).

Oh yeah, I get that if I were a CEO paid hundreds of millions I wouldn't have much time to feed the fish in my backyard.

I just find the glorifying of answering emails at 1am on a a Sunday a little crazy, that's all.

It's the glorification by the people making 8 figures that gets the people making 5-6 figures to do it too. The profits flow to the top.

It's the kind of thing that a CEO in a startup will often do because he/she cares and has an overwhelming personal involvement in the company. (I once was in that position for a tiny company of a handful of people, and I would write emails at 1:00 on Saturday night.)

It's rare to see that carried over into a tech giant. I imagine Larry Ellison does something rather different at that point of his weekend than responding to individual worker bees' concerns.

I think you underestimate how hard a guy like Larry Ellison works.

I could completely understand that feeling. Right now im nowhere near her scale but I answer emails at 1 am on a sunday. For me now it is just how I am wired, I want to do it. I also see a difference between being a ceo/owner and "working". I can make decissions all day and answer questions, to me it doesnt feel like work. Now to sit down and design\illustrate for 15 hours straight every day forget it, I burn out. Its like no one who does hard physical labor for 10-12hours a day answers emails at 1 am on sunday lol. For me there is a difference in the "work" being done.

Seems to me like she was the "I say hello to you by first name in the morning but lay you off anyway" kind of CEO

Worked with a bunch of such people. Always nice in the front.

Layoffs suck, but in some cases they're necessary. It doesn't really have anything to do with being nice or mean.

The alternatives include treating people poorly and laying them off, or treating them well and not performing the tough part of your job as CEO. Neither is better.

I know. But look what she did to Yahoo, doesn't seem to me like a bunch of people losing their jobs did help anyone.

> But look what she did to Yahoo

You say this like she single-handedly took down a healthy company. It's possible she went in with the best intentions, and worked her hardest to rescue a sinking ship.

Frankly, Yahoo had a lot of dead weight that should have been cut years before she got there. It was a dying company for a reason.

I know plenty of people at Yahoo hoping to get let go.

She successfully added a very aggressive change in control clause with a double trigger, so anyone let go will have accelerated vesting of all their stock.

For many of my friends there, they would be let go with essentially a 6 figure layoff package (in addition to 2 months of severence).

> Always nice in the front.

I'd happily settle for this. I've met many's the type that were just rude, and layed you off anyway. I'll take a bit of manners with my daily beating any day!

There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level positions. I'm convinced they simply have better genetics than the rest of us -- after 10 or so hours of work, my memory is garbage and I wouldn't feel confident dealing with anything important but some people are totally fine.

Plus, you couldn't work that hard for any amount of money unless you loved the work. I'm not sure I want to be a CEO for that reason -- I treasure the ability to turn off 'work mode' for a little while every day.

I work with high level executives at a well known company regularly. Most of them are normal people. Hard working, smarter than the average? Sure. Answering emails at 1am on a Sunday with a newborn? Certainly not. In fact, my director just took a month off when his second child was born, and is taking another month off soon.

There is no "better genetics" or "sleeping 4 hours a night". That's just the media and tech echo chamber doing its thing.

I work with major company C-suite guys on a regular basis, and while not everyone is the "4 hours a night" type, they're definitely overrepresented. Keep in mind I don't see this as a positive thing -- I think it's unhealthy and sets a bad example for your employees. But there are some people who just have more stamina, and that's something I've had to accept. I have less stamina, so I need to be more effective with the time that I do have and delegate work to others.

There are reasons to believe that there are people who have a genetic characteristic that enables them to get by on that little sleep. This is a link to the study referenced in the parent post's BBC article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/

Furthermore, human genetic variation being what it is, there is no reason to dismiss "better genetics" in general. There are many genetic differences that make people better or worse than others at performing certain tasks. Some are obvious, some less so. But its certainly plausible that they exist, and dismissing them as part of an "echo chamber" is unjustified.

Being a high level executive does not require the type of Deep Thought that being a software engineer requires. Not to say that CEO's and such are all shallow thinkers, but they have to respond to multiple streams of information at all times (Which is why I think women make great CEO's, there are many studies that show women are better multi-taskers).

* This is also articulated well in the book "Deep Thought"

This may be true, but I don't think Mayer is a great example of excelling. Maybe if she had a different approach than answering random emails in the middle of the night, her tenure wouldn't have gone like it did.

Note that they are also doing a different kind of work. Paul Graham's essay on Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule - http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html - is a good highlight of the differences. (It covers what both sides take to get into the "zone" etc.)

Trust me, at that level there are many things that help you artificially. It exists at lower levels too, of course.

> There's a certain workaholic personality that excels at executive-level positions

Except that Marissa didn't excel.

Mayer reportedly has the gene that lets you get by on 4 hours of sleep a night:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150706-the-woman-who-barel...

http://www.businessinsider.com/successful-people-who-barely-...

Of course, with a new baby in the house, it's possible she was going to be up at 1 AM anyway...

Do you really think she had to get up with the baby? I'm sure even her help had help.

That's what stuck out to me the most. I'd rather work for a CEO/manager that communicates through actions that it's perfectly fine to go home at 6 and ignore work until you come in the next morning.

