8 ms·

Someone made a compelling case a few months ago that Mayer executed perfectly for what she was brought in for. Activist investors brought her in after buying th

by wand3r 10y ago

Someone made a compelling case a few months ago that Mayer executed perfectly for what she was brought in for. Activist investors brought her in after buying the stock super low and then liquidated at the perfect time after the stock rallyied. Regardless, objectively Yahoo failed and she bears a large share of the responsibility. Absurd reward for botching a lot of the sale, operations and core of that company. I think she tried hard but man I wish I got 9 figures for effort.

binthere 10y ago
Stocks only went up because of Alibaba, Marissa didn't have anything to do with the price of the stock.
- run4yourlives2 10y ago
  She's the CEO. You can explain it away but she is as subject to good fortune as much as she is bad. EDIT: Haters out in force I see. The share price was $16 when she started. It's now $48. It's irrelevant what she did or didn't do to get that. That's the fact, and that's what matters to her employers, the shareholders. Why shouldn't she be compensated for a 200% increase? The company's long term survival is a goal that may have never been shared by the actual owners.
  - berberous 10y ago
    I don't think you understand how much the Alibaba shares that Yahoo held were worth (~$40 billion) and how little the rest of the business was worth (<$5 billion). This is not a normal situation, where your point would usually be correct. She had zero responsibility for running Alibaba. She ran a business that was worth less than $5 billion, but was compensated based on a stock price that primarily moved based on the run-up in the $40 billion worth of Alibaba stock Yahoo held (and such stock was acquired before she became CEO). Here's one of many Matt Levine pieces that explained the Yahoo/Alibaba situation, although it's now dated: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-01-28/yahoo-would-rather-not-pay-taxes-on-its-alibaba-shares https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-01-28/yahoo-wou...
    - run4yourlives2 10y ago
      And? Was Meyer not the CEO when this happened? I'm pretty sure she was. Just because she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders doesn't mean she's a failure. We're all assuming that her job was to "save" Yahoo. I don't think that was ever really on the table.
      - derefr 10y ago
        Your comment: > she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders Parent comment: > and such stock was acquired before she became CEO She didn't do "resort to" anything. Yahoo made that money from an action a previous CEO was ultimately responsible for. If you want to be really generous, you could praise her for not selling the stock—but if we're praising CEOs for every way they choose not to change the companies they come into, then my pet rock would make an awesome CEO indeed.
        1024core 10y ago
        > She didn't do "resort to" anything. You have to give her credit where it's due: she saved the Alibaba partnership from that total fuckup, Carol Bartz. CB was such a fuckup, that she's the sun to Marissa's candle. She insulted Jack Ma in front of his underlings when he came calling to Sunnyvale. She refused/forgot to put someone on BABA's board and totally ignored Ma. As a result, Ma said 'fuck you' and took Alipay out of the group without even telling Bartz. I wish more people looked at the period preceding Marissa (Bartz, Thompson) and they'd realize that Mayer was a Godsend compared to the cabal of clowns running Yahoo before her.
        derefr 10y ago
        Even if it's true that her management was better than previous management, I think everyone here is applying a standard where someone shouldn't get compensated for management that was provably worse than no management, because having no management is free. If the board of directors had just told everybody to go on without a CEO, the company would have done better financially than if they had installed Marissa.
  - acchow 10y ago
    Haters out in force I see. The share price was $16 when she started. It's now $48. It's irrelevant what she did or didn't do to get that. False. More than 100% of that $32 increase in value was due to Yahoo's stake in Alibaba, especially due to its IPO. Yahoo itself ex-BABA lost value.
    - run4yourlives2 10y ago
      I fail to see how this is an issue, but even if I concede the point, she still brought the stock up and created an exit for shareholders. The goal of a resurgent Yahoo seems to only have been one shared by outside observers.
      - kesselvon 10y ago
        because she didn't do anything to increase the stock price? You could have an empty chair as CEO and it would be rose regardless. She made a lot of objectively bad decisions like Yahoo's stint in video, or the bogglingly expensive acquisition of Tumblr
  - kesselvon 10y ago
    Stock price up: Give CEOs more Business sold for parts: Give CEOs more When does this ever end
mason55 10y ago
> objectively Yahoo failed and she bears a large share of the responsibility Curious to hear more on this. Yahoo! was a disaster before she came in, she tried some things to turn it around, it didn't work. One of the arguments for this kind of compensation in this situation is that you want the CEO to take a risk to try to turn around the company. A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that. The problem is that we don't know what the alternate universe holds, where a different CEO was brought in. It might be that that most likely scenario was that Yahoo! drops to $0 and Marissa actually made $5B for investors that an average CEO would not have made (in baseball terms her VORC [value over replacement CEO] was $5B).
- guiomie 10y ago
  It would be great to see some data behind this assertion if it exists. I suspect that failing for business reasons as opposed to being caught in some illegal scheme isn't as bad when it comes to finding another job.
- evilduck 10y ago
  A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that. Ok, but when is that compensation enough? At 10x your lifetime spending needs, or 20x? She just got paid enough for generations of her descendants to be on easy street for life. It's absurd. Edit: I'm not angry at Mayer at all, I just don't understand why companies agree to golden parachute deals like this for failure. She took a career-ending risk, that's worth some compensation, but the scale seems disproportionate.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >I'm not angry at Mayer at all, I just don't understand why companies agree to golden parachute deals like this for failure. Because "the company" that decides is the board -- and these people rub each other's backs...
    - mcbruiser3 10y ago
VonGuard 10y ago
It's very interesting to see so many people on the Internet complaining about Marissa's golden parachute. Honestly, the only remarkable thing about it is that she's a woman. These types of rewards are handed out all the time to CEO's of failed companies. Failed CEO's get them too, and frankly, I don't think Marissa failed. Frankly, she did what she was supposed to do: sold the company, satisfied Carl Icahn, and improved internal morale. From what I heard anecdotally, she took an internal culture of rot and at least made it a place where people didn't dread going into work every morning. It's kinda like she pulled the teams out of the swamp, and rested them on a muddy, cold bank of the river. At least they weren't drowning anymore. The pivot to mobile-first was a big deal, internally. They really lived and breathed that change, as is evidenced by the tremendous amount of engineering they put into simple things like their mobile weather app. It didn't ultimately work, but it was the right direction to be going, honestly. Was it all misguided and doomed from the start? Sure! Yahoo! was the new AOL, and it was a miracle the company didn't get sold off to a media firm. But then, Verizon is kind of building its own media arm, and it already owns AOL. The fact that anyone bought Yahoo is a testament to Marissa's leadership. Would you have bought it, given the opportunity? I probably wouldn't have either. But she made the sale. If nothing else, that golden parachute is a commission just for ending the damn place as a going concern. One of the things that really killed Yahoo, that no one talks about, is that they had these security people called Paranoids. They were great, super smart, always available, BUT, they held sway over everything and it was very very easy to just say, "naw, forget that 6 months of work, throw it all away, the Paranoids say we can't put it on production machines." This was evidently an entirely acceptable thing to happen, internally, and it's why so many things were killed. It's also why you don't hear about constant data breaches at Yahoo! anymore, though.
- otoburb 10y ago
  >>One of the things that really killed Yahoo, that no one talks about, is that they had these security people called Paranoids. Did this group of Paranoids hold product-blocking sway after or before the highly publicized Yahoo! hacks? Lose-lose no matter which branch of the analysis tree we traverse.
  - 10y ago

