8 ms·

Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography

134 points by neya 13y ago

od2m 13y ago
This article has very low information density.
- hga 13y ago
  Indeed. But it does have rather a lot of information. If you're interested in this, and e.g. Google history you might want to read it; I had to decide I couldn't justify the time and energy.
crazygringo 13y ago
This is 22,424 words long. Literally the length of a light book. (Even long-form journalism usually tops out at around 7-8,000 words.) Anyone got a TL;DR?
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
  TLDR: everything you need to know to predict how Marissa Mayer will run Yahoo. I would say that the article is very short. It's supposed to be a biography; those things are usually massive. It's a great condensation of a biography; just enough detail from the early years to get a sense of Marissa as a person and what guides her, the detail increasing through her Stanford and Google years to fill out her style and her strengths and weaknesses. And then a bunch of detail about why she was hunted and how, and on some of the pivotal actions she took at Yahoo (like the Tumblr acquisition and Mail redesign). It's long, but it's very much story telling so it reads well. If it was half the length it could contain the same amount of information but would be much harder to read. In many cases the best way to convey information is to tell a story.
af3 13y ago
print version?
- moondowner 13y ago
  I guess this will do it: http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fmarissa-mayer-biography-2013-8%3Fop%3D1 http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%...
- pavs 13y ago
  http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-...
jacquesm 13y ago
Buried in there this gem: "The first is that she would recreate the technological circumstances of her users in her own life. Mayer went without broadband for years in her home, refusing to install it until it was also installed in the majority of American homes. She carried an iPhone at Google, which makes Android phones, because so did most mobile Web users." edit: this one is funny: " As she spoke, two of the people seated near her typed away like crazy, trying to take verbatim notes in Google Docs." Yahoo using google docs for their email strategy :) Who is leaking to Kara Swisher? Having a leaky board member can be lethal. "She said that Tumblr was an excellent product — an amazing tool for self-expression. She noted that it was beating Facebook with younger consumers." Aha. Younger generation+mobile->tumbler acquisition. Funny how in the same breath that Yahoo acquires companies to shut them down they can state with a straight face the new way of doing this is to let them stay independent post acquisition.
- wdewind 13y ago
  > Funny how in the same breath that Yahoo acquires companies to shut them down they can state with a straight face the new way of doing this is to let them stay independent post acquisition. I don't think that's fair. There is a huge difference between acquiring a successful startup and letting them continue to be themselves, and acqui-hiring a failing startup and stripping it for parts. The point is tumblr isn't a repeat of flickr, delicious etc. Summly etc., are in a different category altogether, and it's not like they are being misled about what's going to happen when they are being acquired.
ahk 13y ago
The dollar numbers being talked about in the article are kind of stunning, for a website that dropped off my radar more than a decade ago. Who are all these people with all that much money and where are they getting it from??
- jacquesm 13y ago
  Yahoo is still the 4th largest internet property. It has more than half a billion unique visitors monthly.
- pavs 13y ago
  You are giving too much credit to your internet usage preference and its relation to a company being relevant and successful.
- mojuba 13y ago
  Similar sentiments here. Those numbers are likely to reflect something, but the fact that Yahoo is so irrelevant to geeks and highly self-aware Internet users is a good sign that their position is very unstable. Somehow reminds of Microsoft gradually sliding into irrelevance (while still generating some dollars) for geeks first, and then for everyone else.
jokoon 13y ago
Misleading title, does this article dig up some dirt about mayer or not, I don't get it. The title sounds like people have been lied to about Mayers, but what lies ?
techboots 13y ago
Anyone else find this line offensive & presumptious of the author? "Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesn’t look the part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and glamorous style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks."
krakensden 13y ago
Is it meaningful that everyone she didn't get along with at Google had a name from southern Asia?
- adharmad 13y ago
  Kamangar is from Iran
  - meepmorp 13y ago
    Which is in south(western) Asia.
- slurry 13y ago
  I noticed that too.
- jgalt212 13y ago
  Outside of the US/Western Europe, many men don't have the most enlightened view of women in the workplace. Perhaps this was her response to biases she rightly or wrongly perceived directly or indirectly.
