7 ms·

Marissa Mayer is a terrible CEO. Unbelievable the amount of money she has been paid to flush the remainder of Yahoo down the drain with no strategy while employ

by hodder 10y ago

Marissa Mayer is a terrible CEO. Unbelievable the amount of money she has been paid to flush the remainder of Yahoo down the drain with no strategy while employees suffer. Yahoo (net of BABA) is less than worthless.

ssharp 10y ago
At the time of Mayer's hire, Yahoo had a pretty low chance at a highly successful turnaround. I think it's unfair to say she didn't have a strategy and that she purposefully let employees suffer. Whatever she did failed to turn the company around but that alone doesn't make her a terrible CEO.
mc32 10y ago
I know she's unpopular, but she's hardly the first one who tried righting that ship without success. I think she's stabilized it and made people believe there was a possibility in turning around, giving it breathing room more than the previous three. You have to remember that when she came on board, Y! was taking water fast. No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. I think she did a pretty commendable job trying.
- zamalek 10y ago
  > No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. Agreed. I simply can't understand why we keep flogging this dead horse, Mayer or Verizon, none of it makes any sense. Am I missing something regarding the true value of Yahoo!?
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I _believe_ the reason the horse keeps getting flogged is because a wide swath of HN doesn't believe Mayer had the skill set needed to make a real attempt to right Yahoo (and, arguably, her actions support that assumption). Yahoo never had a chance.
  - fweespeech 10y ago
    > Agreed. I simply can't understand why we keep flogging this dead horse, Mayer or Verizon, none of it makes any sense. Am I missing something regarding the true value of Yahoo!? As a stand alone entity, Yahoo simply had no real chance. Their only path to relevance was a complete remodel of their priorities ~10 years ago. Verizon, honestly, doesn't make alot of sense but my guess is they think they can integrate it into their operations to make money. Idk how they would.
- jazzyk 10y ago
  The "lets keep buying companies and see what works out" strategy is a "pretty commendable job trying"? A 10-year old who knows how to play Monopoly could come up with it. For much less money. If you sell yourself as a savior at > $50M/year compensation, it is not unreasonable to demand close-to-miraculous results, not "trying".
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Why do they have to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at people who aren't expected to turn things around? I thought the whole point of paying that money is that these people make the impossible possible.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Loss avoidance rather than gain maximisation. Yahoo is apparently still worth ~$4 billion. For quite a while there, its nominal stock value was negative after dispatching Ali Baba, despite cash-on-hand in excess of zero. I'm not a fan of Meyer's, but she managed to keep the beast alive, where her predecessors were killing it swiftly.
- riboflava 10y ago
  Making remote employees come in to actually work was the single best thing she did for the company. Unfortunately it wasn't enough as Yahoo fundamentally doesn't have anything competitive for employees to work on, hence the attempts to find that something with startup acquisition and killing off venerable old portals like Yahoo Games.
  - Yhippa 10y ago
    Makes me wonder...did Yahoo pay a premium for their engineers as of late? Surely you wouldn't go work there without some kind of compensation for the writing on the wall the past 10 years.
    - douche 10y ago
      I believe that they have been paying a premium for ad managers, by the data point of a friend who got a nearly 50% bump when hired at their Boston office in the past year.
- zaidf 10y ago
  ...giving it breathing room more than the previous three One of the previous CEOs was the founder Jerry Yang. He made one of the most epic corporate investments when he fought for Yahoo to invest in Alibaba. No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. If we are going to set the bar so low, I can think of a lot of qualified people in the Valley that could have done as good or better job than Marissa. She made a whole bunch of bets and basically none of them panned out. Her top skillset was supposed to be Product Management and the best that has yielded are one-time decent Yahoo products becoming shittier.
  - mc32 10y ago
    Yang was the fourth one down after Levinsohn, Thompson, Bartz... and he lasted all of 18 months... Arguably the sandwich was prepared by Semel.
Mahn 10y ago
I mean, she hasn't done any miracles, but it's not like any of us would have done any better in her position. I wouldn't call her a terrible CEO, just someone that took over a company that was very difficult to turn around to begin with.
