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Rather than the inevitable bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread, I'd like to put in a little reminder that we usually celebrate taking

Rather than the inevitable bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread, I'd like to put in a little reminder that we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks and that we should commend her for taking on the immense challenge of steadying the Yahoo ship. Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.

icelancer 10y ago
I do as well. As outlined in The Halo Effect, people want very tidy, clean, and rational reasons why a company failed. Blame must be specifically laid somewhere. However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Variance is a thing.
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  I don't really mind people failing. I do think there's something wrong with someone earning massive amounts of money to fail and then everyone saying, "Oh well, anyone would have failed in that role." Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
  - icelancer 10y ago
    >Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome? Because all big C-level positions work this way? Doesn't make it a good idea, or even rational. But humans are of the rationalizing type, not actual rational beings.
  - akjainaj 10y ago
    I suppose, there's a huge responsibility coming with that role, and you also know your name will be stained forever. But it's something somebody has to do.
    - shitgoose 10y ago
      their names are never stained. she will resurface in some other high profile position in no time. these C*O's live in their own universe, where common sense and peasants' logic do not apply.
  - adewinter 10y ago
    Because it wasn't the expected outcome. Or, at least, there was a chance that things could be saved. The high risk is even more reason to offer huge compensation. We can only see in retrospect that it was doomed to failure.
    - npizzolato 10y ago
      What risk? Yahoo failed, but Marissa Mayer made out with millions of dollars. Seems like a no-risk endeavor to me.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        The risk of her future income being depressed. The risk her compensation package mitigated by paying her millions even in the face of a perceived failure.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome? Because the people making executive compensation decisions are from a narrow elite class and are the people benefiting from executive compensation decisions.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Well-said. Major example: interlocking boards of directors. They clearly demonstrate cartel-like behavior where it's "us vs them" at one level protecting their personal profits and "them vs them" at another level competing for good positions, policy preferences, or market share. Unsurprisingly, it's one of ideal moves a capitalist can make in an environment like the U.S. given it gains the personal benefits of capitalism while minimizing the risk that real competition or cost minimization of labor would bring them. They must operate collectively to defeat what threatens their wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate Example with some specifics and nice illustrations: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/corporate_community.html http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/corporate_communi... EDIT: The answers all around yours are screenshot-worthy. Perfect example of what the elites bought with all those donations/visits to universities, textbooks, biased media, and so on. Many still believe they have to earn it in a way that's about merit as an employee of the company. Thousands of years of human history showed nepotism, classism, and other rigging were main ways people got ahead. Then it suddenly is out of the equation for many analyzing success of modern elites. ;)
  - jonny_eh 10y ago
    The blame for compensation should be on the board, not the CEO.
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    To attract someone who has a chance of fixing things rather than someone who is guaranteed to fail?
  - prostoalex 10y ago
    The "failure" is subjective. What's objective is the stock price, which has grown from $15 to $41 under her management. As bulk of her compensation is locked in stock (negotiated at 2012 prices), it's increasingly hard for her to get compensated less while the stock has tripled in value.
    - shitgoose 10y ago
      all the stock growth is due to buybacks, so credit goes to Janet, not Marissa.
      - prostoalex 10y ago
        That may be, and you seem to have a better scoop on the internals. I was just pointing out that there are very few YHOO investors unhappy with the stock moves 2012-2017 (when benchmarked against S&P 500 or whatever else is commonly accepted metric) compared with, for example, Eric Jackson's war against Terry Semel's (and some directors') compensation package while the stock was in consistent decline https://www.law360.com/articles/26456/advisors-oust-yahoo-directors-over-ceo-pay https://www.law360.com/articles/26456/advisors-oust-yahoo-di...
- narrator 10y ago
  One reason I heard for the demise of Yahoo, from someone who worked there, was tech was totally anarchic. They didn't build up the vast amounts of shared software infrastructure that Google, Facebook and Amazon did. Apparently, each separate business unit did a lot of reinventing the wheel. That might have been something someone with a background in big company software architecture could have focused on, but that wasn't Marissa.
  - icelancer 10y ago
    Or it was too much inertia to overcome, which is probably a huge factor.
    - normaljoe 10y ago
      It was both and more. I started there back when Bartz was CEO. Bartz continued down the media company path that was already established. Thompson doubled down and cut huge amount of tech talent to focus on media. Like he literally almost completely killed labs the PhD wing that did research. There are other things that elaborate on that really hurt and created the outcome we see today. When MM started she had no idea of the technical debt she was going to inherit. Something to keep in mind is that Yahoo invented web at scale. It started on FreeBSD and had kernel contributors even when I started. I think they all work for Apple these days. To help handle scale Yahoo would create Yahoo versions of software via things like kernel extensions or software patches. Nobody was doing these things back in the late 90s, but it was needed. Back then nobody knew what we know now and they literally where making it up as they went along. The thing is when you are the first to the table it sometimes creates technical issues. Sometime before I started there was a decision to shift from BSD to Linux. That was probably a good decision, not because of the merits of FreeBSD, but because Linux was getting a lot more headway with extra contributors. When you have code that was dependent on kernel extensions and you change kernels you get some pain points. Some are manageable others are not. I don't think anybody knew how painful that transition would be, well maybe Filo did because he was crazy aware of everything. As a side note when I started Filo was maybe a L3 but I think a L4 because tech was just that that devalued. So if he did know he probably didn't have much say in the matter. Even as a major stock holder he is not the kind of guy that throws that