7 ms·

I'm not talking about money or reputation. The risk I see is time and opportunity. She could spend a maddening four years not moving the needle at Yahoo rather

by jbyers 14y ago

I'm not talking about money or reputation. The risk I see is time and opportunity. She could spend a maddening four years not moving the needle at Yahoo rather than another company or a startup of her own. Four years of punishing travel, endless meetings, unending Wall Street scrutiny. That risk.

TylerE 14y ago
Did you seriously just compare the CEO position at Yahoo to a _start-up_? To think the two are even in the same zip code, much less the same ballpark, is just, well it reflects a rather isolated viewpoint, put it that way. Yahoo is a $19B corporation.
- jbyers 14y ago
  Corrected. Poor phrasing on my part. I was suggesting a likely alternative for her would be starting a company, not that Yahoo is anything like a startup.
  - TylerE 14y ago
    No, that's exactly how I took it. Oblig car metaphor: That's like saying hey, as an alternative to a free Lamborghini Aventador, you can have an old Pontiac Fiero chassis, and a Chevy 350 with a blown head gasket. If you're really lucky and amazing you might make something worth 1/10th what the Lamborghini is.
    - debacle 14y ago
      No one I've talked to who works at Yahoo would compare it favorably to a Lamborghini.
      - Retric 14y ago
        Except as CEO she would probably make enough to buy a new Lamborghini every week. People rarely talk about opportunity costs but if you can make more than 10 million a year spending 5 years building a company from scratch to see a 30 million exit is a Failure. And doing better than that is ridiculously rare.
    - falicon 14y ago
      Well in this case it's an original Lamborghini, but it was in a horrible wreck and has been sitting at the bottom of the sea for about ten years... So you can dredge it up, and perhaps restore it to it's original glory...or you can go out and build your own, new dream car from scratch. Either way it's going to be a TON of work to get to a truly valuable (and fun to drive) vehicle...
      - chrischen 14y ago
        Also even if you restore the Lamborghini you will own way less than 30% of it.
        jarek 14y ago
        I'm not sure the analogy stretches quite that far. Do you really care how many percent you own if you can drive it whenever you like and modify it however you please?
      - lukeschlather 14y ago
        Car metaphors are tempting, but Yahoo vs. a startup is more like the difference between fixing up a rusty EOL aircraft carrier and building a sailboat.
    - gfosco 14y ago
      The appropriate analogy would not be a free Lamborghini, but the chance to drive one (with 2 bad tires) for a while. Or, go buy/build your own car and own it. I think it's a great move, and Google is probably in favor of it.
    - kfury 14y ago
      The flaw with this analogy isn't likening Yahoo! to a Lamborghini. It's saying that startups are all the same, regardless of who's starting them. If Elon Musk and a new Stanford grad started brand new companies on the same day, would both companies be old busted cars with blown head gaskets? Also, the metaphor is a bit flawed by likening the 17-year-old floundering company to a new sports car and a hypothetical new company as something that's already worthless because of wear and tear.
    - temphn 14y ago
      Not really a good metaphor. Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and many more entrepreneurs chose to start a second company rather than take a C level job somewhere else. A better analogy is whether to adapt an off the shelf piece of code to scratch your itch (often a reasonable choice) or to write your own from scratch, clean slate. The latter is much more risky, but that fits a certain personality.
      - FrojoS 14y ago
        Exactly. With her connections, knowledge and wealth she might be able to build an amazing company from scratch.
        kamaal 14y ago
        Not exactly, Building a successful company is not a joke even if you have knowledge and connections. Users don't value what and whom you know. At her level and for all she has done, getting to be the CEO of a billion dollar firm is actually a great deal. Looking at it from other way around, Her career at Google might have probably come to a halt given the fact that Larry and Sergey are going to be there around for a long time to come. On the other hand, she could not be the CEO of a successful firm- Because such stints demand prior experience. In short the change she got now is because, the company is currently a underdog. No big CEO who is already on a wave of success will take up that kind of a job. She needs the company because she gets to be the CEO and nobody else would offer her the same position. In many ways this is a no brainer.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - sriram_sun 14y ago
        All these people were Founders. Employee No. 19 <> Employee No. 1 <> Founder. Mayer was not a founder. It's probably easier to rationalize going from employee to CEO than founder to employee even if that employee happens to be CEO. Having said that, I realize most companies get acquired and most founders probably end up as employees anyway.
