8 ms·

IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absol

IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female. I think HN readers remember a bit more about the state that Yahoo was in when she took over (hint: not good.) I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. I think she succeeded on that front: the market was probably undervaluing Yahoo's other assets, and she was able to sell those to Verizon for a fair price after divesting the Alibaba stake. tl;dr: Yahoo was long dead before she arrived. WSJ readers forget that. HN readers don't. Plus she's an attractive woman, which will always paint a target on your back as an executive.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Qub3d 9y ago
I am of the opinion that Ms. Mayer was hired partly as a way for Yahoo's investors to hedge their bets [1]. Its a bit of a dark view on silicon valley culture, perhaps, but I think a valid one. Anyways, I agree with your point that Yahoo had already suffered most of its damage. In many ways, its latest CEO did the best that could be expected of anyone in that position. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
jonknee 9y ago
> I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. If that was the case she never would have been given the job. That's something any old bean counter could do and they wouldn't require hundreds of millions of dollars for the babysitting job. She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?). Some examples: * Tumblr - $1.1b with the majority of that later written off because they have only figured out how to keep losing money * Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google * Summly - $30m to a teenager for a news app that was shut down and never heard of again
- MekaiGS 9y ago
  To be fair Summly became Yahoo news digest so it wasn't a complete write off.
  - redmaverick 9y ago
    So here is what Yahoo did: It "aqui-hired" a team of people, led by a 17-year-old living in London, that cannot claim to have invented a cool technology OR to have built a cool app. Yahoo does own the technology SRI invented for Summly, but it doesn't own SRI, so it hasn't acquired the team that can scale the technology for Yahoo.
- exelius 9y ago
  > She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?). Well, it's no small thing to divest a big chunk of equity like that without crushing the value. There are a few ways you can do it, but you need someone empowered to actually execute on it for the board. That's the CEO's job. She did a good job in that. And yeah, she made some bad acquisitions. But most of these types of acquisitions fail (it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history) and the losses on those acquisitions were more than made up for by the additional amount she was able to get for the combined Alibaba + Yahoo. She basically ended up spinning off the entire value of the Alibaba stake plus $4.5 billion -- which is about $5 billion ahead of where the company was at when she started (remember the articles basically saying Yahoo's operations were worth negative money?)
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    >it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history I wouldn't think of HP or post-Gates Microsoft as very good examples of how to run a publicly-traded tech firm.
    - jyrkesh 9y ago
neilk 9y ago
You may think it was MM's primary job to sell Yahoo for parts, but I don't think she did. Look at the initiatives into media, big-bet acquisitions, reinvestment in search. I think it's clear she was trying to reinvent Yahoo, and that's the story she told the board. She even did a rebrand right away, a rather dubious logo designed by her and some associates over a weekend. I was optimistic when she came on board, because Yahoo really needed a strong product vision and someone who had a touch of ruthlessness. But maybe it was unsalvageable.
- wolco 9y ago
  Yahoo did need a visionary but if you look at her bio on wikipedia it tells a different story. It mentions she is known for her attention to detail and she is a usability leader. She joined google as employee #20 after school. She was involved in many important google projects over the span of her career at google overseeing core key project in many cases. Very well rounded person. To me that sounds like the wrong person to bet my money on. The employee who plays it safe is not right person to transform a dying company that needed radical change. You need a bolder person. Someone with a burning passion or an act to grind. If you are google employee 20 and you haven't cashed out to build something you always wanted to but didn't have the resources yet I don't think I want you leading the transformation process. I would rather have employee 21 who quit and tried something else and failed.
  - neilk 9y ago
    This may be the purest distillation of Hacker News brogrammerism I've ever read. By her own words, she thought Google had a 2% chance of success. Is that not enough risk for one life? http://fortune.com/2011/10/03/marissa-mayer-i-thought-google-had-a-2-chance-of-success/ http://fortune.com/2011/10/03/marissa-mayer-i-thought-google... Also, her experience running hundreds of projects and experiments at another billion dollar tech company is exactly what they wanted. Not whether she does all-nighters and knows Rails. I'm not going to argue that the Yahoo board made the right choice, but you would definitely have made the wrong choice.
    - 9y ago
macspoofing 9y ago
>IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female. Who said that? The non-existent, hypothetical people?
- rhizome 9y ago
  The funny part about your pushback is that Mayer is pretty much identical in behavior to any number of other male CEOs who have received golden parachutes without comment. There's literally nothing she's receiving that others haven't before. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-golden-parachutes/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-golden-parachutes/
  - exelius 9y ago
    Exactly. Trot out the old argument "If we didn't pay that, we couldn't find qualified candidates!" Yahoo had to hire her away from a senior leadership position at Google. She was young, sure, but she was definitely qualified.
    - fjdlwlv 9y ago
      Yahoo hired her after she got demoted from senior leadership at Google. They got her on her way down, and vice versa.
  - acqq 9y ago
    Even more interesting: http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-net-worth-salary/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-ne... "Marissa Mayer's replacement as CEO of Yahoo, Thomas McInerney, will get paid twice as much as she did—for a job basically doing nothing." "After all, the company that McInerney will run will not be an operating business like the one Yahoo is today, but rather an investment company not all that different from a mutual fund." "In short, McInerney is getting paid a huge amount to sit atop a fund that basically runs itself. The way Yahoo describes McInerney's responsibilities in a filing Monday makes it sound like he will be little more than a glorified trustee, the way a retiree might occasionally check in on the status of the family nest egg."
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
debacle 9y ago
> she only got the job for being an attractive female. I've followed her role as CEO closely, and I don't think I've read that in a single article, out of the 40+ that I've read over the last few years.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Qub3d 9y ago