around, I really think he cares more about the tech then his bank account. If I had his bank account I probably would be in the same place. Yahoo also made a somewhat fatal accounting issue prior to me getting there and probably early on. This was probably the right thing at that time, but it morphed into a bigger issue later down the road. They wanted to isolate "properties" or business units financially. To do that each property, such as news, sports or mail had their own hardware and justification for the hardware. This unfortunately creates a hoarding of assets since you never know when you can get more compute or storage. Keep in mind we are are talking pre-VM tech for you young folks and buying a server cost some big bucks. This created a culture or inertia that made to switch to VM very difficult. That wasn't the only thing. If the sports "product" is separate from the news "product" and assets, both physical and talent wise are isolated, then where is the incentive to share? This doesn't mean there was no sharing, there was, but it created a culture of do it your own way to get things done. When MM started she focused internally at first. If you where in the building you got that. If you where in IT then well you knew there was a laser on you. It was all about getting the simple things first, upgrade outdated laptops etc. Then it moved to getting infrastructure in place. She was trying to shift the culture from mediocrity for developers to a developer and product first standpoint. It then became about reducing technical debt and lifting the barriers between groups. That ship does not correct overnight. There was some point in this that she did have to embrace the media focus and did a few big deals to get media talent, just is just a guess, but the timing is right. Probably the final nail in the coffin was delivered unknowingly by co-founder Jerry Yang. With all best intentions Yang helped his friend Jack Ma with the Alibaba venture. Instead of a personal investment Yang opted for a joint venture where Alibaba got Yahoo China and some cash and Yahoo got some shares in Alibaba. Well as we all know Alibaba took off and the deal is just epic in terms of ROI. That created a big issue though. When MM took the reigns she would grow the stock price marginally which should have bought time, but Alibaba took over. The stock price became a proxy to Alibaba and the hedge funds took notice. Enter Jeffery Smith and his hedge fund. He did his job, as unpleasant as some of us might think, and went to work on maximizing return. Most of that return is in tax savings so he started working that angle which is ultimately why this sale is going to happen. When a company goes from $15 per share to $40 per share because of a holding, you are and investment company. There is nothing that can be done you are tied to the holding. When Yahoo hired MM they had fired 2 CEOs in the past year, had two interim CEOs, and was probably looking to just get somebody that had a chance of righting the ship.
- dilemma 10y ago
  >However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Case in point. A clean, tidy, rational reason why Yahoo failed: it was impossible to save. Blame the company itself.
akjainaj 10y ago
I think there is absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo. So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I think back to Gillard and Australia. I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment. Abbott was and Rudd..ugh..something something party implosion; whatever. It has nothing to do with her being a women. There just aren't many people who can put up with that endless rubbish. With Yahoo, you have to give her credit. She has been there for a while and has attempted quite a bit. Saving Yahoo was going to be a totally chance attempt, as its competitors are crushing it in ... everything. From the surface it looked like she was in a better environment overall as well (compared to my Aussie politics stretching example anyway). I think a company like Yahoo could have, and may still turn itself around. AOL did, mostly by investing itself in news and editorial sites. Maybe Verizon will be able to do something with their data, customers and brand -- and maybe like AOL we won't even realize they're the company owning the articles we're reading or the services we're using.
  - lotophage 10y ago
    > she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment What are you talking about? She managed to make enough backroom deals to oust a standing Prime Minister. That's pretty strong evidence that she is Machiavellian enough to play the game of politics.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment. She became PM by playing that game. Her public persona was ruined because she played it too publicly and she should be held responsible for starting a decade long period of political instability.
javiayala 10y ago
I want to echo on your message and also to thank you for contributing with a positive comment and not with a harsh one like most people often do. I remember a few years ago when some of the stuff that Marissa was doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes and were being replicated in other companies (Bringing in remote people, focusing on some products, etc.) I guess we can all agree that in the end she didn't do the best job but maybe no one else could've done it differently. No way to know now.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Sure we can. Just spin up a parallel universe instance and change just one or two decisions. There's an AWS offering for that right?
- iaw 10y ago
  > doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes My recollection of those events were that Marissa Mayer exercised her privilege to have a daycare next to her office while ignoring the needs of all the parents that worked for her. Those were the events that made me dislike her, it showed antipathy for the people that had stuck at Yahoo.
nostromo 10y ago
Let's do away with excessive scorn for failed CEOs and excessive adulation for successful CEOs. There's a lot of randomness in business and in life.
- darkr 10y ago
  Also the excessive pay then by that logic?
  - xapata 10y ago
    Yes, the pay is excessive and probably unnecessary, but BoDs that approve it are often comprised of CEOs at other companies. Quid pro quo. CEO compensation increased dramatically at around the same time that the finance sector started capturing a bigger chunk of the GDP, which is around the same time that many large companies created mini hedge funds internally. Maybe it's more to do with that, but the country club networking opportunities can't hurt.
    - prostoalex 10y ago
      Her financial compensation largely depended on stock performance, as is typical with anyone involved at the C-level. A share of YHOO is worth $41 today vs $15 (and lower teens) at the time of her hire five years back. If the YHOO stock was anywhere near 2012 levels (or lower, or zero), her total compensation would look very different.
  - deleted 10y ago
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idlewords 10y ago
She was very well compensated for her time sinking Yahoo. I think this kind of tone policing is unhealthy.
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  I'd want to be well compensated for taking on a job where I was fairly certain I was doomed to fail because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    Wouldn't it be unethical to take on a job you were certain you'd fail at? (If you disclosed that, and they hired you anyway, then there's no ethical problem.)