    - benatkin 14y ago
      > Oblig Please spare us the silly abbreviations.
    - Aramgutang 14y ago
      You would think that at Hacker News, car analogies would not be necessary, since I imagine there is a large proportion of users like myself who have no interest in cars, and have never owned nor intend to own one. I have no idea how a Pontiac Fiero or a Chevy 350 compares to a Lamborghini Aventator without looking it up. All I know is that all three are probably luxury automobiles. I have even less of clue about what a head gasket might be. On the other hand, if you tried to explain something to me by using a job at Google, Yahoo, and a start-up as analogies, it would definitely help make things more understandable.
      - entropy_ 14y ago
        Well, only the Lamborghini is a luxury car(unless you consider all cars a luxury but that would be a different discussion). Otherwise, I fully agree with your point. I like cars and had no clue what, exactly, the Pontiac Fiero or the Chevy 350 were as I'm not American and those are American cars. Around here German(Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW) and Japanese(Mazda, Subary, Toyota, ...) cars are much much more common.
        TylerE 14y ago
        Fiero: Pontiac's great experiment at making a European style sports car. A real _proper_ sports car: Mid-engined, rear wheel drive. Except, because most most of the parts were from other GM vehicles, it was mostly shite. Still - very popular with kit car/replicar builders because they made quite a few of them (~350,000) and they're cheap as donor cars. Chevy 350: Basically a commodity engine. 5.7L pushrod V-8. Used in lots of GM vehicles from the late 60s through the early 90s. Camaros, Corvettes, Cadiallacs etc. Built tough, cheap, and there are a gazillion aftermarket parts available.
        entropy_ 14y ago
        I've always found it weird how different engine sizes are in American cars as opposed to everything else. Unless you were going for a race car or something it's quite uncommon to have a 5.7L engine in anything but an American car.
  - ttran4 14y ago
    Yahoo = Major Leagues , Starting your own start up = Minors
    - TheSOB88 14y ago
      Wow, has HN been taken over by business types already? Don't you think Mayer has enough capital, connections, reputation, experience, etc. that if she started a company to do what she wanted, how she wanted, it would be completely different from your average college-grad startup? I mean, come on now. There's no comparing the two.
- coreygoodie 14y ago
  Agreed. I understand there's a hacker mentality here, but who would really pass up the CEO at an established behemoth like Yahoo to take the reigns of an unproven (or found) startup?
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    Me. I'm not qualified to be the CEO of Yahoo, so I would only be setting myself up for failure if I took the job. But running a smaller company limits the amount of harm I can do to myself and others while I learn the ropes. The only reason to expect Mayer to do well as the CEO of Yahoo would be if her work at Google were similar to that job in some respect. I'm not sure it is.
mmakunas 14y ago
True, but Yahoo! has made so many mistakes that she would have to really to screw up (like lie on your resume) for it to hurt her reputation. So that time and opportunity cost is unlikely to ever be a waste. If she fails, well Yahoo! was already a failure, if she succeeds, she's a perceived as savior. Either way, she's a contenter for ceo of any other major internet company going forward.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  I see it as the wrestling with a pig problem. If you wrestle with a pig, both of you get dirty, and the pig enjoys it. Meyer's a superstar right now. Yahoo's had an anti-Midas touch on several people who've attempted to steer it right.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    Actually, your metaphor and the pattern of ruining hopefuls fits a pattern from Greek Mythology. (Other tough guys try to capture/defeat/kill a fearsome monster, but Hercules shows he's an uber-stud by finally doing it) So Yahoo's now the Erymanthian boar?
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      I see it more as an Augean stables. Time to divert Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River. But I think the stench is stronger than them.
  - PakG1 14y ago
    I really don't understand why people are saying she won't get a reputation hit from this if she fails. Every other CEO trying to steer Yahoo right so far in recent history has a black eye and had to leave in relative disgrace. None of them had the superstar status that she has right now, but the fact is, none of them were allowed the conclusion "well, Yahoo was just too screwed up anyway". I'm not convinced that she'll be able to escape getting a black eye if she also fails. People are harsh on Yahoo CEOs. The deck is stacked against them in so many ways.

