10 ms·

In my book, the unsurpassed champion is Marissa Mayer. She was a product manager at early Google who dated Sergey and was promoted to VP. One of her accomplishm

In my book, the unsurpassed champion is Marissa Mayer. She was a product manager at early Google who dated Sergey and was promoted to VP. One of her accomplishments at Google was choosing the palette for the Google logo using a data-driven process. Based off of this success, she was made the CEO of Yahoo!, which she promptly proceeded to drive into the ground.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
Now now, let's not understate the accomplishments of Elizabeth Holmes.
- quantified 4y ago
  Any league table of contenders would be a social third rail. Kind of an anti-"hot or not"/original Facebook focused on business aspects, profile pictures banned. Super bad idea, don't do it.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    I honestly can't tell if you're serious or concern trolling...
- brewdad 4y ago
  Will she get to wear her black turtleneck in prison?
  - layer8 4y ago
    Orange is the new black.
peter422 4y ago
Yes when she took the job the stock was at $15 and sold it for $40. Granted much of the appreciation had nothing to do with Yahoo but I'm sure a worse executive would have messed up the Alibaba situation. She took a dying company, tried a couple of home run ideas which flopped and then effectively returned what value was left to the shareholders. There is no reason to think that Yahoo would have performed any better under another CEO.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  No reason to think it would be better under another CEO? She drove Yahoo into the ground with incredibly useless ideas like a new weather app that made them no money. Basically everything she tried completely flopped and she tanked the value of the company. What are you even talking about?
  - peter422 4y ago
    Imagine if another CEO took all the proceeds from the Alibaba stock and blew it trying to make a dying company relevant again. That would have been much, much worse. Also the value of the company is the stock. She didn't tank it, it went up.
  - infamouscow 4y ago
    I think the metric you're using for success is different than what Yahoo's shareholders are using. The CEO of a publicly traded company is responsible for carrying out the goals set by the board, which represent the whims of the owners of the company. Typically that means balancing many factors. If the owners of the company care about features and competing, they will set goals accordingly. If the owners feel like maximizing profit for an expedient exit, they will set goals aligned with that.
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    Tell me you're completely unfamiliar with all of the terrible CEOs Yahoo had before Mayer without telling me you're completely unfamiliar with all of the terrible Yahoo CEOS. She inherited an absolutely untenable situation and yes, she failed, but given the atrocious track records of the previous five CEOs, she absolutely didn't do any worse and yes, she did at least get the company through the Alibaba IPO so that shareholders got that value. Let's look at the tenure of her predecessors: * Jerry Yang: Founder who told Microsoft to fuck off when they offered $45b for a company that was in no way worth that. At least Microsoft didn't get saddled with that shit. Yang also managed to flub the entire Web 2.0 boom despite Yahoo being primely suited for that (and buying early Web 2.0 darlings like Flickr). A year after Yang rebuffed the deal, Yahoo's stock was 60% lower than Microsoft's offer. Truly, this is one of the worst CEO moves in history. Oh, he also turned down a deal to sell the search business for $20b. * Carol Bartz: Came from Autodesk and had no idea what a consumer web company was like, traded in Yahoo's search stuff (and search deals) for Microsoft's stack (the same Microsoft that had offered to buy Yahoo's search business for $20b just six months earlier) but for very little upfront money and for a deal that was at the high level, only valued at $500m in revenue a year over ten years (which if you do the math, is half of what Microsoft had offered for the search business six months earlier). Didn't understand consumer products at all and let Mail, Flickr and the other acquisitions languish. * Tim Morse - CFO who served as interim CEO while they found the next replacement. He tried unsuccessfully to sell Yahoo's ad business to Google or Microsoft. * Scott Thompson - This joker was the OG George Santos, who got caught lying about his education on his resume (which, bro, you're trying to be CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, don't do this) and was fired in one of the most humiliating ways that I can ever recall seeing. He lasted 5 months and didn't achieve anything but making an embarrassment of himself and laying off 15% of the staff. Oh, and he sued Facebook over that ridiculous patent thing. * Ross Levinsohn - The interim CEO who REALLY wanted the job for keeps but was just keeping the seat warm while the board did the executive search. He didn't do anything wrong per se, but there was a reason he wasn't chosen as CEO. He was a media guy, not a tech guy, and wouldn't have known how to handle what was still ostensibly a tech company. He later went on to lead a bunch of very bad (from a business perspective) media companies, most notably tronc. He's now head of a company that buys once-proud media brands that it licenses out for every dollar it can, killing the legacy and value of those brands along the way. That's who you were looking at before. Was Marissa successful? Absolutely not. Yahoo spent a lot of money and made a lot of big swings but ultimately came up short. But at least she tried. At least she tried to invest in things like email, search, and content, areas that had the previous five leaders (I guess