    - blacksmythe 10y ago
      >> because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors What if you were the best qualified candidate? Would it be unethical then?
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        If you don't disclose that you could not deliver success, then yes, it would be unethical.
        ceejayoz 10y ago
        We're not privy to the discussions around her becoming CEO, but I'd imagine everyone involved in the decision was fully aware of Yahoo's predicament.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      "Fairly certain", though. If her odds of saving Yahoo were twice as good as an alternative CEO, that was a possibility worth a small fortune. And presumably, they knew the odds were low after sacking the last few CEOs. I'm hoping that she didn't even have to say it - a competent board could approach the whole thing with "we're in deep water, we think you're less doomed than most people would be". That may well have been the case, but if those odds are 1% and 2% I wouldn't want my compensation to depend on me saving the probably-doomed company.
serge2k 10y ago
So what, give out a participation ribbon?
hk__2 10y ago
Out of curiosity, why do you call her by her first name instead of her last name (Meyer)? Is there another famous Meyer such that there could be a confusion here?
- uptown 10y ago
  You spelled her last name wrong.
  - hk__2 10y ago
    That’s right; thanks!
- CarpetBench 10y ago
  Eh? Does it matter? Some people are referred to frequently by their first names (Sergey, Larry, Joel), some by their last name (Woz, Jobs), some by both or either. Are you trying to imply something?
  - hk__2 10y ago
    There’s no reason to be confrontational here; I’m wondering why we refer to some people by their first name rather than they last name. The most obvious reason is when there’s already a famous <last_name> (e.g. "Hillary" vs. "Clinton"), or if you know that person personnally. Wikipedia refers to both Marissa M_a_yer and Larry Page (and everybody) with their last name. Do you have some examples of e.g. press articles where Brin or Page are referred to by their first name?
- rconti 10y ago
  Oscar.
- Gargoyle 10y ago
  Funnily enough, there is a well-known Marissa MEyer as well as the Yahoo CEO Marissa MAyer. http://ew.com/article/2013/02/14/marissa-meyer-talks-scarlet-her-worries-over-cinder-and-a-potential-movie-exclusive/ http://ew.com/article/2013/02/14/marissa-meyer-talks-scarlet...
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jinglbox 10y ago
Steve Jobs worked himself to the bone and took zero money for years when he was trying to save Apple. That's what a good faith effort looks like. If he had failed he would have wasted years and got nothing in return. If Mayer had done this I would be impressed. But Mayer had no vision, didn't put in the effort required, and milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn. Silicon Valley loves failure like Elon Musk's rockets blowing up the first few times. But not this corrupt Wall Street-style failure. Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise.
- pgodzin 10y ago
  Not sure why a "good faith effort" requires taking such a crazy amount of personal risk. Yahoo was willing to pay millions to the exec they thought had the best chance to turn the company around. She should have declined that and and unnecessarily played on Extra Hard mode instead?
  - gniv 10y ago
    That's why the responsibility was on the board to find somebody willing and capable of playing Extra Hard.
    - jaredklewis 10y ago
      Obviously if finding good CEOs who would work for free at failing companies was easy, all boards would do that. Turns out it's not.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        I'm trying to imagine Jobs taking a 'free' turnaround role somewhere other than Apple. That was a labor of love, but it's pretty hard to import talent on those grounds - particularly if no one has significant affection for your brand. Part of the power of startups (and Apple) is that they get some economically-irrational commitments from people who care deeply about them, and it's pretty unfair to expect that for other organizations.
mortenjorck 10y ago
As an enthusiast photographer, she did one great thing in my book: She oversaw the attempted revitalization of Flickr. The old Flickr product and UI had stagnated for the better part of a decade, and under her administration, Yahoo rebooted a lot of the core experience. Some parts were rebooted more successfully than others, but on the balance, it was for the better.
- mullingitover 10y ago
  She did the bare minimum that needed to be done to keep flickr alive, I'm not sure it's worthy of praise. Flickr is currently comatose or dead, given that they haven't updated their mobile app in over a year, let alone anything else on the site. Yahoo could've used flickr to pre-empt YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram all in one, but Yahoo instead neglected it and ran it into the ground. I feel bad for the engineering talent that Yahoo wasted, but the executive leadership deserves nothing but scorn. They missed so many huge opportunities.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Flickr's a tough case. You make it Instagram or Facebook, even successfully, and it's not Flickr. I know I've personally bitched about Flickr stagnating but, when I think about it, I'm not sure how I really want it to change. It's a hosting--and, to some degree, sharing--site mostly for people who are relatively serious about photography. I can think of a few changes I'd like but I suspect that the original Flickr vision is fundamentally a niche market at this point.
  - nadim 10y ago
    The ads on flickr wrecked it 4 me
    - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
      Would you pay for a (higher) subscription?
      - 10y ago
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ebbv 10y ago
She got paid an obscene amount of money to continue driving a sinking ship into the bottom of the ocean. She is not a plucky entrepreneur risking everything against the odds. She gets zero kudos from me.
colordrops 10y ago
Pretty much every thread I've seen on Marissa since she started has had a comment like this.
tyingq 10y ago
Saving it would have required big bold moves. Did she make any?
speaktruth 10y ago
What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment? Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity. And what are this big risks you are talking about? "we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks ..." All I know is that she got a compensation plan in 2012 for about 120 mio. dollars. If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith". Why gets someone who failed such a high compensation and why should it be wrong to criticize and even bash such a person?
- cloakandswagger 10y ago
  I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny. I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO, and for years people will try to whitewash that to avoid its ugly stain on female professionals.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    She also joins a line of failed CEOs at Yahoo. Trying to tie this to her gender would require a lot of evidence to be remotly meaningful. Yahoo has been failing for a decade and a half, largely punctuated by a couple of lucky investments (Google and Alibaba). I also see little evidence of rabid defenses of her. I see some that don't believe she deserves to be crucified for failing to save a company that's been failing for a long time before she joined, and a lot of rabid attacks on her with little substantive.