The right kind of CEO does that by not requiring that you copy her behaviour. It is her prerogative to work all through the night - I had a co-founder who was similar, but I work best in the mornings. It did take us a while to come to a mutual agreement on who was working "more" but once we did it was smooth sailing. We never, ever asked staff to work outside of hours unless in emergencies or with paid overtime and mutual agreement. And in fact, they pressured us back to take time off, and worked with us to make sure our own work was covered (where possible). It was a great environment I am fostering further: hard work comes in small, rewarding bursts, the rest of the time is to support others doing that hard work or having some mental downtime with less challenging work.

>I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning

Perhaps she should have gotten a good night sleep and be refreshed to come up with a viable strategy for the company, rather than worry about emails at 1am?

I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

> I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

This. Larry Ellison fucks around on a sailboat. Larry is busy with "X" for years. And no one bats an eye.

Oracle and Google both make astonishing amounts of money. Nobody (least of all shareholders) is marching on their headquarters with torches and pitchforks. So nobody cares what the leaders of those companies do with their time -- so long as their companies continue to make astonishing amounts of money.

If the money dries up, rest assured that the line of people demanding that the leaders start paying attention to the business would rapidly become quite long.

Exactly. Ellison seen on a mega boat tells you how well he is doing and thus the company. MM answering low-level employee emails in the middle of the night says she doesn't know what's going on.

> This. Larry Ellison fucks around on a sailboat. Larry is busy with "X" for years. And no one bats an eye.

If Oracle's valuation was less than the combined valuation of holdings it owned in other companies such that its core business had an apparent negative valuation, there'd probably be more negative attention to Larry's extracurricular activities.

When you are seen to be succeeding, no one questions your methods -- success implicitly validates them. That's not about sex or gender, its about apparent success.

He's not the CEO of Oracle anymore. He's the executive chairman only.

> I'm no biz-geek, I probably can't name a dozen CEOs. But for years, MM's name was called put in every critical mainstream headline about Yahoo, of which there were many. I do not believe that's an accident. I do not believe a man would have been treated the same way.

IME, male CEOs of formerly-high-flying-but-now-struggling companies are treated the same way that MM has been.

>IME, male CEOs of formerly-high-flying-but-now-struggling companies are treated the same way that MM has been.

Look at the headlines in the ongoing VW scandal.

"Volkswagen Chairman Agrees to Bonus Cut"

"VW Executives to Accept ‘Significant’ Bonus Cuts to Quell Unrest"

These people stand accused of criminal acts, hugely damaging to the business, and they don't even get named in the headlines.

Nor are their bonuses completely held back. Like what do these people have to do to simply lose their bonus?

"Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey. Will It Work?"

"Twitter, Grappling with Anemic Growth, Tries to Bolster Its Advertising Business. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive, in Sun Valley, Idaho, this month."

"How Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Plans to Fix the Company - Fortune"

"Jack Dorsey comments on Twitter staying independent - Business ..."

"Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Confirms Layoffs With Tweet | WIRED"

Fair enough to look for a counterexample, I guess, but here's the thing: I've never heard of Jack Dorsey.

That's not surprising to me. I'm not a Twitter user and I don't read the biz-interest publications.

Meyer's name (always the obviously-feminine "Melissa," never just "Meyer", just like "Hillary" rather than simply "Clinton") in contrast, was plastered all over the NYT and other mainstream outlets from the start.

It's a subtle way of making the headline function as "lady CEO" without coming out and saying it.

MM seems to be very polarizing because she got so much praise and attention when she became the Yahoo CEO without actually doing anything. She was the golden child CEO without any merit. I think people found this frustrating (I did) and so when we saw Yahoo doing poorly it's easy to point out that maybe MM isn't so great just for being a CEO who's also an attractive woman who will pose for magazine covers in a tight dress. Additionally, not many CEOs have a personal brand. MM obviously does, and so even despite everything I mentioned previously, she is going to get lots of attention, good and bad.

That's a good read. Just goes to show that it's important to remember people's humanity, especially when all the cards are stacked against them. People have said some really ugly stuff about MM.

Yes- it's important to stay human while thousands of employees get laid off and the CEO makes a few hundred million for the valiant effort of letting good employees go

That's exactly the sort of situation I'm referring to.

"Good" tends to be very subjective. Actually good people rarely get let go, unless there is a very good reason. At the same time almost everyone who gets laid off thinks they are a very good employee, which obviously is not the case.

And execs get paid for the expectations and responsibility. You are just being salty right now.

Sometimes the reason doesn't need to be "good" in the sense that it's a great reason, but in the sense that it was the right decision.

I worked as a engineer at a huge billion dollar company in a newly created slot. There was 2 on the team and I was the third. Then massive layoffs. Thousands of people let go. I was one of them. Was I "good people" ? I don't know. I like to think I was, that's why I got the position. Of the 3 people on the team, I was the right choice though, least experience with the company's infrastructure, etc.

The real issue at hand was the disconnect between the team manager (who found out he had to let me go the morning it happened and was quite upset about it) and upper executives. Why was adding my position approved by upper executives in the first place if they knew that a month later they would be laying off so many, you would think they would have had a massive layoff of that size in the works for more than just a few days.

So there was no "good reason" other than "cutting cost" but if someone had to be let go, the 2 others on the team deserved the job more than me.