vonmoltke 10y ago
> Yahoo (net of BABA) is less than worthless. This fallacy needs to die. You cannot just subtract the value of Alibaba and declare the company "less than worthless". Company valuations don't work that way Yahoo has significant debt. If Yahoo were willing and able to liquidate Alibaba or Yahoo Japan the proceeds would be used, at least partially, to pay off that debt. You cannot stick all of the company's debt on a select portion of the business and declare it worthless based on that.
- jack9 10y ago
  > You cannot just subtract the value of Alibaba and declare the company "less than worthless". I can and do. > Company valuations don't work that way I disagree, except if you care to shell out <10 million and say "see it's worth something!" which is disingenuous. The amount to maintain the remnants will dwarf the cost of acquisition, making it a net loss.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    > I can and do. Then you're wrong. That isn't how company book value works. A company's book value is the total of its assets minus the total of its liabilities. Removing an asset from the calculation without adjusting the liabilities is just wrong. It isn't proper accounting. > I disagree, except if you care to shell out <10 million and say "see it's worth something!" which is disingenuous. The amount to maintain the remnants will dwarf the cost of acquisition, making it a net loss. What numbers do you have to support this? What portion of Yahoo's liabilities are coming along with the assets Verizon wants to buy?
  - Yhippa 10y ago
    You are correct for market value: http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos-core-business-negatively-valued-baba-yhoo-goog-amzn-fb.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos... > Yahoo’s total market cap is less than the $40.5 billion, and after accounting for the cash on the company’s balance sheet, this means Yahoo’s core business is valued at less than $0. Now, this isn’t a new development that will disappear with some quick arbitrage. In fact, the value of Yahoo’s core business has been negatively valued for more than a year, so investors are seeing the value discrepancy measured by traditional means but just don’t believe in the company’s trajectory.
0xmohit 10y ago
She closed half a dozen or so acquisitions at Yahoo! What else would one expect?
Agustus 10y ago
Marissa Mayer has done some things to try and right the ship initially. 1. Reduce flex time or work from home: The logic on doing this was questioned at the time, but working with your colleagues in a confined space has proven to be beneficial (Pixar, Yahoo, almost any start up) 2. Developing child care policies that included having the kid be close to her (or this could be Marissa Mayer). However, she allowed herself to become a larger than Yahoo personality. How many articles were about her describing her life, things she did, she was promoting her brand, not that of Yahoo. She then fell into the acquisition trap of getting Tumblr.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  "Reduce flex time or work from home: The logic on doing this was questioned at the time, but working with your colleagues in a confined space has proven to be beneficial (Pixar, Yahoo, almost any start up)" Pixar and startups work well not because they are in a confined space but because they have a good company culture that allows people to do their job. Things like reducing flex time and remote are just surface changes that avoid addressing the deeper issues. My company does the same: At every step people are discouraged from making changes. Management complains about lack of innovation so they do "innovation days" and put up innovation posters. But they still squash any good ideas people have because the next deadline is always two weeks away so there never is time to think about things.
IanDrake 10y ago
I wouldn't say she had no strategy, but that her strategy didn't work. But then I think any strategy that started with "This is how we're going to save Yahoo" was doomed to fail. The brand is synonymous with Web 1.0 and was tarnishing their acquisitions. A strategy of "This is how we're going to leverage Yahoo's assets" would have been a better starting point. Yahoo should have become a parent company, like Alphabet, that stays silent and out of the way. Then run down the Yahoo brand while building the acquired brands and re-branding the successful parts of Yahoo as something else.
Spooky23 10y ago
Sounds like Verizon thinks that it's worth about $5B. The stock market mis-prices things all of the time.
1945 10y ago
She inherited a mound of shit. The one mistake I'll admit she made was not gutting management when she came in. It is, and was, completely dysfunctional at the management level. The only people rewarded were those willing to play the political games.