    - cloakandswagger 10y ago
      Here's the thing: If Yahoo was in such dire shape that it couldn't be saved (that seems to be the consensus), it should have been scrapped and sold for parts to maximize shareholder value. Instead Marissa squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on random acquisitions and Katie Couric. In my mind there is nothing noble or defensible about coming into a dire situation, throwing a Hail Mary and then shrugging when it doesn't work.
iaw 10y ago
I didn't see a good-faith effort, what I saw was a lot of conservative policies that tamped down innovation and then efforts to chase the market leaders. Marissa Mayer didn't do a good job, her first acts at Yahoo alienated the loyal employees that she needed to embrace. I don't know if anyone could have saved Yahoo from sinking but she sure as shit didn't do anything to stave it off.
draw_down 10y ago
I agree. But part of leadership is that people criticize your performance- fairly or otherwise. Being a leader means accepting that.
bobbyi_settv 10y ago
How is anything she did a "big risk" if she is immune for any consequences of failure?
all_usernames 10y ago
She made over $200M in salary over four years. Her risk was zero. I can see no analog here for anything a normal human being would recognize as a challenge despite tough odds.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  There was a pretty major risk that her name would be tarred as "that loser who wrecked Yahoo". It might affect her ability to get any further C-level positions. That risk might not be something that a normal human being would want compensation to take on.
  - fma 10y ago
    If you have $200 million in the bank, why do you need any further C-level position? Hell, give me $20 million and I'll take that risk.
    - nimchimpsky 10y ago
      $2 million
      - fma 10y ago
        You would be a better CEO than me off the bat. You just saved the company $198 million.
    - discodave 10y ago
      By the time you're that rich money & wealth is just a scoresheet, not a means to an end. Competitive, successful people like winning more than they like money, otherwise people like Larry Ellison wouldn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the Americas cup.
      - username223 10y ago
        > By the time you're that rich money & wealth is just a scoresheet, not a means to an end. Yo'ure no doubt right, but when a majority of society is told to accept that money is "food, shelter, and a decent existence" to most people, and "points in a senseless ego game" to a few, things have gone badly off the rails. Those differences in perspective tend to be resolved violently and badly.
twblalock 10y ago
> Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort. Are we giving out an A for effort now? CEOs are hired to achieve results. If they fail, it doesn't matter how hard they tried. Maybe nobody could have prevented the failure of Yahoo. But that doesn't get Mayer off the hook for being a bad CEO -- she made bad decisions, managed to piss off the shareholders, executive team, and rank-and-file employees, hid major security breaches, and did not succeed at any of the things she tried to do. She had no major positive achievements during her entire tenure as CEO. The best that can realistically be said about her is that she was a bad CEO stuck in an impossible situation.
joering2 10y ago
Using your example, how much of a benefit is to have a "steady" ship while its still "sinking" ??
ACow_Adonis 10y ago
I can't speak for the rest of HN, but part of the "bashing" of Mayer is not just a personal attack on her, but a critique of our entire culture and economic system. At the end of the day, she'll receive multiple millions of dollars for doing and achieving nothing. Not a bad job of you can get it, but the phenomenon itself seems eminentl, judiciously and justifiably open to criticism to me. She's just another caricature in the social pattern...
- deleted 10y ago
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- zigzigzag 10y ago
  This. None of us know Mayer, have met her, really, none of us give a monkeys about her. I'm sure she's a lovely and pleasant person. Criticism of her in this context are entirely criticisms of the events surrounding her time at Yahoo, for which there are multiple other examples. The habit corporate boards have of rewarding failure is a problem, but it's not clear how to solve it.
homero 10y ago
She raided the company, she did nothing good
king_kerr 10y ago
Couldn't agree more.
mtgx 10y ago
I don't blame Marissa for "not saving Yahoo". I blame her for allowing the NSA to (illegally) get root access to Yahoo's servers so they can spy on everyone whenever they feel like it with no oversight, for doing it behind the security team's backs (not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things, but also shows what kind of person she is), and (perhaps related) allowing 1 billion of Yahoo accounts to be hacked so easily. So what does this show us? Beyond her failing to "make great new products at Yahoo", which I guess you could argue no one other than Steve Jobs may have been able to do at Yahoo anymore, it shows that she likes to betray not just her colleagues but also the users at the companies she leads. And in the end she ended up getting paid more than handsomely for all of those failures or malicious actions in which she engaged. So I'll make sure to never ever use a service run by Marissa Mayer and that everyone I know stays away from a company run by her.
- nadim 10y ago
  I really wish this wasn't true. The Internet is effectively dead to me.
praneshp 10y ago
I do not think she put in a good-faith effort. I am an ex-Yahoo, and found the hiring of several mid-level Googlers and buying a startup run by an ex-APM investigation-worthy.
pravda 10y ago
>bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread Can we say something about the Tumblr acquisition?
ljk 10y ago
> Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort. yahoo was a sinking ship already but she illegally fired men because they were men and got rid of remote workers, is that really considered "good-faith effort"? http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote-employees-to-work-in-an-office--or-quit-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote...
baybal2 10y ago
you criticize people screwing up. it is right thing to do
sonink 10y ago
If a CEO doesnt perform, she is accountable. If multiple CEO's dont perform, it is the board who must be held accountable.
syngrog66 10y ago
There are challenges and then there are challenges. When the challenge is... "Try to increase/stabilize Yahoo profits and keep relevant/hip, and, no matter what, we'll give you X millions of dollars." I don't think that's a challenge, let alone an immense challenge. Start with nothing. No code, no customers, no brand, no employees, no customers, no investors, and very little cash in the bank for runway, and try to build that up to Yahoo's level -- that's a challenge. That's a big challenge. Being able to parachute into a high status, high privledge, highly paid (no matter what) role, where you can just kind of twiddle the bits and get to spin every more you make as the obviously smart thing to do -- that's easy. Even if you "fail" you still win. Very different from situations where when you fail you... starve, get evicted, etc.