But that's the point. You weren't a "good" employee if you're judging on one metric: experience with their infrastructure.

You were clearly good enough to get hired but all things considered you were the correct person the let go.

The distinction, and you seem to understand, is that it wasn't a personal thing. People say stuff like "let go of good people". What does being a good person have anything to do with running a business?

Not saying any of this is right or wrong but more musing over what drives business decisions and how people will often mix personal feelings into non-personal decisions.

While her great experiences illustrate a caring and hard-working person, I still can't forget writeups describing someone who was unable to develop a product strategy / roadmap in a timely manner, resulting in a lot of miscommunication and execs left in limbo (see the Forbes article written in early 2015).

There's no doubt that it was extremely hard to turn that ship around, so I'm not at all attributing the company's failure to her. But as a product person, at the end of the day, my best experiences with CEOs has never been about whether they've rejuvenated a certain company culture but rather their ability to help provide vision and strategy (among other things).

Furthermore:

> But I know that, if I’m ever in a position like Marissa’s, I want to be the kind of CEO who answers emails from strangers six or seven levels down from herself at 1 AM on a Sunday morning, even when she has a new baby in the house. I want to be the kind of person who has time to hear people out, even when they’re saying things that hurt me.

Honestly, I'm happy when my CEO answers e-mails at reasonable hours and has work/life balance (as much as a CEO can get).

Thanks for all the great discussion here & thank you Jess for submitting my article to HN. (In case anyone is curious, Medium currently credits this post with 13,362 views on my Medium post.) I have another HN account--sadly underutilized, I have to admit--but didn't want to tie it to my real name, so here's a brand new baby account for this thread...

I'm glad to see a few comments here from other ex-Yahoos who felt the same thrill I did when Marissa came to Yahoo. It really was like night and day.

I've seen a lot of discussion here, on Twitter and on Medium critiquing the way I responded to Marissa's late-night email habits. For a lot of people it seems late emails from an executive are a negative and demonstrates an expectation that others also be on email at 1 AM. I was surprised by that because I've always really enjoyed working for workaholic/fanatic CEOs, but I understand because I've also encountered some toxic personalities who do use late night email runs to demonstrate that they're "working harder" than everyone else (when in reality they're only putting more work into playing the game, not into deliverables). Because that was never remotely the case with Marissa, I didn't even think about it while writing. With Marissa, hearing from her late at night sent the message "I'm always thinking about what you need from me," not, "I'm always thinking about what you should be doing FOR me."

Of course, I'm a little bit of an unhealthy fanatic workaholic type myself, which is definitely part of why Marissa is such a powerful role model for me. She doesn't pretend that her sleeplessness or fanaticism is the most healthy or balanced way to live, and she doesn't advise others to be exactly like her. She just demonstrates that being naturally that sort of person is survivable and is compatible with having love and happiness in your life. That alone was huge for me. If I can be who I authentically am and survive it and have people around me who love me anyway, even if I shorten my life and don't necessarily have human relationships that are AS fulfilling as a Type B personality might be able to have, I'm ok with that outcome.

I have to admit that when she started in Yahoo, they tried to do their best to not suck that much, but I think it was too late. In a time where internet and word of mouth can punish very hard bad PR/bad UX, they tried with Tumblr showing they weren't going to screw up anymore, but still they couldn't go back to what they were before.

and yet, Craigslist.

do you mean the UX on craigslist is bad? i find it to be fantastic. could be better on mobile screens, i'll grant, but it all still works, and is fast enough for what I need.

Yeah, Marissa Mayer is how I was first introduced to the concept of the glass cliff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff. I don't think she ever had a chance.

She was consoled with ~$200M for not having had a chance.

This explains the seemingly easy path Theresa May had to becoming Prime Minister following the Brexit vote.

It's definitely a reasonable explanation. Her only real opponent was a woman as well.

Mainly because her potential male opponents stabbed each other in the back until they were no longer viable.

This seems like a funny place to cite that concept. The studies identifying it find it in roles like lead counsel or political candidate (which, at a glance, are both limited initiatives with well-defined success conditions).

Meanwhile it specifically wasn't found for turnaround CEOs: "A 2007 study of corporate performance preceding CEO appointments showed that women executives are no more likely to be selected for precarious leadership positions than males."

Mayer was publicly linked to this phenomenon, but the studies and proposed explanations don't seem consistent with hiring a CEO for an obvious turnaround role and massively compensating them for it.

I think the evidence is sort of mixed. Here's an article responding to the study that quote came from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984315...

As for explanations that could explain this particular case: Men are more likely to get another chance at a CEO job, so they can afford to turn down a crisis position.

When an organization is in crisis, they are likely to look for a candidate as different as possible from the CEO that caused that crisis, and hiring a woman tends to send a very visible signal that the organization is going in a different direction, even if that's sort of a sexist assumption.

I think there are more likely explanations than the directly sexist idea of "male board members don't respect women and use them as scapegoats".

Thanks, this is a good summary.

I suspect there's probably something to the phenomenon (even in terms of turnaround CEOs), although I'm immensely skeptical of the people who explain this with "women are seen as caring and sensitive so they get positions where morale is bad". That narrative seems like a terrible way to explain many of the other outcomes, like preferring women for hotly-contested political races.