by wand3r 10y ago

binthere 10y ago

Stocks only went up because of Alibaba, Marissa didn't have anything to do with the price of the stock.

run4yourlives2 10y ago
She's the CEO. You can explain it away but she is as subject to good fortune as much as she is bad. EDIT: Haters out in force I see. The share price was $16 when she started. It's now $48. It's irrelevant what she did or didn't do to get that. That's the fact, and that's what matters to her employers, the shareholders. Why shouldn't she be compensated for a 200% increase? The company's long term survival is a goal that may have never been shared by the actual owners.
- berberous 10y ago
  I don't think you understand how much the Alibaba shares that Yahoo held were worth (~$40 billion) and how little the rest of the business was worth (<$5 billion). This is not a normal situation, where your point would usually be correct. She had zero responsibility for running Alibaba. She ran a business that was worth less than $5 billion, but was compensated based on a stock price that primarily moved based on the run-up in the $40 billion worth of Alibaba stock Yahoo held (and such stock was acquired before she became CEO). Here's one of many Matt Levine pieces that explained the Yahoo/Alibaba situation, although it's now dated: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-01-28/yahoo-would-rather-not-pay-taxes-on-its-alibaba-shares https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-01-28/yahoo-wou...
  - run4yourlives2 10y ago
    And? Was Meyer not the CEO when this happened? I'm pretty sure she was. Just because she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders doesn't mean she's a failure. We're all assuming that her job was to "save" Yahoo. I don't think that was ever really on the table.
    - derefr 10y ago
      Your comment: > she resorted to something other than organically growing the business to increase the value to her shareholders Parent comment: > and such stock was acquired before she became CEO She didn't do "resort to" anything. Yahoo made that money from an action a previous CEO was ultimately responsible for. If you want to be really generous, you could praise her for not selling the stock—but if we're praising CEOs for every way they choose not to change the companies they come into, then my pet rock would make an awesome CEO indeed.
      - 1024core 10y ago
        > She didn't do "resort to" anything. You have to give her credit where it's due: she saved the Alibaba partnership from that total fuckup, Carol Bartz. CB was such a fuckup, that she's the sun to Marissa's candle. She insulted Jack Ma in front of his underlings when he came calling to Sunnyvale. She refused/forgot to put someone on BABA's board and totally ignored Ma. As a result, Ma said 'fuck you' and took Alipay out of the group without even telling Bartz. I wish more people looked at the period preceding Marissa (Bartz, Thompson) and they'd realize that Mayer was a Godsend compared to the cabal of clowns running Yahoo before her.
        derefr 10y ago
        Even if it's true that her management was better than previous management, I think everyone here is applying a standard where someone shouldn't get compensated for management that was provably worse than no management, because having no management is free. If the board of directors had just told everybody to go on without a CEO, the company would have done better financially than if they had installed Marissa.
- acchow 10y ago
  Haters out in force I see. The share price was $16 when she started. It's now $48. It's irrelevant what she did or didn't do to get that. False. More than 100% of that $32 increase in value was due to Yahoo's stake in Alibaba, especially due to its IPO. Yahoo itself ex-BABA lost value.
  - run4yourlives2 10y ago
    I fail to see how this is an issue, but even if I concede the point, she still brought the stock up and created an exit for shareholders. The goal of a resurgent Yahoo seems to only have been one shared by outside observers.
    - kesselvon 10y ago
      because she didn't do anything to increase the stock price? You could have an empty chair as CEO and it would be rose regardless. She made a lot of objectively bad decisions like Yahoo's stint in video, or the bogglingly expensive acquisition of Tumblr
- kesselvon 10y ago
  Stock price up: Give CEOs more Business sold for parts: Give CEOs more When does this ever end