andrewljohnson 13y ago
I would call this historical fiction, not a biography. The author says as much (after tens of thousands of words that almost no one will read all of). Quoting someone else, he writes: "As part of the narrative, I have included passages of dialogue. Dialogue— what words were said— is a fact like any other. It is not necessarily a quotation from an interview with me and I would discourage readers from inferring that one or both of the speakers is a direct source." The article ends up being overwhelmingly flattering, and subtly balances the flattery by bringing up and then dispelling muckety-muck from the news, with an insider POV. And of course no one has to vouch for a word of it.
- ISL 13y ago
  The disclaimer regarding dialogue may have belonged at the top of the article. I was surprised to find it at the end.
- wdewind 13y ago
  You left out the next sentence of that, which completely changes the meaning A person will often share thoughts about pivotal moments in their lives with a large group of people. The author meant you should not assume that because someone is quoted that they directly spoke to him. He got some quotes from public sources.
  - andrewljohnson 13y ago
    And of course you left out the weasel words thereafter: Readers should bear in mind that, given the vagaries of human memory, remembered dialogue is rarely the same as actual recordings and transcripts. At the same time, it is no more nor less accurate than many other recollections.
    - wdewind 13y ago
      Which means there are two types of quotes in this article: 1) Those which are public and on some kind of record and 2) Those which are recollection The quote you gave does not speak to 2, it speaks to 1 as a way to make sure people do not get confused when reading the article and think that he spoke to certain sources. It's a way of covering the source's asses. As for 2, the same standard applies to journalistic quoting in general: for instance, it is unlikely you will be able to sue someone successfully for misquoting you (ie: libel) if the general meaning of the quote is the same.
BlackJack 13y ago
A terrific read! I learned a lot about what kind of a person Marissa is. If I had to summarize, I'd say she's "firm but fair". An observation: There are 8 pages in total, but pages 1-3 were much shorter than 4-7, and 8 was the sources page. I think it's pretty smart of them to keep the first few pages short to keep you moving, and let the latter half be longer as you're committed to finishing if you've made it that far. I don't know of this is common practice for longer articles, but it's a great thing to do!
- yo-mf 13y ago
  Good point, though I just read it on mobile where is automatically shows as one page, something I find to be a smoother reading experience.
simplezeal 13y ago
Personally I find it amusing that she mixed personal life with work - her dating Larry and all. You lose a lot of respect from peers if you are rising fast and they find out a powerful person has soft spot for him/her. I am wondering if that had something to do with so many Googlers hating her. She was always pain to work with - office hours etc. What changed?
- rhizome 13y ago
  lose a lot of respect from peers if you are rising fast and they find out a powerful person has soft spot for him/her. The only place this kind of favoritism is a negative is with personal relationships. Nobody bats an eye when the riser is a fraternity or alma mater cohort, where that kind of thing is expected. If I were a betting man, I'd say it's a class argument that the favoritism wasn't "earned" in the proper way, without the old school tie. Aside from that, in contemporary business culture, losing respect of your peers is no loss when you're upwardly mobile. They're the ones you're leaving behind.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    >The only place this kind of favoritism is a negative is with personal relationships. Nobody bats an eye when the riser is a fraternity or alma mater cohort, where that kind of thing is expected. I suspect that you're projecting here. I think favoritism in any of those situations is both expected and resented. I don't see how sexual relationships are any less class-based than alma mater or frat stuff. People are more likely to have been in the same frat with someone outside of their class than to have dated someone outside of their class.
    - rhizome 13y ago
      I think you're thinking that class necessarily means economics. Think more "cohort."
      - pessimizer 13y ago
        I am thinking cohort. People tend to date people who hang out in the exact social circles as they do. Which is what happened in this case, really. There are lots of token and outsider members of colleges and frats that the insider groups will never even notice. The person dating the boss or the bosses' daughter/son is more likely to be a member of an insider group than somebody who attended the same elite university at the same time - especially if the frat/college person is of a different race or economic class than the boss. Went to the same school, in the same frat, from the same town, went to the same camp, dated your sister once are all shorthand for describing insider groupings, not the cause of them. People who work hard who are not insiders in that way will resent it.