I'm also hesitant about the "afford to turn down a crisis" narrative - certainly it could apply in many cases, but turnaround CEO for Yahoo isn't a job people were running from. Taking or rejecting it was hardly the kiss of death: saying no looks sensible, saying yes either makes your name forever or gets an "at least you tried". (Does anyone think this exit is going to actually harm Mayer's employability?) And indeed a bunch of men also took the role and failed, arguably much worse than Mayer.

I do think the signaling thing is quite true. If things have been going to hell, appointing a radically different CEO shows new direction, and an appointment like Mayer is a great way to produce news stories about your new direction (with big pictures of her in them - it might be a sexist assumption but it's also a very media-friendly one). There's also a claim that it's a way for something like Yahoo to signal "See, we aren't outdated and stuffy! We did an appointment you'd never see at a boring old bank!"

Rambling aside, none of the studies really sold me in either direction (replication crisis and all that) but I can see a lot of reasons this could happen in places where business as usual hasn't been working.

Totally reasonable comment. But "Does anyone think this exit is going to actually harm Mayer's employability?" Yes, absolutely. The overwhelming narrative from the media and the public is that she failed, she made terrible decisions, and someone else could have done a lot better. I'm sure the people in charge of choosing CEOs are capable of seeing through that narrative and assessing her actual performance, but if they care about their stock price, they have to care about what the public thinks. Choosing Mayer will no longer get you articles about your fresh new direction, it will produce stories about her past failures. This certainly would apply to male CEOs as well, but I don't agree that taking the Yahoo job was basically a win/win.

I agree it was too late. Yahoo missed search 15ish years ago, and then missed social 10ish years ago. The writing was the on the wall without a cash cow to fall back on, a la Microsoft.

Her performance ranking program was so badly implemented by Yahoo’s ugly layers of middle management that it deserved every bit of the mocking and criticism it got, both on devel-random and in the tech press.

I think one thing that could possibly "save" Yahoo would be to fire every single middle manager and above immediately (and probably most of the 1st line management as well), and then rebuild the management from the ground up.

Yes, Yahoo would be a mess for a year or more, but it already is a mess and has been for years - and it seems like a common thread is the entrenched management that isn't willing to change and has a lot of incompetency. Time to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Haha it would be great to see a troubled company try that. One suspects that we'd hear it more than see it however, as the great wailing and gnashing of teeth by PHBs would be audible on other continents. It would have to be a completely vendor-driven company, however... er, excuse me, "a company that concentrated on its core competencies". After all, the paychecks still have to go out, for the peons left after the great firing, and you can't just give the bank accounts to some random person.

I've actually said exactly this several times including in a convo with an exec-level ex-Yahoo last night. I don't think it's ever really been possible even for Marissa - the company is public and if you fire thousands of people you are likely to scare the board and shareholders. But I can't think of a middle manager I knew at Yahoo who deserved to stay.

There's a simple reason why you'll never see this strategy attempted: who decides which people get fired? Middle management and above.

Off topic but what would the selling price for Yahoo have to be for MM to be considered a success? 20B, 100B,..

[ignore: Didn't they get an offer from Microsoft a few years ago for 125B or something?]

I think what makes it a huge failure is that 5B is basically what they spent just to acquire one company.

Edit: Based on the replies the first part of my comment is inaccurate.

No. The $125b was the valuation during the 1990s. Microsoft offered way less - $44b.

OK, my bad, I got confused with the numbers :)

The Microsoft offer was for $45B: http://news.microsoft.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acqu...

The market cap of Yahoo was still around half that when Mayer was appointed. But that was all from their stake in Alibaba, which has already been spun off. The rest of Yahoo had a negative value, I think. So it's gone from 0 (conservatively) to $5B.

Success would have been growing revenues, instead of watching them decline.

Success would have been at least one really successful mobile app.

Success would have been not selling Yahoo....

Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value.

I think it's very clear that the goal when she was hired was to sell the company and get the shareholder's some payout. Considering where the company was when she came in, I'd say she did an admirable job at this.

You might say that's not success, but I think the (shareholder elected) board had the company on that trajectory before she was hired. She came in to finish the job.

> the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value.

It always bothers me to see this, as I feel it is the reason many companies decline. The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule should be "keep the employees happy" since happy employees help implement the first rule. If rule one and two are achieved then as a side effect shareholder value is maximized.

>The first rule should be "make the customers happy" and the second rule should be "keep the employees happy"

if you burn through your cash reserves doing those things and now you don't have any money, that doesn't do anything for you since you burned all your cash - even if employees and customers are happy

the first rule should be "make money", the second rule should be "spend less money than you make"

if those two are achieved, THEN shareholder value is maximized

Not true. Sometimes shareholders want metrics like Return on Equity, which forces the hand of management to sell profitable parts of the business... but not profitable enough. That's the insanity of trying to maximize shareholder value.

That's only insane if you assume the success of the business is the goal, rather than the success of the shareholders.

Success of the business and success of the shareholders is not a zero-sum game. You can usually have both.

What is insane is sacrificing the success of the business for the success of shareholders. That affects employees, and you end up getting situations where entire towns get fucked because the profitable-but-not-profitable-factory gets shut down because of some obscure metric.