mason55 10y ago

> objectively Yahoo failed and she bears a large share of the responsibility Curious to hear more on this. Yahoo! was a disaster before she came in, she tried some things to turn it around, it didn't work. One of the arguments for this kind of compensation in this situation is that you want the CEO to take a risk to try to turn around the company. A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that. The problem is that we don't know what the alternate universe holds, where a different CEO was brought in. It might be that that most likely scenario was that Yahoo! drops to $0 and Marissa actually made $5B for investors that an average CEO would not have made (in baseball terms her VORC [value over replacement CEO] was $5B).

guiomie 10y ago
It would be great to see some data behind this assertion if it exists. I suspect that failing for business reasons as opposed to being caught in some illegal scheme isn't as bad when it comes to finding another job.
evilduck 10y ago
A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that. Ok, but when is that compensation enough? At 10x your lifetime spending needs, or 20x? She just got paid enough for generations of her descendants to be on easy street for life. It's absurd. Edit: I'm not angry at Mayer at all, I just don't understand why companies agree to golden parachute deals like this for failure. She took a career-ending risk, that's worth some compensation, but the scale seems disproportionate.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >I'm not angry at Mayer at all, I just don't understand why companies agree to golden parachute deals like this for failure. Because "the company" that decides is the board -- and these people rub each other's backs...
  - mcbruiser3 10y ago

VonGuard 10y ago

It's very interesting to see so many people on the Internet complaining about Marissa's golden parachute. Honestly, the only remarkable thing about it is that she's a woman. These types of rewards are handed out all the time to CEO's of failed companies. Failed CEO's get them too, and frankly, I don't think Marissa failed. Frankly, she did what she was supposed to do: sold the company, satisfied Carl Icahn, and improved internal morale. From what I heard anecdotally, she took an internal culture of rot and at least made it a place where people didn't dread going into work every morning. It's kinda like she pulled the teams out of the swamp, and rested them on a muddy, cold bank of the river. At least they weren't drowning anymore. The pivot to mobile-first was a big deal, internally. They really lived and breathed that change, as is evidenced by the tremendous amount of engineering they put into simple things like their mobile weather app. It didn't ultimately work, but it was the right direction to be going, honestly. Was it all misguided and doomed from the start? Sure! Yahoo! was the new AOL, and it was a miracle the company didn't get sold off to a media firm. But then, Verizon is kind of building its own media arm, and it already owns AOL. The fact that anyone bought Yahoo is a testament to Marissa's leadership. Would you have bought it, given the opportunity? I probably wouldn't have either. But she made the sale. If nothing else, that golden parachute is a commission just for ending the damn place as a going concern. One of the things that really killed Yahoo, that no one talks about, is that they had these security people called Paranoids. They were great, super smart, always available, BUT, they held sway over everything and it was very very easy to just say, "naw, forget that 6 months of work, throw it all away, the Paranoids say we can't put it on production machines." This was evidently an entirely acceptable thing to happen, internally, and it's why so many things were killed. It's also why you don't hear about constant data breaches at Yahoo! anymore, though.

otoburb 10y ago
>>One of the things that really killed Yahoo, that no one talks about, is that they had these security people called Paranoids. Did this group of Paranoids hold product-blocking sway after or before the highly publicized Yahoo! hacks? Lose-lose no matter which branch of the analysis tree we traverse.
- 10y ago