four is more fair, Ross didn't have a chance to do anything) focused on, the company might not have been in that position. She also managed to keep things afloat and working so that the Alibaba IPO and Yahoo's stake in that could come to fruition. Given the caliber of the people who led the company before that and the shareholder activism and lawsuits happening before and during her tenure, she did probably as good as anyone in that situation could do. The bottom line is that Yahoo was not a company that could be saved and she took on an impossible mission, but at least she tried. Yahoo's death warrant was signed in 2008 when Jerry Yang told Steve Ballmer to go fuck himself because he didn't consider $45b a high enough valuation for Yahoo (even tho the price offered per share was a significant premium over Yahoo at the time), mere weeks before Bear Stearns collapsed and the global financial crisis took hold (a position he continued to stick to for months, even when it was clear that the global economy in general was in big trouble).
nugget 4y ago
Carol Bartz was the one who decided to divest search to Microsoft. Even preceding Carol, there was an attitude among the executives at Yahoo that search was not "strategic" and as a result they jumped from one shiny new object to the next, never realizing the treasure chest was underneath them the whole time.
jasmer 4y ago
I suggest this is sexism here - and I'm generally the last person to call that kind of thing out, usually assuming goodwill. Specifically for implying that someone traded sex for a promotion, unless you have some legit data there. Marissa was a very early person at Google, and contributed to a lot of things [1]. Obviously a Wikipedia entry is going to be hagiographic, and some early players are going to be better than others, but there's no reason to believe she wasn't at least on the same playing field as many of the other early landing big names. And she has nothing acutely toxic or myopic on her record. She was hired by the board of Yahoo to mostly do what she did. FYI Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with someone in power who appointed her to positions she was not remotely qualified for, that's an example wherein the unseemly facts are just a bit too real for polite conversation. But I suggest when one wants to throw such tawdry things around, one should not be making arbitrary claims. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
- metadat 4y ago
  Great new (to me) word: Hagiographic Definition: Excessively flattering
  - mwest217 4y ago
    The origin adds additional color here - hagiography is writing about the lives of saints. So the adjectival form just means that it's portraying someone as (perhaps excessively) saintly.
  - hodgesrm 4y ago
    Hagiography is literally writing about the lives of saints: a sturdy addition to any writer's vocabulary. To avoid overuse there are also fine synonyms like panegyric (defined as "elaborate praise" in the OED) and encomium.
- quantified 4y ago
  Dating isn't sex. Just "super close, possibly hormone-addled friendship" is enough.
- 4y ago
Alupis 4y ago
Is there a reasonable assumption Yahoo! was even salvageable by time Mayer took the reigns? From the outside looking in, it appeared Yahoo! was a ghost ship, sailing under previously established momentum with no wind in the sails. Piecemealing Yahoo! out Gordon Gekko style might have been the only realistic future to save groups/units that could operate without the mothership, so to speak. The spending/acquisition spree Mayer went on... I'm not certain what to make of that, however.
ceejayoz 4y ago
> One of her accomplishments at Google was choosing the palette for the Google logo using a data-driven process. This is a really disingenuous way of framing her work at Google.
olliej 4y ago
Gosh, early employees/founder dated, and that early employee somehow ended up highly ranked. The only possibility is sexing her way to the top. Every knows early employees never go far up the ranks. By all accounts she did quite a bit more than just "choosing the colors" at google, but as we all know only guys can do real work. And then she came into the hugely profitable, exponentially growing yahoo, and turned it into a failure. Yahoo! absolutely was not an already failing business that bought Meyer in solely because the were trying to find some external person who would try different things to turn it around. JFC.
agilob 4y ago
Don't forget that she not only ruined Yahoo, but also companies that Yahoo acquired like Tumblr. >On May 20, 2013, Mayer led Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition.[53][54] In February 2016, Yahoo! acknowledged that the value of Tumblr had fallen by $230 million since it was acquire She also covered up Yahoo hack, that was one of the biggest in history: >U.S. Charges Russian FSB Officers and Their Criminal Conspirators for Hacking Yahoo and Millions of Email Accounts Not easy to achieve that much on a single CEO position, without being forced out from a company
yongjik 4y ago
That's a very uncharitable take. By the time Mayer took over Yahoo, it was already a sinking ship and had been so for a few years. It would have taken extraordinary leadership (and a lot of luck) to turn it around. Turned out Mayer couldn't, but that doesn't necessarily make her a bad leader.
jonathankoren 4y ago
Yahoo was on its way out even before Mayer took over. No one was going stop it. Her Y! tenure is textbook glass cliff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
vkou 4y ago
Yahoo! was in free-fall long before MM.
Stratoscope 4y ago
I had a Marissa review once. She wanted a color and a font changed. I was actually grateful that was all she wanted, because it gave me more time to get the features done!
chrismcb 4y ago
What was the data driven process? "Let me see what colors our competitors use?"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