I think a culture has developed -- in the United States specifically -- where we expect companies to act according to some undefined ethical principle. We're upset when they don't pay taxes, close factories, pollute the environment or whatever. The problem is these principles are always moving goalposts and more often than not, immeasurable. A business exists to make money. That is a concrete and measurable goal and thus one that the organization is made to pursue. If a business it not in it to make money, it's something else: perhaps a non-profit, an NGO, a union, a cooperative, etc. There are places for organizations that don't exist to make money, but publicly traded exchanges are not it.

It's really the responsibility of communities to plan, governments to regulate and enforce and people to rationally choose the best for themselves and their community. As pointed out above, there are a variety of ways to do this, it's a matter of choosing the right ones.

Unfortunately that is not a reality. Once you go public, the entire focus of a company is paying out to shareholders. Everything else is secondary.

If companies operated like that, people would not invest in them. Why would you invest in a company that does not put your share growth as a priority, when others will?

Besides, the shareholders own the company. Why shouldn't a company prioritize those who own it? The shareholders take on risk by providing capital to the company, and they deserve to be compensated for that risk.

I think you are confusing strategic principles with actual goals. Unless you are essentially an NGO and your investors are donating money as philanthropists, the #1 goal of a public company is never anything but make money for the shareholders. The goals of the investors and owners are the goals of the company. Focusing on customer and employee happiness are just means to that end.

> Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Selling Yahoo went very well for the shareholders and the first rule for any publicly traded company is to maximize shareholder value.

No, it went badly. If she'd been able to increase sales, and if she'd launched one or more successful apps, Yahoo would have been more valuable. In fact, they might even have sold Yahoo for more before she spent loads of money buying lots of companies and writing down their value.

> I think it's very clear that the goal when she was hired was to sell the company and get the shareholder's some payout.

Don't think so. You'd be welcome to provide some evidence for that claim, but the publicly stated aim at the time was to turn Yahoo around. She failed badly at that.

Yahoo: The challenges facing new boss Marissa Mayer By Matthew Wall Business reporter, BBC News 17 July 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18867477

The stock price on July 1, 2012 was 15.84. Today it's 38.30. So over the last 4 years she's more than doubled the stock price. And her compensation is tied to that stock price, which to me points to a "sell me" strategy by the Yahoo board. Add to that the fact that revenue hasn't even close to doubled in that time (though net income has been fairly healthy due to some cost cutting), it seems to that the market has been anticipating this acquisition. I don't think anyone has been buying Yahoo stock expecting a turnaround. Considering the trajectory of Yahoo since 2004 or so, I'd say that's as good an outcome as shareholders could expect.

True, but the rise had nothing to do with Mayer or the core Yahoo. It was the Alibaba stock in particular that drove the share price. Which is why if you removed the value of Yahoo's shareholdings, the core Yahoo (nominally, at least) had a negative value.

> the market has been anticipating this acquisition

Yes, it has, but Mayer fought against that until she had no choice. She lost that battle when activist investor Starboard Value -- which had been pushing for the break-up -- got its CEO named to Yahoo’s board of directors. See

http://www.ibtimes.com/yahoo-yhoo-shareholders-meeting-2016-...

Starboard has been pushing the break up for a couple of years. It wrote several interesting letters, like this from January 2015: http://fortune.com/2015/01/08/starboards-latest-letter-to-ya...

You'll see that Starboard had already been pushing the break up of Yahoo and the sale to AOL's parent.

Further, we continue to believe that Yahoo must significantly reduce costs to improve profitability in its core business and should be considering a combination with AOL. A combination with AOL, structured properly, could accomplish all of these goals by allowing for: (i) a tax-efficient separation of the non-core minority equity investments; (ii) tremendous cost synergies of between $1 billion and $1.5 billion; and (iii) a strong growth platform given AOL’s progress in mobile and video advertising.

The investors were scared because Mayer had, in effect, a bottomless supply of cash (in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba) and she had already wasted $2 billion. They wanted the break-up before she could splash out on something bigger and even more useless than Tumblr.

That's one of the reasons why she was such a failure.

Yahoo's fantasy sports app is pretty successful. It's about as installed as ESPNs and they were third in DFS (though far behind the first two). They actually just did a major redesign to it that made the DFS stuff more prominent.

https://medium.com/@jonathanjoseph/speculating-on-the-value-...

Conceivably, you could consider it a phenomenal success to sell something for $5 billion that the stock market was once valuing at less than $0.

It's a little more complicated than that, but see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UHMfzlmE7HXY_ph9BN68...

Interesting discussion and I wanted to call out a particular part: The CEO's willingness and constancy in responding to employees.

I worked at Global Crossing during the entire time that John Legere (of T-Mobile fame) was CEO and he had a very similar policy, though I can't say for sure he didn't fire folks for writing him things he didn't like[0]. He swore up and down that he reads every message sent to him and that employees are always welcome to write him. I did so in the later evening on Christmas Eve (I'll admit I had a few beers in me) about some finishing touches I was putting on an application we were deploying to production the following week. I received a reply just after midnight on Christmas, clearly sent from a Blackberry. I can't remember the contents (it was something along the lines of "nice work") but I remember feeling quite good that the CEO was willing to take some time to reply to me on a holiday at a very odd hour.