icelancer 10y ago

I do as well. As outlined in The Halo Effect, people want very tidy, clean, and rational reasons why a company failed. Blame must be specifically laid somewhere. However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Variance is a thing.

Gargoyle 10y ago
I don't really mind people failing. I do think there's something wrong with someone earning massive amounts of money to fail and then everyone saying, "Oh well, anyone would have failed in that role." Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome?
- icelancer 10y ago
  >Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome? Because all big C-level positions work this way? Doesn't make it a good idea, or even rational. But humans are of the rationalizing type, not actual rational beings.
- akjainaj 10y ago
  I suppose, there's a huge responsibility coming with that role, and you also know your name will be stained forever. But it's something somebody has to do.
  - shitgoose 10y ago
    their names are never stained. she will resurface in some other high profile position in no time. these C*O's live in their own universe, where common sense and peasants' logic do not apply.
- adewinter 10y ago
  Because it wasn't the expected outcome. Or, at least, there was a chance that things could be saved. The high risk is even more reason to offer huge compensation. We can only see in retrospect that it was doomed to failure.
  - npizzolato 10y ago
    What risk? Yahoo failed, but Marissa Mayer made out with millions of dollars. Seems like a no-risk endeavor to me.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      The risk of her future income being depressed. The risk her compensation package mitigated by paying her millions even in the face of a perceived failure.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Why pay someone huge sums of money if failure is the expected outcome? Because the people making executive compensation decisions are from a narrow elite class and are the people benefiting from executive compensation decisions.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Well-said. Major example: interlocking boards of directors. They clearly demonstrate cartel-like behavior where it's "us vs them" at one level protecting their personal profits and "them vs them" at another level competing for good positions, policy preferences, or market share. Unsurprisingly, it's one of ideal moves a capitalist can make in an environment like the U.S. given it gains the personal benefits of capitalism while minimizing the risk that real competition or cost minimization of labor would bring them. They must operate collectively to defeat what threatens their wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate Example with some specifics and nice illustrations: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/corporate_community.html http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/corporate_communi... EDIT: The answers all around yours are screenshot-worthy. Perfect example of what the elites bought with all those donations/visits to universities, textbooks, biased media, and so on. Many still believe they have to earn it in a way that's about merit as an employee of the company. Thousands of years of human history showed nepotism, classism, and other rigging were main ways people got ahead. Then it suddenly is out of the equation for many analyzing success of modern elites. ;)
- jonny_eh 10y ago
  The blame for compensation should be on the board, not the CEO.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  To attract someone who has a chance of fixing things rather than someone who is guaranteed to fail?
- prostoalex 10y ago
  The "failure" is subjective. What's objective is the stock price, which has grown from $15 to $41 under her management. As bulk of her compensation is locked in stock (negotiated at 2012 prices), it's increasingly hard for her to get compensated less while the stock has tripled in value.
  - shitgoose 10y ago
    all the stock growth is due to buybacks, so credit goes to Janet, not Marissa.
    - prostoalex 10y ago
      That may be, and you seem to have a better scoop on the internals. I was just pointing out that there are very few YHOO investors unhappy with the stock moves 2012-2017 (when benchmarked against S&P 500 or whatever else is commonly accepted metric) compared with, for example, Eric Jackson's war against Terry Semel's (and some directors') compensation package while the stock was in consistent decline https://www.law360.com/articles/26456/advisors-oust-yahoo-directors-over-ceo-pay https://www.law360.com/articles/26456/advisors-oust-yahoo-di...
narrator 10y ago
One reason I heard for the demise of Yahoo, from someone who worked there, was tech was totally anarchic. They didn't build up the vast amounts of shared software infrastructure that Google, Facebook and Amazon did. Apparently, each separate business unit did a lot of reinventing the wheel. That might have been something someone with a background in big company software architecture could have focused on, but that wasn't Marissa.
- icelancer 10y ago
  Or it was too much inertia to overcome, which is probably a huge factor.
  - normaljoe 10y ago
    It was both and more. I started there back when Bartz was CEO. Bartz continued down the media company path that was already established. Thompson doubled down and cut huge amount of tech talent to focus on media. Like he literally almost completely killed labs the PhD wing that did research. There are other things that elaborate on that really hurt and created the outcome we see today. When MM started she had no idea of the technical debt she was going to inherit. Something to keep in mind is that Yahoo invented web at scale. It started on FreeBSD and had kernel contributors even when I started. I think they all work for Apple these days. To help handle scale Yahoo would create Yahoo versions of software via things like kernel extensions or software patches. Nobody was doing these things back in the late 90s, but it was needed. Back then nobody knew what we know now and they literally where making it up as they went along. The thing is when you are the first to the table it sometimes creates technical issues. Sometime before I started there was a decision to shift from BSD to Linux. That was probably a good decision, not because of the merits of FreeBSD, but because Linux was getting a lot more headway with extra contributors. When you have code that was dependent on kernel extensions and you change kernels you get some pain points. Some are manageable others are not. I don't think anybody knew how painful that transition would be, well maybe Filo did because he was crazy aware of everything. As a side note when I started Filo was maybe a L3 but I think a L4 because tech was just that that devalued. So if he did know he probably didn't have much say in the matter. Even as a major stock holder he is not the kind of guy that throws that around, I really think he cares more about the tech then his bank account. If I had his bank account I probably would be in the same place. Yahoo also made a somewhat fatal accounting issue prior to me getting there and probably early on. This was probably the right thing at that time, but it morphed into a bigger issue later down the road. They wanted to isolate "properties" or business units financially. To do that each property, such as news, sports or mail had their own hardware and justification for the hardware. This unfortunately creates a hoarding of assets since you never know when you can get more compute or storage. Keep in mind we are are talking pre-VM tech for you young folks and buying a server cost some big bucks. This created a culture or inertia that made to switch to VM very difficult. That wasn't the only thing. If the sports "product" is separate from the news "product" and assets, both physical and talent wise are isolated, then where is the incentive to share? This doesn't mean there was no sharing, there was, but it created a culture of do it your own way to get things done. When MM started she focused internally at first. If you where in the building you got that. If you where in IT then well you knew there was a laser on you. It was all about getting the simple things first, upgrade outdated laptops etc. Then it moved to getting infrastructure in place. She was trying to shift the culture from mediocrity for developers to a developer and product first standpoint. It then became about reducing technical debt and lifting the barriers between groups. That ship does not correct overnight. There was some point in this that she did have to embrace the media focus and did a few big deals to get media talent, just is just a guess, but the timing is right. Probably the final nail in the coffin was delivered unknowingly by co-founder Jerry Yang. With all best intentions Yang helped his friend Jack Ma with the Alibaba venture. Instead of a personal investment Yang opted for a joint venture where Alibaba got Yahoo China and some cash and Yahoo got some shares in Alibaba. Well as we all know Alibaba took off and the deal is just epic in terms of ROI. That created a big issue though. When MM took the reigns she would grow the stock price marginally which should have bought time, but Alibaba took over. The stock price became a proxy to Alibaba and the hedge funds took notice. Enter Jeffery Smith and his hedge fund. He did his job, as unpleasant as some of us might think, and went to work on maximizing return. Most of that return is in tax savings so he started working that angle which is ultimately why this sale is going to happen. When a company goes from $15 per share to $40 per share because of a holding, you are and investment company. There is nothing that can be done you are tied to the holding. When Yahoo hired MM they had fired 2 CEOs in the past year, had two interim CEOs, and was probably looking to just get somebody that had a chance of righting the ship.
dilemma 10y ago
>However, there's a pretty good chance no one available could have saved the demise of Yahoo. Case in point. A clean, tidy, rational reason why Yahoo failed: it was impossible to save. Blame the company itself.