Now now, let's not understate the accomplishments of Elizabeth Holmes.

quantified 4y ago
Any league table of contenders would be a social third rail. Kind of an anti-"hot or not"/original Facebook focused on business aspects, profile pictures banned. Super bad idea, don't do it.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you're serious or concern trolling...
brewdad 4y ago
Will she get to wear her black turtleneck in prison?
- layer8 4y ago
  Orange is the new black.

peter422 4y ago

Yes when she took the job the stock was at $15 and sold it for $40. Granted much of the appreciation had nothing to do with Yahoo but I'm sure a worse executive would have messed up the Alibaba situation. She took a dying company, tried a couple of home run ideas which flopped and then effectively returned what value was left to the shareholders. There is no reason to think that Yahoo would have performed any better under another CEO.

DoesntMatter22 4y ago
No reason to think it would be better under another CEO? She drove Yahoo into the ground with incredibly useless ideas like a new weather app that made them no money. Basically everything she tried completely flopped and she tanked the value of the company. What are you even talking about?
- peter422 4y ago
  Imagine if another CEO took all the proceeds from the Alibaba stock and blew it trying to make a dying company relevant again. That would have been much, much worse. Also the value of the company is the stock. She didn't tank it, it went up.
- infamouscow 4y ago
  I think the metric you're using for success is different than what Yahoo's shareholders are using. The CEO of a publicly traded company is responsible for carrying out the goals set by the board, which represent the whims of the owners of the company. Typically that means balancing many factors. If the owners of the company care about features and competing, they will set goals accordingly. If the owners feel like maximizing profit for an expedient exit, they will set goals aligned with that.
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  Tell me you're completely unfamiliar with all of the terrible CEOs Yahoo had before Mayer without telling me you're completely unfamiliar with all of the terrible Yahoo CEOS. She inherited an absolutely untenable situation and yes, she failed, but given the atrocious track records of the previous five CEOs, she absolutely didn't do any worse and yes, she did at least get the company through the Alibaba IPO so that shareholders got that value. Let's look at the tenure of her predecessors: * Jerry Yang: Founder who told Microsoft to fuck off when they offered $45b for a company that was in no way worth that. At least Microsoft didn't get saddled with that shit. Yang also managed to flub the entire Web 2.0 boom despite Yahoo being primely suited for that (and buying early Web 2.0 darlings like Flickr). A year after Yang rebuffed the deal, Yahoo's stock was 60% lower than Microsoft's offer. Truly, this is one of the worst CEO moves in history. Oh, he also turned down a deal to sell the search business for $20b. * Carol Bartz: Came from Autodesk and had no idea what a consumer web company was like, traded in Yahoo's search stuff (and search deals) for Microsoft's stack (the same Microsoft that had offered to buy Yahoo's search business for $20b just six months earlier) but for very little upfront money and for a deal that was at the high level, only valued at $500m in revenue a year over ten years (which if you do the math, is half of what Microsoft had offered for the search business six months earlier). Didn't understand consumer products at all and let Mail, Flickr and the other acquisitions languish. * Tim Morse - CFO who served as interim CEO while they found the next replacement. He tried unsuccessfully to sell Yahoo's ad business to Google or Microsoft. * Scott Thompson - This joker was the OG George Santos, who got caught lying about his education on his resume (which, bro, you're trying to be CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, don't do this) and was fired in one of the most humiliating ways that I can ever recall seeing. He lasted 5 months and didn't achieve anything but making an embarrassment of himself and laying off 15% of the staff. Oh, and he sued Facebook over that ridiculous patent thing. * Ross Levinsohn - The interim CEO who REALLY wanted the job for keeps but was just keeping the seat warm while the board did the executive search. He didn't do anything wrong per se, but there was a reason he wasn't chosen as CEO. He was a media guy, not a tech guy, and wouldn't have known how to handle what was still ostensibly a tech company. He later went on to lead a bunch of very bad (from a business perspective) media companies, most notably tronc. He's now head of a company that buys once-proud media brands that it licenses out for every dollar it can, killing the legacy and value of those brands along the way. That's who you were looking at before. Was Marissa successful? Absolutely not. Yahoo spent a lot of money and made a lot of big swings but ultimately came up short. But at least she tried. At least she tried to invest in things like email, search, and content, areas that had the previous five leaders (I guess four is more fair, Ross didn't have a chance to do anything) focused on, the company might not have been in that position. She also managed to keep things afloat and working so that the Alibaba IPO and Yahoo's stake in that could come to fruition. Given the caliber of the people who led the company before that and the shareholder activism and lawsuits happening before and during her tenure, she did probably as good as anyone in that situation could do. The bottom line is that Yahoo was not a company that could be saved and she took on an impossible mission, but at least she tried. Yahoo's death warrant was signed in 2008 when Jerry Yang told Steve Ballmer to go fuck himself because he didn't consider $45b a high enough valuation for Yahoo (even tho the price offered per share was a significant premium over Yahoo at the time), mere weeks before Bear Stearns collapsed and the global financial crisis took hold (a position he continued to stick to for months, even when it was clear that the global economy in general was in big trouble).