As "employee engagement" goes, this certainly improved mine.

[0] I honestly don't know. Global Crossing had a total of "zero" good years in that every six months or so another 10% of the staff would be let go. Did some of that originate from a bad message sent to the CEO? No idea, but they were looking for reasons to get rid of anyone they could throughout my tenure. Though I'd written him a few times, I'd written him a few times but never in a manner that would have had cause to get me fired.

IMO Yahoo was just unfortunately not salvageable and MM gets a lot of criticism from a lot of directions (I've seen a lot of articles by women criticizing her for not taking "enough" maternity leave, for example). I feel like she's just a favorite target.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/03/marissa-may...

Always several sides to any story - super appreciated this one. Whether Marissa failed or not - this piece was well written and worth the read.

> Yahoo may be a failure but Marissa was a success

This is low tier bait. I am convinced the author is trying to ruse anyone who reads his garbage post.

The problem with this is: this means MM is a very good executive regarding technical details, daily operations and the like. However, she wasn't hired to be HR or COO. She was hired to be CEO, in a company that faced deep existential challenges in a market that was rapidly making its products irrelevant. When she took over, I wasn't sure what value Yahoo really provided other than a "yet another portal and email provider" type of thing, far from being a peer of FB and Google that it aspired to be. The company needed to execute a pivot of epic proportions and in this, we have heard very little. And maybe there were some projects in their skunk works that may yet get written about, which never saw the light of day.

Morale of the troops? great. Making employees' lives better? great. But it doesn't mean squat if your company still doesn't have a viable product at the end of the day...

I was a Yahoo for a couple of years before getting caught up in the recent layoffs. When I talk about my time there, I use the term "organizational inertia". It's amazing how people will fight for products, methodologies, and workflows that are clearly not going to be feasible if the company is going to survive. A company that's been around for as long as Yahoo has, and has locked in to a certain way of doing things, is hard to turn around no matter how good the CEO is.

>the company was also stacked with some of the least motivated.

Every company has unmotivated people for the CEO to deal with. Yahoo is not unique in this regard.

"on a Saturday IIRC, she responded to someone on d-r. This sent shockwaves throughout the upper echelons, and soon senior management were clamoring to get on d-r."

So, basically Marissa ruined devel-random, too? Nice. Is there anything Marissa can't do?

Great story, thanks for the different perspective on things. I did giggle at the title here on HN though.

"... That cannot be bought."

I guess MM, being an acquired CEO could be considered bought. It just didn't give the result they wanted..

Sorry, so she raised comfort of some employees (which developer "on a mission to save a company" really needs free food instead of interesting challenges?) and decreased the ability to hire top talent by introducing other employee-unfriendly policies like banning remote work, i.e. working while living on Hawaii, giving superb motivation to stay at Yahoo and see it prosper. The rest seems more like a COO would do and not a strategic CEO. It is still fact that a little team of 5 can accomplish huge things, yet they weren't able to recruit any, while blowing insane money on useless acquihires. And also looking at technical decisions like replacing Netty with node.js in their infrastructure and resulting 4x slowdown and probably increasing operating costs reeks of following useless fads and really useless management.

I may get downvoted for saying this since it's not fashionable to say things like this but I will anyway:

When a company is going down, the type of people you need is people who are enthusiastic and team players. The last type of people you need are competent yet not so much of a team player. It's because:

1. Pampering these people will only result in lowering rest of the team's morale. 2. When a company is going down, a 10x or 100x or even 1000x developer (whatever that means) won't be able to save the company alone.

In a sense I think she was trying to filter out people who were not "all-in", because that's what it takes for a sinking ship to have even 1% chance of coming back up.

I believe what you actually need is to hire 2-3 teams of 10x developers/artists including a few visionaires and let them figure out projects that might one day become cash cows keeping company afloat (and give them massive stake in success). You need to both expose them to problems of the company so that they feel pressure as well as completely isolate them from toxic culture that brought down your company, so that they can give an all-out effort.

Imagine if that lone guy at Microsoft didn't figure out trick with 286 protected mode that allowed Windows to survive and wasn't heard by top management - we would all be running OS/2 10 now.

I think that's easier said than done when a company is going down, as we've witnessed through Yahoo. That's exactly what she tried to do by hiring bunch of startups but failed, probably because the board became impatient. I know people criticize her saying she did a half assed job of dealing with acquired companies but I'll bet that it's not entirely because of her decisions but because of lack of support from the board.

> Imagine if that lone guy at Microsoft didn't figure out trick with 286 protected mode that allowed Windows to survive and wasn't heard by top management - we would all be running OS/2 10 now.

I haven't heard this story before. Got a link?

Google turned this up:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2006/12/07/saving-w...

I believe this is it: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2005/02/08/fa...

The IBM way required IBM BIOS and an absurdly long time (as I recalled it was hundreds of milliseconds, not just milliseconds) to re-enter real mode.

The motivation was to be able to run DOS real-mode programs as well as protected mode programs.

Was OS/2 bad? :-|

Everybody I knew who used it said it was better than Windows, but that's sort of a self-selecting crowd. More to the point, OS/2 wasn't a M$ product, so that sort of success for it would have been bad for M$.