akjainaj 10y ago

I think there is absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo. So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.

djsumdog 10y ago
I think back to Gillard and Australia. I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment. Abbott was and Rudd..ugh..something something party implosion; whatever. It has nothing to do with her being a women. There just aren't many people who can put up with that endless rubbish. With Yahoo, you have to give her credit. She has been there for a while and has attempted quite a bit. Saving Yahoo was going to be a totally chance attempt, as its competitors are crushing it in ... everything. From the surface it looked like she was in a better environment overall as well (compared to my Aussie politics stretching example anyway). I think a company like Yahoo could have, and may still turn itself around. AOL did, mostly by investing itself in news and editorial sites. Maybe Verizon will be able to do something with their data, customers and brand -- and maybe like AOL we won't even realize they're the company owning the articles we're reading or the services we're using.
- lotophage 10y ago
  > she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment What are you talking about? She managed to make enough backroom deals to oust a standing Prime Minister. That's pretty strong evidence that she is Machiavellian enough to play the game of politics.
- flukus 10y ago
  > I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment. She became PM by playing that game. Her public persona was ruined because she played it too publicly and she should be held responsible for starting a decade long period of political instability.

javiayala 10y ago

I want to echo on your message and also to thank you for contributing with a positive comment and not with a harsh one like most people often do. I remember a few years ago when some of the stuff that Marissa was doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes and were being replicated in other companies (Bringing in remote people, focusing on some products, etc.) I guess we can all agree that in the end she didn't do the best job but maybe no one else could've done it differently. No way to know now.

djsumdog 10y ago
Sure we can. Just spin up a parallel universe instance and change just one or two decisions. There's an AWS offering for that right?
iaw 10y ago
> doing to reshape Yahoo's internal structure were being looked with good eyes My recollection of those events were that Marissa Mayer exercised her privilege to have a daycare next to her office while ignoring the needs of all the parents that worked for her. Those were the events that made me dislike her, it showed antipathy for the people that had stuck at Yahoo.

nostromo 10y ago

Let's do away with excessive scorn for failed CEOs and excessive adulation for successful CEOs. There's a lot of randomness in business and in life.

darkr 10y ago
Also the excessive pay then by that logic?
- xapata 10y ago
  Yes, the pay is excessive and probably unnecessary, but BoDs that approve it are often comprised of CEOs at other companies. Quid pro quo. CEO compensation increased dramatically at around the same time that the finance sector started capturing a bigger chunk of the GDP, which is around the same time that many large companies created mini hedge funds internally. Maybe it's more to do with that, but the country club networking opportunities can't hurt.
  - prostoalex 10y ago
    Her financial compensation largely depended on stock performance, as is typical with anyone involved at the C-level. A share of YHOO is worth $41 today vs $15 (and lower teens) at the time of her hire five years back. If the YHOO stock was anywhere near 2012 levels (or lower, or zero), her total compensation would look very different.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

idlewords 10y ago

She was very well compensated for her time sinking Yahoo. I think this kind of tone policing is unhealthy.

ceejayoz 10y ago
I'd want to be well compensated for taking on a job where I was fairly certain I was doomed to fail because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Wouldn't it be unethical to take on a job you were certain you'd fail at? (If you disclosed that, and they hired you anyway, then there's no ethical problem.)
  - blacksmythe 10y ago
    >> because the company is being eaten alive by its competitors What if you were the best qualified candidate? Would it be unethical then?
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      If you don't disclose that you could not deliver success, then yes, it would be unethical.
      - ceejayoz 10y ago
        We're not privy to the discussions around her becoming CEO, but I'd imagine everyone involved in the decision was fully aware of Yahoo's predicament.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    "Fairly certain", though. If her odds of saving Yahoo were twice as good as an alternative CEO, that was a possibility worth a small fortune. And presumably, they knew the odds were low after sacking the last few CEOs. I'm hoping that she didn't even have to say it - a competent board could approach the whole thing with "we're in deep water, we think you're less doomed than most people would be". That may well have been the case, but if those odds are 1% and 2% I wouldn't want my compensation to depend on me saving the probably-doomed company.