by jbyers 14y ago

TylerE 14y ago

Did you seriously just compare the CEO position at Yahoo to a _start-up_? To think the two are even in the same zip code, much less the same ballpark, is just, well it reflects a rather isolated viewpoint, put it that way. Yahoo is a $19B corporation.

jbyers 14y ago
Corrected. Poor phrasing on my part. I was suggesting a likely alternative for her would be starting a company, not that Yahoo is anything like a startup.
- TylerE 14y ago
  No, that's exactly how I took it. Oblig car metaphor: That's like saying hey, as an alternative to a free Lamborghini Aventador, you can have an old Pontiac Fiero chassis, and a Chevy 350 with a blown head gasket. If you're really lucky and amazing you might make something worth 1/10th what the Lamborghini is.
  - debacle 14y ago
    No one I've talked to who works at Yahoo would compare it favorably to a Lamborghini.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Except as CEO she would probably make enough to buy a new Lamborghini every week. People rarely talk about opportunity costs but if you can make more than 10 million a year spending 5 years building a company from scratch to see a 30 million exit is a Failure. And doing better than that is ridiculously rare.
  - falicon 14y ago
    Well in this case it's an original Lamborghini, but it was in a horrible wreck and has been sitting at the bottom of the sea for about ten years... So you can dredge it up, and perhaps restore it to it's original glory...or you can go out and build your own, new dream car from scratch. Either way it's going to be a TON of work to get to a truly valuable (and fun to drive) vehicle...
    - chrischen 14y ago
      Also even if you restore the Lamborghini you will own way less than 30% of it.
      - jarek 14y ago
        I'm not sure the analogy stretches quite that far. Do you really care how many percent you own if you can drive it whenever you like and modify it however you please?
    - lukeschlather 14y ago
      Car metaphors are tempting, but Yahoo vs. a startup is more like the difference between fixing up a rusty EOL aircraft carrier and building a sailboat.
  - gfosco 14y ago
    The appropriate analogy would not be a free Lamborghini, but the chance to drive one (with 2 bad tires) for a while. Or, go buy/build your own car and own it. I think it's a great move, and Google is probably in favor of it.
  - kfury 14y ago
    The flaw with this analogy isn't likening Yahoo! to a Lamborghini. It's saying that startups are all the same, regardless of who's starting them. If Elon Musk and a new Stanford grad started brand new companies on the same day, would both companies be old busted cars with blown head gaskets? Also, the metaphor is a bit flawed by likening the 17-year-old floundering company to a new sports car and a hypothetical new company as something that's already worthless because of wear and tear.
  - temphn 14y ago
    Not really a good metaphor. Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and many more entrepreneurs chose to start a second company rather than take a C level job somewhere else. A better analogy is whether to adapt an off the shelf piece of code to scratch your itch (often a reasonable choice) or to write your own from scratch, clean slate. The latter is much more risky, but that fits a certain personality.
    - FrojoS 14y ago
      Exactly. With her connections, knowledge and wealth she might be able to build an amazing company from scratch.
      - kamaal 14y ago
        Not exactly, Building a successful company is not a joke even if you have knowledge and connections. Users don't value what and whom you know. At her level and for all she has done, getting to be the CEO of a billion dollar firm is actually a great deal. Looking at it from other way around, Her career at Google might have probably come to a halt given the fact that Larry and Sergey are going to be there around for a long time to come. On the other hand, she could not be the CEO of a successful firm- Because such stints demand prior experience. In short the change she got now is because, the company is currently a underdog. No big CEO who is already on a wave of success will take up that kind of a job. She needs the company because she gets to be the CEO and nobody else would offer her the same position. In many ways this is a no brainer.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - sriram_sun 14y ago
      All these people were Founders. Employee No. 19 <> Employee No. 1 <> Founder. Mayer was not a founder. It's probably easier to rationalize going from employee to CEO than founder to employee even if that employee happens to be CEO. Having said that, I realize most companies get acquired and most founders probably end up as employees anyway.
  - benatkin 14y ago
    > Oblig Please spare us the silly abbreviations.
  - Aramgutang 14y ago
    You would think that at Hacker News, car analogies would not be necessary, since I imagine there is a large proportion of users like myself who have no interest in cars, and have never owned nor intend to own one. I have no idea how a Pontiac Fiero or a Chevy 350 compares to a Lamborghini Aventator without looking it up. All I know is that all three are probably luxury automobiles. I have even less of clue about what a head gasket might be. On the other hand, if you tried to explain something to me by using a job at Google, Yahoo, and a start-up as analogies, it would definitely help make things more understandable.
    - entropy_ 14y ago
      Well, only the Lamborghini is a luxury car(unless you consider all cars a luxury but that would be a different discussion). Otherwise, I fully agree with your point. I like cars and had no clue what, exactly, the Pontiac Fiero or the Chevy 350 were as I'm not American and those are American cars. Around here German(Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW) and Japanese(Mazda, Subary, Toyota, ...) cars are much much more common.
      - TylerE 14y ago
        Fiero: Pontiac's great experiment at making a European style sports car. A real _proper_ sports car: Mid-engined, rear wheel drive. Except, because most most of the parts were from other GM vehicles, it was mostly shite. Still - very popular with kit car/replicar builders because they made quite a few of them (~350,000) and they're cheap as donor cars. Chevy 350: Basically a commodity engine. 5.7L pushrod V-8. Used in lots of GM vehicles from the late 60s through the early 90s. Camaros, Corvettes, Cadiallacs etc. Built tough, cheap, and there are a gazillion aftermarket parts available.
        entropy_ 14y ago
        I've always found it weird how different engine sizes are in American cars as opposed to everything else. Unless you were going for a race car or something it's quite uncommon to have a 5.7L engine in anything but an American car.
- ttran4 14y ago
  Yahoo = Major Leagues , Starting your own start up = Minors
  - TheSOB88 14y ago
    Wow, has HN been taken over by business types already? Don't you think Mayer has enough capital, connections, reputation, experience, etc. that if she started a company to do what she wanted, how she wanted, it would be completely different from your average college-grad startup? I mean, come on now. There's no comparing the two.
coreygoodie 14y ago
Agreed. I understand there's a hacker mentality here, but who would really pass up the CEO at an established behemoth like Yahoo to take the reigns of an unproven (or found) startup?
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Me. I'm not qualified to be the CEO of Yahoo, so I would only be setting myself up for failure if I took the job. But running a smaller company limits the amount of harm I can do to myself and others while I learn the ropes. The only reason to expect Mayer to do well as the CEO of Yahoo would be if her work at Google were similar to that job in some respect. I'm not sure it is.