It was a MS product (even the early OS/2 2.0 SDKs from the 1990 period). The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, partly because of how horrible and unethical it was.

Could you point some reading about it?

One of my favorite readings is http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011.... Notice that they did not mention the problems with the "32-bit Windows extenders" for example. On the later attacks, look up "Microsoft Munchkins" and "Steve Barkto" for one example of them.

That could explain the anti work from home policy but what about buying that pre-teens app for like $15M. What did that accomplish?

That was probably some favor to the guy behind the teen, some VC IIRC. They might not be able to give each other money directly, so they use a useless acquisition for money transfer. Probably what Larry did today.

I think that was the only way at that point to bring in fresh creative talent. No creative person probably wanted to quit their existing job and leave for Yahoo at that point.

And why would they? If you're really talented, you could either go work for Google/Facebook/etc. (if you want a stable life), or start your own company (if you're adventurous). Yahoo was stuck in the purgatory somewhere in between.

I don't really buy this argument. There are reasons for acqui-hires, but it's usually to bring on board a strong existing team, a world-class domain expert, or a tech base with employee support.

Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo.

I know nobody wants to go work for Yahoo, but they spent 30 million dollars. Hire 10 self-directed, expert devs for $1,000,000/year. I promise you can find good people at that price.

> I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good

What does that even mean?

It means that if you're acqui-hiring, you're paying a massive premium to get good talent you couldn't get another way. I'm saying that nothing about Summly suggested that it was worth spending $30,000,000 for 18 months of the sole employee's time.

I wrote it that way to point out that I'm not calling D'Aloisio a bad hire or a bad developer. He's got a good reputation, and Yahoo News Digest (his big project there) was actually really well received.

Rather, it wasn't worth the commitment Yahoo made for him, because he wasn't taking on the kind of sweeping rework or major new project needed to help with the death spiral. It fit into the general pattern of grabbing shiny new things at high prices, without really chasing the outcomes in users or revenue that might have mattered.

That it doesn't matter how good they are; their skill could not explain the reason to spend that much money.

> Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo.

Summly was not D'Aloiso's product in terms of development. He may have had the idea, but the technology was SRI's (the same guys who developed Siri), and IIRC, Summly had exclusive use of that. So please stop demeaning it as "some 17-year-old's app".

I'm... not sure where I was demeaning it that way? I certainly never said the quoted thing, and I didn't intend it.

I don't think that Summly was a bad product, and I don't think D'Aloisio is a bad dev. I specified him alone because as far as I know he's the only one Yahoo acquired - SRI is great but Yahoo didn't acquire their devs or exclusive rights to their tech.

The question at hand is whether Yahoo got their money's worth, and I'm claiming that they didn't bring on enough relevant tech or expertise to justify the expense. That holds even if Summly, SRI, and D'Aloisio are all fantastic.

I'm one of two ex yahoo engs who integrated Summply summarization algo into Yahoo home page. More specifically it was (is?) a large personalization platform that would carefully pick which news to show you and in what order. It only took us a couple of days. It was mostly invisible for an outsider because Yahoo already had a decent summarization algorithm, but was a clear improvement.

While I don't know if all these dictionaries and calibrated weights of parameters were really worth $15M, I'm positive that such an IP was major reason of the acquisition.

How has working from home/remotely imply being a team player/enthusiastic yes/no?

I work for a non-IT company. Loads of people work in the office. There are a few which do not. They're really good at their job (it is somewhat measurable), are a team player and take their work very seriously. This in a big company where they have a dress code, etc.

IMO the problem wasn't the employees.

The CEOs one job is to set the direction of the company. To create a vision of what a successful Yahoo looks like.

In this article, it talks about Mayer being responsive to email, turnstiles, food, etc. These are things a mid-level manager takes care of, not the CEO. And these things definitely are not a strategy.

All the way up until recently Yahoo wasn't even sure what type of company it is--media or tech. This is not possible if the CEO is clearly communicating what Yahoo is and should be.

If you want a company full of team players.. forget about this idea of dividing them into 1x vs 1000x. Make the vision of the company clear, so that people know what they're doing and what success looks like. When you get buy in of your strategy from the employees, it doesn't matter if they're 1x or 1000x developer. Everyone is working toward the same goal.

I strongly agree with this.

It seemed more like "playing CEO" rather than actually being CEO. I read many interviews over the years with her, and there was never any kind of thesis or anything I would ever take away from the conversation that was had.

I don't remember a single thing she has said or done aside from what's in the main headlines about Yahoo.

To be fair, the confusion between media and tech has existed for as long as Yahoo has. Marisa didn't bring that with her. IMO her job was just to stop the bleeding to allow Yahoo to divest Alibaba and sell off the rest of the company. Without Marissa, Yahoo is a flaming dumpster fire a la Sun -- where the value of the company was in patents alone. She allowed the company to retain some effective talent and keep the lights on until they could find a viable exit -- definitely a win for the Yahoo shareholders.

And realistically, what options did Yahoo have? They didn't have the cash flows to aggressively invest in content to become a media company and they didn't have the cash reserves or engineering talent to aggressively invest in R&D to become a tech company. What vision should Yahoo have invested in? I'm not really sure they had any good options; so she rolled the dice with her best ones and lost. Can't fault her for that IMO.