serge2k 10y ago

So what, give out a participation ribbon?

hk__2 10y ago

Out of curiosity, why do you call her by her first name instead of her last name (Meyer)? Is there another famous Meyer such that there could be a confusion here?

uptown 10y ago
You spelled her last name wrong.
- hk__2 10y ago
  That’s right; thanks!
CarpetBench 10y ago
Eh? Does it matter? Some people are referred to frequently by their first names (Sergey, Larry, Joel), some by their last name (Woz, Jobs), some by both or either. Are you trying to imply something?
- hk__2 10y ago
  There’s no reason to be confrontational here; I’m wondering why we refer to some people by their first name rather than they last name. The most obvious reason is when there’s already a famous <last_name> (e.g. "Hillary" vs. "Clinton"), or if you know that person personnally. Wikipedia refers to both Marissa M_a_yer and Larry Page (and everybody) with their last name. Do you have some examples of e.g. press articles where Brin or Page are referred to by their first name?
rconti 10y ago
Oscar.
Gargoyle 10y ago
Funnily enough, there is a well-known Marissa MEyer as well as the Yahoo CEO Marissa MAyer. http://ew.com/article/2013/02/14/marissa-meyer-talks-scarlet-her-worries-over-cinder-and-a-potential-movie-exclusive/ http://ew.com/article/2013/02/14/marissa-meyer-talks-scarlet...

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jinglbox 10y ago

Steve Jobs worked himself to the bone and took zero money for years when he was trying to save Apple. That's what a good faith effort looks like. If he had failed he would have wasted years and got nothing in return. If Mayer had done this I would be impressed. But Mayer had no vision, didn't put in the effort required, and milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn. Silicon Valley loves failure like Elon Musk's rockets blowing up the first few times. But not this corrupt Wall Street-style failure. Marissa Mayer's failure at Yahoo was caused by pure incompetence, negligence, and laziness of all involved. Nothing about it that deserves praise.

pgodzin 10y ago
Not sure why a "good faith effort" requires taking such a crazy amount of personal risk. Yahoo was willing to pay millions to the exec they thought had the best chance to turn the company around. She should have declined that and and unnecessarily played on Extra Hard mode instead?
- gniv 10y ago
  That's why the responsibility was on the board to find somebody willing and capable of playing Extra Hard.
  - jaredklewis 10y ago
    Obviously if finding good CEOs who would work for free at failing companies was easy, all boards would do that. Turns out it's not.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      I'm trying to imagine Jobs taking a 'free' turnaround role somewhere other than Apple. That was a labor of love, but it's pretty hard to import talent on those grounds - particularly if no one has significant affection for your brand. Part of the power of startups (and Apple) is that they get some economically-irrational commitments from people who care deeply about them, and it's pretty unfair to expect that for other organizations.

mortenjorck 10y ago

As an enthusiast photographer, she did one great thing in my book: She oversaw the attempted revitalization of Flickr. The old Flickr product and UI had stagnated for the better part of a decade, and under her administration, Yahoo rebooted a lot of the core experience. Some parts were rebooted more successfully than others, but on the balance, it was for the better.

mullingitover 10y ago
She did the bare minimum that needed to be done to keep flickr alive, I'm not sure it's worthy of praise. Flickr is currently comatose or dead, given that they haven't updated their mobile app in over a year, let alone anything else on the site. Yahoo could've used flickr to pre-empt YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram all in one, but Yahoo instead neglected it and ran it into the ground. I feel bad for the engineering talent that Yahoo wasted, but the executive leadership deserves nothing but scorn. They missed so many huge opportunities.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Flickr's a tough case. You make it Instagram or Facebook, even successfully, and it's not Flickr. I know I've personally bitched about Flickr stagnating but, when I think about it, I'm not sure how I really want it to change. It's a hosting--and, to some degree, sharing--site mostly for people who are relatively serious about photography. I can think of a few changes I'd like but I suspect that the original Flickr vision is fundamentally a niche market at this point.
- nadim 10y ago
  The ads on flickr wrecked it 4 me
  - JumpCrisscross 10y ago
    Would you pay for a (higher) subscription?
    - 10y ago

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ebbv 10y ago

She got paid an obscene amount of money to continue driving a sinking ship into the bottom of the ocean. She is not a plucky entrepreneur risking everything against the odds. She gets zero kudos from me.

colordrops 10y ago

Pretty much every thread I've seen on Marissa since she started has had a comment like this.

tyingq 10y ago

Saving it would have required big bold moves. Did she make any?

speaktruth 10y ago

What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment? Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity. And what are this big risks you are talking about? "we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks ..." All I know is that she got a compensation plan in 2012 for about 120 mio. dollars. If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith". Why gets someone who failed such a high compensation and why should it be wrong to criticize and even bash such a person?

cloakandswagger 10y ago
I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny. I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO, and for years people will try to whitewash that to avoid its ugly stain on female professionals.
- vidarh 10y ago
  She also joins a line of failed CEOs at Yahoo. Trying to tie this to her gender would require a lot of evidence to be remotly meaningful. Yahoo has been failing for a decade and a half, largely punctuated by a couple of lucky investments (Google and Alibaba). I also see little evidence of rabid defenses of her. I see some that don't believe she deserves to be crucified for failing to save a company that's been failing for a long time before she joined, and a lot of rabid attacks on her with little substantive.
  - cloakandswagger 10y ago
    Here's the thing: If Yahoo was in such dire shape that it couldn't be saved (that seems to be the consensus), it should have been scrapped and sold for parts to maximize shareholder value. Instead Marissa squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on random acquisitions and Katie Couric. In my mind there is nothing noble or defensible about coming into a dire situation, throwing a Hail Mary and then shrugging when it doesn't work.