mmakunas 14y ago

True, but Yahoo! has made so many mistakes that she would have to really to screw up (like lie on your resume) for it to hurt her reputation. So that time and opportunity cost is unlikely to ever be a waste. If she fails, well Yahoo! was already a failure, if she succeeds, she's a perceived as savior. Either way, she's a contenter for ceo of any other major internet company going forward.

dredmorbius 14y ago
I see it as the wrestling with a pig problem. If you wrestle with a pig, both of you get dirty, and the pig enjoys it. Meyer's a superstar right now. Yahoo's had an anti-Midas touch on several people who've attempted to steer it right.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  Actually, your metaphor and the pattern of ruining hopefuls fits a pattern from Greek Mythology. (Other tough guys try to capture/defeat/kill a fearsome monster, but Hercules shows he's an uber-stud by finally doing it) So Yahoo's now the Erymanthian boar?
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    I see it more as an Augean stables. Time to divert Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River. But I think the stench is stronger than them.
- PakG1 14y ago
  I really don't understand why people are saying she won't get a reputation hit from this if she fails. Every other CEO trying to steer Yahoo right so far in recent history has a black eye and had to leave in relative disgrace. None of them had the superstar status that she has right now, but the fact is, none of them were allowed the conclusion "well, Yahoo was just too screwed up anyway". I'm not convinced that she'll be able to escape getting a black eye if she also fails. People are harsh on Yahoo CEOs. The deck is stacked against them in so many ways.