I get your point about wanting people to be all-in. (Must make for a good sign for everybody to stop being it, but yes, it's a point.) But this:

> When a company is going down, a 10x or 100x or even 1000x developer (whatever that means) won't be able to save the company alone.

Committees don't save failing companies. They also don't steer successful companies.

In fact, the one thing you can expect from a committee is business as usual. And if your company is already failing, that's failure.

To be fair, I can't think of any significant tech company coming back from near death, except Apple. But we all know that's an exception.

IBM has been there too.

Big companies in general do not come back from near death. But the surest way to guarantee that this small chance won't be taken is betting everything on "team playing" and antagonizing every "bad team player" that thinks differently from the main line.

>introducing other employee-unfriendly policies like banning remote work

I heard for friends working at yahoo that this was perceived as positive by a lot of employees at yahoo.

for years yahoo was so directionless that there were a lots of people who were simply slacking off using wfh as an excuse. This was breeding a lot of resentment among people who were actually doing work.

Sure it might have hurt honest wfh workers but saying all companies regardless of their situation should allow wfh is not fair.

wfh works great if your work is mostly heads-down. Remote working sucks for anything creative and almost everything collaborative -- I can't tell you how many 30 minute meetings I have every day that could have been solved with a 5 minute conversation and a picture on a whiteboard. While that's unavoidable to some extent, you should also try to be physically collocated with the people you work with most frequently to reduce the overhead of interaction with them.

Also, wfh can be a bad thing if the company has a paranoid, avoidant, passive-aggressive culture like Yahoo did. Life situations that require flexibility can seem like extended absences to coworkers who aren't in the loop, which in turn spawns rumors, misinformation and resentment among employees.

By the time she took over, Yahoo had been in a death spiral for years. Most of their best employees were already gone, and everyone left was mostly punching the clock. You've gotta make changes when that's happening, and scaling back wfh is reasonable in that context. I'm sure they made exceptions on a case-by-case basis anyway.

> I can't tell you how many 30 minute meetings I have every day that could have been solved with a 5 minute conversation

Buy everybody on your team a $150 wacom tablet. Use uberconference with screensharing. Use awwapp.com. Bonus - now you have a way to save your whiteboards and attach them to your wiki or bug tracker.

"Remote working sucks for anything creative.."

Being creative requires a lot of focus and concentration as well as being in the a good creative space. This seems to be the opposite description of any office I've ever seen. IMO you can do your best creative work when working remotely.

This was breeding a lot of resentment among people who were actually doing work.

Serious question: what work? Everything tech at Yahoo seems to have been in maintenance mode at best for a decade. New products that never saw the light of day?

> The rest seems more like a COO would do and not a strategic CEO.

Yeah, which of these are tasks a good CEO should see to, and which would be more appropriate or acceptable to delegate to a COO?

Do Yahoo employees really call themselves "Yahoos"?

No different than calling yourself a Googler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_(Gulliver%27s_Travels)

Which itself has silly variants, like Noogler gor new employees or Doogler for dogs. (Google is, explicitly, a dog company. Dogs are welcome at Google facilities. Cats are officially strongly deprecated.)

Interesting given the number of cat videos this "dog" company distributes. ;)

They're cats. They have to feel they're unwelcome before they want to be there.

At one point they were yahooligans. I suppose that term fell out of favor at some point.

I remember Yahoo having a kids' section, and the members being called Yahooligans.

That probably put off the adults from wanting to be called that :)

Yes, when I was there (2004-2011), my job title was Technical Yahoo!, but nowadays they've lost the punctuation. The security team was called the Paranoids. Lots of little goofy names.

> Yahoo is a Failure, but Marissa is a Success

I have to be living in some alternate universe. Because in my universe, if you do not accomplish the goal (revenue grow) you failed. It could that the goal was too hard to achieve, maybe the goal was impossible to achieve, etc. But, at end of the day, she failed.

And as result of her failure people will lose their jobs :(

> And as result of her failure people will lose their jobs

They will most probably get jobs again like they did earlier. Life is full of ups and down, you can blame one person for that..but try not to.

She gets paid $50M/yr for the sole purpose of being held to blame and credit for everything that happens.

I remember that is was usually claimed that Yahoo's valuation (net of Alibaba's stake) was either zero or negative.

She was able to sell it for $5B.

That sounds like an amazing success story.

It turned out that after taxes and other factors, Yahoo's core value was worth more. I doubt she had a significant effect on it, other than the ~700 mil loss they took on Tumblr.

I guess I don't think it's particularly good that she was an email junkie, to the point of being on email a couple hours after giving birth? But beside that I can understand why some took her as an inspirational figure.

$200M for handing out free lunch, a self-esteem boost, a poorly implemented personnel ranking scheme, and a few emails at weird hours ... sounds like a pretty sweet deal. sign me up!

Salty about never making a management role, eh?

didn't read the article, eh?

You could use this same argument for any CEO. Pick 3 things then say $X m for a b and c that's a pretty sweet deal. Sign me up.

another non-reader. i picked out the main points the writer specified.

I read it. My point is you can make the same class of argument - pick one or two trivial achievements and a fuckup for almost any CEO or indeed professional and make it sound like their job is easy.

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