by hodder 10y ago

ssharp 10y ago

At the time of Mayer's hire, Yahoo had a pretty low chance at a highly successful turnaround. I think it's unfair to say she didn't have a strategy and that she purposefully let employees suffer. Whatever she did failed to turn the company around but that alone doesn't make her a terrible CEO.

mc32 10y ago

I know she's unpopular, but she's hardly the first one who tried righting that ship without success. I think she's stabilized it and made people believe there was a possibility in turning around, giving it breathing room more than the previous three. You have to remember that when she came on board, Y! was taking water fast. No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. I think she did a pretty commendable job trying.

zamalek 10y ago
> No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. Agreed. I simply can't understand why we keep flogging this dead horse, Mayer or Verizon, none of it makes any sense. Am I missing something regarding the true value of Yahoo!?
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  I _believe_ the reason the horse keeps getting flogged is because a wide swath of HN doesn't believe Mayer had the skill set needed to make a real attempt to right Yahoo (and, arguably, her actions support that assumption). Yahoo never had a chance.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  > Agreed. I simply can't understand why we keep flogging this dead horse, Mayer or Verizon, none of it makes any sense. Am I missing something regarding the true value of Yahoo!? As a stand alone entity, Yahoo simply had no real chance. Their only path to relevance was a complete remodel of their priorities ~10 years ago. Verizon, honestly, doesn't make alot of sense but my guess is they think they can integrate it into their operations to make money. Idk how they would.
jazzyk 10y ago
The "lets keep buying companies and see what works out" strategy is a "pretty commendable job trying"? A 10-year old who knows how to play Monopoly could come up with it. For much less money. If you sell yourself as a savior at > $50M/year compensation, it is not unreasonable to demand close-to-miraculous results, not "trying".
maxxxxx 10y ago
Why do they have to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at people who aren't expected to turn things around? I thought the whole point of paying that money is that these people make the impossible possible.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Loss avoidance rather than gain maximisation. Yahoo is apparently still worth ~$4 billion. For quite a while there, its nominal stock value was negative after dispatching Ali Baba, despite cash-on-hand in excess of zero. I'm not a fan of Meyer's, but she managed to keep the beast alive, where her predecessors were killing it swiftly.
riboflava 10y ago
Making remote employees come in to actually work was the single best thing she did for the company. Unfortunately it wasn't enough as Yahoo fundamentally doesn't have anything competitive for employees to work on, hence the attempts to find that something with startup acquisition and killing off venerable old portals like Yahoo Games.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  Makes me wonder...did Yahoo pay a premium for their engineers as of late? Surely you wouldn't go work there without some kind of compensation for the writing on the wall the past 10 years.
  - douche 10y ago
    I believe that they have been paying a premium for ad managers, by the data point of a friend who got a nearly 50% bump when hired at their Boston office in the past year.
zaidf 10y ago
...giving it breathing room more than the previous three One of the previous CEOs was the founder Jerry Yang. He made one of the most epic corporate investments when he fought for Yahoo to invest in Alibaba. No one, no one could have saved it and made it relevant. If we are going to set the bar so low, I can think of a lot of qualified people in the Valley that could have done as good or better job than Marissa. She made a whole bunch of bets and basically none of them panned out. Her top skillset was supposed to be Product Management and the best that has yielded are one-time decent Yahoo products becoming shittier.
- mc32 10y ago
  Yang was the fourth one down after Levinsohn, Thompson, Bartz... and he lasted all of 18 months... Arguably the sandwich was prepared by Semel.