iaw 10y ago

I didn't see a good-faith effort, what I saw was a lot of conservative policies that tamped down innovation and then efforts to chase the market leaders. Marissa Mayer didn't do a good job, her first acts at Yahoo alienated the loyal employees that she needed to embrace. I don't know if anyone could have saved Yahoo from sinking but she sure as shit didn't do anything to stave it off.

draw_down 10y ago

I agree. But part of leadership is that people criticize your performance- fairly or otherwise. Being a leader means accepting that.

bobbyi_settv 10y ago

How is anything she did a "big risk" if she is immune for any consequences of failure?

all_usernames 10y ago

She made over $200M in salary over four years. Her risk was zero. I can see no analog here for anything a normal human being would recognize as a challenge despite tough odds.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
There was a pretty major risk that her name would be tarred as "that loser who wrecked Yahoo". It might affect her ability to get any further C-level positions. That risk might not be something that a normal human being would want compensation to take on.
- fma 10y ago
  If you have $200 million in the bank, why do you need any further C-level position? Hell, give me $20 million and I'll take that risk.
  - nimchimpsky 10y ago
    $2 million
    - fma 10y ago
      You would be a better CEO than me off the bat. You just saved the company $198 million.
  - discodave 10y ago
    By the time you're that rich money & wealth is just a scoresheet, not a means to an end. Competitive, successful people like winning more than they like money, otherwise people like Larry Ellison wouldn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the Americas cup.
    - username223 10y ago
      > By the time you're that rich money & wealth is just a scoresheet, not a means to an end. Yo'ure no doubt right, but when a majority of society is told to accept that money is "food, shelter, and a decent existence" to most people, and "points in a senseless ego game" to a few, things have gone badly off the rails. Those differences in perspective tend to be resolved violently and badly.

twblalock 10y ago

> Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort. Are we giving out an A for effort now? CEOs are hired to achieve results. If they fail, it doesn't matter how hard they tried. Maybe nobody could have prevented the failure of Yahoo. But that doesn't get Mayer off the hook for being a bad CEO -- she made bad decisions, managed to piss off the shareholders, executive team, and rank-and-file employees, hid major security breaches, and did not succeed at any of the things she tried to do. She had no major positive achievements during her entire tenure as CEO. The best that can realistically be said about her is that she was a bad CEO stuck in an impossible situation.

joering2 10y ago

Using your example, how much of a benefit is to have a "steady" ship while its still "sinking" ??

ACow_Adonis 10y ago

I can't speak for the rest of HN, but part of the "bashing" of Mayer is not just a personal attack on her, but a critique of our entire culture and economic system. At the end of the day, she'll receive multiple millions of dollars for doing and achieving nothing. Not a bad job of you can get it, but the phenomenon itself seems eminentl, judiciously and justifiably open to criticism to me. She's just another caricature in the social pattern...

deleted 10y ago
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zigzigzag 10y ago
This. None of us know Mayer, have met her, really, none of us give a monkeys about her. I'm sure she's a lovely and pleasant person. Criticism of her in this context are entirely criticisms of the events surrounding her time at Yahoo, for which there are multiple other examples. The habit corporate boards have of rewarding failure is a problem, but it's not clear how to solve it.

homero 10y ago

She raided the company, she did nothing good

king_kerr 10y ago

Couldn't agree more.

mtgx 10y ago

I don't blame Marissa for "not saving Yahoo". I blame her for allowing the NSA to (illegally) get root access to Yahoo's servers so they can spy on everyone whenever they feel like it with no oversight, for doing it behind the security team's backs (not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things, but also shows what kind of person she is), and (perhaps related) allowing 1 billion of Yahoo accounts to be hacked so easily. So what does this show us? Beyond her failing to "make great new products at Yahoo", which I guess you could argue no one other than Steve Jobs may have been able to do at Yahoo anymore, it shows that she likes to betray not just her colleagues but also the users at the companies she leads. And in the end she ended up getting paid more than handsomely for all of those failures or malicious actions in which she engaged. So I'll make sure to never ever use a service run by Marissa Mayer and that everyone I know stays away from a company run by her.

nadim 10y ago
I really wish this wasn't true. The Internet is effectively dead to me.

praneshp 10y ago

I do not think she put in a good-faith effort. I am an ex-Yahoo, and found the hiring of several mid-level Googlers and buying a startup run by an ex-APM investigation-worthy.

pravda 10y ago

>bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread Can we say something about the Tumblr acquisition?

ljk 10y ago

> Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort. yahoo was a sinking ship already but she illegally fired men because they were men and got rid of remote workers, is that really considered "good-faith effort"? http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote-employees-to-work-in-an-office--or-quit-2013-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote...

baybal2 10y ago

you criticize people screwing up. it is right thing to do

sonink 10y ago

If a CEO doesnt perform, she is accountable. If multiple CEO's dont perform, it is the board who must be held accountable.

syngrog66 10y ago

There are challenges and then there are challenges. When the challenge is... "Try to increase/stabilize Yahoo profits and keep relevant/hip, and, no matter what, we'll give you X millions of dollars." I don't think that's a challenge, let alone an immense challenge. Start with nothing. No code, no customers, no brand, no employees, no customers, no investors, and very little cash in the bank for runway, and try to build that up to Yahoo's level -- that's a challenge. That's a big challenge. Being able to parachute into a high status, high privledge, highly paid (no matter what) role, where you can just kind of twiddle the bits and get to spin every more you make as the obviously smart thing to do -- that's easy. Even if you "fail" you still win. Very different from situations where when you fail you... starve, get evicted, etc.