I am of the opinion that Ms. Mayer was hired partly as a way for Yahoo's investors to hedge their bets [1]. Its a bit of a dark view on silicon valley culture, perhaps, but I think a valid one. Anyways, I agree with your point that Yahoo had already suffered most of its damage. In many ways, its latest CEO did the best that could be expected of anyone in that position. [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

jonknee 9y ago

> I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo. If that was the case she never would have been given the job. That's something any old bean counter could do and they wouldn't require hundreds of millions of dollars for the babysitting job. She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?). Some examples: * Tumblr - $1.1b with the majority of that later written off because they have only figured out how to keep losing money * Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google * Summly - $30m to a teenager for a news app that was shut down and never heard of again

MekaiGS 9y ago
To be fair Summly became Yahoo news digest so it wasn't a complete write off.
- redmaverick 9y ago
  So here is what Yahoo did: It "aqui-hired" a team of people, led by a 17-year-old living in London, that cannot claim to have invented a cool technology OR to have built a cool app. Yahoo does own the technology SRI invented for Summly, but it doesn't own SRI, so it hasn't acquired the team that can scale the technology for Yahoo.
exelius 9y ago
> She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?). Well, it's no small thing to divest a big chunk of equity like that without crushing the value. There are a few ways you can do it, but you need someone empowered to actually execute on it for the board. That's the CEO's job. She did a good job in that. And yeah, she made some bad acquisitions. But most of these types of acquisitions fail (it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history) and the losses on those acquisitions were more than made up for by the additional amount she was able to get for the combined Alibaba + Yahoo. She basically ended up spinning off the entire value of the Alibaba stake plus $4.5 billion -- which is about $5 billion ahead of where the company was at when she started (remember the articles basically saying Yahoo's operations were worth negative money?)
- smitherfield 9y ago
  >it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history I wouldn't think of HP or post-Gates Microsoft as very good examples of how to run a publicly-traded tech firm.
  - jyrkesh 9y ago

neilk 9y ago

You may think it was MM's primary job to sell Yahoo for parts, but I don't think she did. Look at the initiatives into media, big-bet acquisitions, reinvestment in search. I think it's clear she was trying to reinvent Yahoo, and that's the story she told the board. She even did a rebrand right away, a rather dubious logo designed by her and some associates over a weekend. I was optimistic when she came on board, because Yahoo really needed a strong product vision and someone who had a touch of ruthlessness. But maybe it was unsalvageable.

wolco 9y ago
Yahoo did need a visionary but if you look at her bio on wikipedia it tells a different story. It mentions she is known for her attention to detail and she is a usability leader. She joined google as employee #20 after school. She was involved in many important google projects over the span of her career at google overseeing core key project in many cases. Very well rounded person. To me that sounds like the wrong person to bet my money on. The employee who plays it safe is not right person to transform a dying company that needed radical change. You need a bolder person. Someone with a burning passion or an act to grind. If you are google employee 20 and you haven't cashed out to build something you always wanted to but didn't have the resources yet I don't think I want you leading the transformation process. I would rather have employee 21 who quit and tried something else and failed.
- neilk 9y ago
  This may be the purest distillation of Hacker News brogrammerism I've ever read. By her own words, she thought Google had a 2% chance of success. Is that not enough risk for one life? http://fortune.com/2011/10/03/marissa-mayer-i-thought-google-had-a-2-chance-of-success/ http://fortune.com/2011/10/03/marissa-mayer-i-thought-google... Also, her experience running hundreds of projects and experiments at another billion dollar tech company is exactly what they wanted. Not whether she does all-nighters and knows Rails. I'm not going to argue that the Yahoo board made the right choice, but you would definitely have made the wrong choice.
  - 9y ago

macspoofing 9y ago

>IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female. Who said that? The non-existent, hypothetical people?

rhizome 9y ago
The funny part about your pushback is that Mayer is pretty much identical in behavior to any number of other male CEOs who have received golden parachutes without comment. There's literally nothing she's receiving that others haven't before. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-golden-parachutes/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-golden-parachutes/
- exelius 9y ago
  Exactly. Trot out the old argument "If we didn't pay that, we couldn't find qualified candidates!" Yahoo had to hire her away from a senior leadership position at Google. She was young, sure, but she was definitely qualified.
  - fjdlwlv 9y ago
    Yahoo hired her after she got demoted from senior leadership at Google. They got her on her way down, and vice versa.
- acqq 9y ago
  Even more interesting: http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-net-worth-salary/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-ne... "Marissa Mayer's replacement as CEO of Yahoo, Thomas McInerney, will get paid twice as much as she did—for a job basically doing nothing." "After all, the company that McInerney will run will not be an operating business like the one Yahoo is today, but rather an investment company not all that different from a mutual fund." "In short, McInerney is getting paid a huge amount to sit atop a fund that basically runs itself. The way Yahoo describes McInerney's responsibilities in a filing Monday makes it sound like he will be little more than a glorified trustee, the way a retiree might occasionally check in on the status of the family nest egg."

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

debacle 9y ago

> she only got the job for being an attractive female. I've followed her role as CEO closely, and I don't think I've read that in a single article, out of the 40+ that I've read over the last few years.