Mahn 10y ago

I mean, she hasn't done any miracles, but it's not like any of us would have done any better in her position. I wouldn't call her a terrible CEO, just someone that took over a company that was very difficult to turn around to begin with.

vonmoltke 10y ago

> Yahoo (net of BABA) is less than worthless. This fallacy needs to die. You cannot just subtract the value of Alibaba and declare the company "less than worthless". Company valuations don't work that way Yahoo has significant debt. If Yahoo were willing and able to liquidate Alibaba or Yahoo Japan the proceeds would be used, at least partially, to pay off that debt. You cannot stick all of the company's debt on a select portion of the business and declare it worthless based on that.

jack9 10y ago
> You cannot just subtract the value of Alibaba and declare the company "less than worthless". I can and do. > Company valuations don't work that way I disagree, except if you care to shell out <10 million and say "see it's worth something!" which is disingenuous. The amount to maintain the remnants will dwarf the cost of acquisition, making it a net loss.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > I can and do. Then you're wrong. That isn't how company book value works. A company's book value is the total of its assets minus the total of its liabilities. Removing an asset from the calculation without adjusting the liabilities is just wrong. It isn't proper accounting. > I disagree, except if you care to shell out <10 million and say "see it's worth something!" which is disingenuous. The amount to maintain the remnants will dwarf the cost of acquisition, making it a net loss. What numbers do you have to support this? What portion of Yahoo's liabilities are coming along with the assets Verizon wants to buy?
- Yhippa 10y ago
  You are correct for market value: http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos-core-business-negatively-valued-baba-yhoo-goog-amzn-fb.aspx http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos... > Yahoo’s total market cap is less than the $40.5 billion, and after accounting for the cash on the company’s balance sheet, this means Yahoo’s core business is valued at less than $0. Now, this isn’t a new development that will disappear with some quick arbitrage. In fact, the value of Yahoo’s core business has been negatively valued for more than a year, so investors are seeing the value discrepancy measured by traditional means but just don’t believe in the company’s trajectory.

0xmohit 10y ago

She closed half a dozen or so acquisitions at Yahoo! What else would one expect?

Agustus 10y ago

Marissa Mayer has done some things to try and right the ship initially. 1. Reduce flex time or work from home: The logic on doing this was questioned at the time, but working with your colleagues in a confined space has proven to be beneficial (Pixar, Yahoo, almost any start up) 2. Developing child care policies that included having the kid be close to her (or this could be Marissa Mayer). However, she allowed herself to become a larger than Yahoo personality. How many articles were about her describing her life, things she did, she was promoting her brand, not that of Yahoo. She then fell into the acquisition trap of getting Tumblr.

maxxxxx 10y ago
"Reduce flex time or work from home: The logic on doing this was questioned at the time, but working with your colleagues in a confined space has proven to be beneficial (Pixar, Yahoo, almost any start up)" Pixar and startups work well not because they are in a confined space but because they have a good company culture that allows people to do their job. Things like reducing flex time and remote are just surface changes that avoid addressing the deeper issues. My company does the same: At every step people are discouraged from making changes. Management complains about lack of innovation so they do "innovation days" and put up innovation posters. But they still squash any good ideas people have because the next deadline is always two weeks away so there never is time to think about things.

IanDrake 10y ago

I wouldn't say she had no strategy, but that her strategy didn't work. But then I think any strategy that started with "This is how we're going to save Yahoo" was doomed to fail. The brand is synonymous with Web 1.0 and was tarnishing their acquisitions. A strategy of "This is how we're going to leverage Yahoo's assets" would have been a better starting point. Yahoo should have become a parent company, like Alphabet, that stays silent and out of the way. Then run down the Yahoo brand while building the acquired brands and re-branding the successful parts of Yahoo as something else.

Spooky23 10y ago

Sounds like Verizon thinks that it's worth about $5B. The stock market mis-prices things all of the time.

1945 10y ago

She inherited a mound of shit. The one mistake I'll admit she made was not gutting management when she came in. It is, and was, completely dysfunctional at the management level. The only people rewarded were those willing to play the political games.