nugget 4y ago

Carol Bartz was the one who decided to divest search to Microsoft. Even preceding Carol, there was an attitude among the executives at Yahoo that search was not "strategic" and as a result they jumped from one shiny new object to the next, never realizing the treasure chest was underneath them the whole time.

jasmer 4y ago

I suggest this is sexism here - and I'm generally the last person to call that kind of thing out, usually assuming goodwill. Specifically for implying that someone traded sex for a promotion, unless you have some legit data there. Marissa was a very early person at Google, and contributed to a lot of things [1]. Obviously a Wikipedia entry is going to be hagiographic, and some early players are going to be better than others, but there's no reason to believe she wasn't at least on the same playing field as many of the other early landing big names. And she has nothing acutely toxic or myopic on her record. She was hired by the board of Yahoo to mostly do what she did. FYI Kamala Harris had a romantic relationship with someone in power who appointed her to positions she was not remotely qualified for, that's an example wherein the unseemly facts are just a bit too real for polite conversation. But I suggest when one wants to throw such tawdry things around, one should not be making arbitrary claims. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer

metadat 4y ago
Great new (to me) word: Hagiographic Definition: Excessively flattering
- mwest217 4y ago
  The origin adds additional color here - hagiography is writing about the lives of saints. So the adjectival form just means that it's portraying someone as (perhaps excessively) saintly.
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  Hagiography is literally writing about the lives of saints: a sturdy addition to any writer's vocabulary. To avoid overuse there are also fine synonyms like panegyric (defined as "elaborate praise" in the OED) and encomium.
quantified 4y ago
Dating isn't sex. Just "super close, possibly hormone-addled friendship" is enough.
4y ago

Alupis 4y ago

Is there a reasonable assumption Yahoo! was even salvageable by time Mayer took the reigns? From the outside looking in, it appeared Yahoo! was a ghost ship, sailing under previously established momentum with no wind in the sails. Piecemealing Yahoo! out Gordon Gekko style might have been the only realistic future to save groups/units that could operate without the mothership, so to speak. The spending/acquisition spree Mayer went on... I'm not certain what to make of that, however.

ceejayoz 4y ago

> One of her accomplishments at Google was choosing the palette for the Google logo using a data-driven process. This is a really disingenuous way of framing her work at Google.

olliej 4y ago

Gosh, early employees/founder dated, and that early employee somehow ended up highly ranked. The only possibility is sexing her way to the top. Every knows early employees never go far up the ranks. By all accounts she did quite a bit more than just "choosing the colors" at google, but as we all know only guys can do real work. And then she came into the hugely profitable, exponentially growing yahoo, and turned it into a failure. Yahoo! absolutely was not an already failing business that bought Meyer in solely because the were trying to find some external person who would try different things to turn it around. JFC.

agilob 4y ago

Don't forget that she not only ruined Yahoo, but also companies that Yahoo acquired like Tumblr. >On May 20, 2013, Mayer led Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr in a $1.1 billion acquisition.[53][54] In February 2016, Yahoo! acknowledged that the value of Tumblr had fallen by $230 million since it was acquire She also covered up Yahoo hack, that was one of the biggest in history: >U.S. Charges Russian FSB Officers and Their Criminal Conspirators for Hacking Yahoo and Millions of Email Accounts Not easy to achieve that much on a single CEO position, without being forced out from a company

yongjik 4y ago

That's a very uncharitable take. By the time Mayer took over Yahoo, it was already a sinking ship and had been so for a few years. It would have taken extraordinary leadership (and a lot of luck) to turn it around. Turned out Mayer couldn't, but that doesn't necessarily make her a bad leader.

jonathankoren 4y ago

Yahoo was on its way out even before Mayer took over. No one was going stop it. Her Y! tenure is textbook glass cliff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

vkou 4y ago

Yahoo! was in free-fall long before MM.

Stratoscope 4y ago

I had a Marissa review once. She wanted a color and a font changed. I was actually grateful that was all she wanted, because it gave me more time to get the features done!

chrismcb 4y ago

What was the data driven process? "Let me see what colors our competitors use?"