wj 13y ago
That tidbit about her piano teacher's daughter was from a great talk about creativity she gave at Stanford in 2006. My notes on the lecture: http://personalopz.com/blog/nine-lessons-learned-creativity-google/ http://personalopz.com/blog/nine-lessons-learned-creativity-...
anuraj 13y ago
I am very interested to see how a dead horse can be brought to life again - it would be an incredible feat if Marissa does it.
nwzpaperman 13y ago
When do we get another Vogue photo shoot?
BerislavLopac 13y ago
The most interesting detail to me is this mentioned so off-handedly that it's easy to miss it: "At one point during Mayer’s early years at Google, she and Page started dating." Now, I'm not saying that this had anything to do with her later success, on the contrary -- she obviously proved repeatedly that she is amazingly capable. But it's interesting that this kind of power shuffle that's going on in large companies inevitably includes some dose of sexual attraction; it reminds me of Salman Rushdie's Moth podcast appearance[0], where he described something similar in a Latin American coup. [0] http://www.podcast-directory.co.uk/episodes/salman-rushdie-writer%E2%80%99s-block-14492745.html http://www.podcast-directory.co.uk/episodes/salman-rushdie-w...
mrwnmonm 13y ago
what did you feel while reading this?
graycat 13y ago
For the context, that is, computing, the Internet, mobile, etc., there is a fundamental problem: We are awash in cheap processor cycles, main memory bytes, solid state and rotating disk bytes, infrastructure software, LAN and Internet bandwidth, client devices, sensors, transducers, etc. and for most of these are getting more rapidly. The fundamental problem is what the heck to do of high value -- change the world size -- with these fantastic, cheap resources? Open ocean sailing? Permitted trading without the many 'tolls' from long paths across land. Personal cars? Killed off the horses and passenger trains and opened up suburbia. Trucks? Killed off a lot of freight trains. Electric lights? Got rid of lighting by burning candles, whale oil, kerosene, and coal gas. Big stuff. Computing's done a lot so far. The fundamental problem now is, now what? The common assumption is that a big IT company must frequently 'reinvent' itself and 'create' its future. If so, then the big IT companies -- and related companies in 'media', cars, etc. -- just must successfully address significant parts of this fundamental problem. So, the fundamental problem must be (no choice) shared by Yahoo, Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, newspapers, TV, movies, DARPA, essentially all information technology (IT) startups and venture capital, etc. Efforts that successfully address significant parts are coming forward quite slowly, maybe only a few such efforts each 10 years. Not fast enough. Big IT companies, I hate to say it, but a lot of you guys stand to go the way of buggy whips if you fail successfully to address significant parts of this fundamental problem. So, better set up a group, issue thinking caps, and get to work. Maybe the projects look 'blue sky', but at least some of them have to go all the way to revenue, earnings, and big changes in the world. Gotta be willing to stand there on the sea shore and think "open ocean sailing" and, then, make it real, make a lot of money, and change the world. Do that or you are in line for a buggy whip award. In a musical analogy, a little, student's piano sonata won't cut it; think more like Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony'. One way -- not the only one -- is to look at some 'economics', i.e., how to take some work needed in the economy and do it better and/or cheaper. Yahoo? So, you have a lot of stock market data. Now what? Envision an investor, see what else they need, and start to provide it. Yes, there should be a mobile tie in. Yahoo? Yes, you have some headline news, maybe some of it is entertaining. What about information that is really valuable? Find some such categories and how to get the information out there. Yahoo? There's lots of stuff on the Internet, and recently at AVC.COM Fred Wilson has been complaining that he doesn't know how to find blogs, videos, etc. he wants. A solution is needed. With just the economic driver, we can go on and on. I didn't say that it was all easy, but neither was Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony', and when he wrote it he had been stone deaf for years. Get on it Marissa or be in line for a buggy whip award. And, f'get about picking colors or numbers of screen pixels. And, to think better, get some sleep.

134 points by neya 13y ago

od2m 13y ago

This article has very low information density.

hga 13y ago
Indeed. But it does have rather a lot of information. If you're interested in this, and e.g. Google history you might want to read it; I had to decide I couldn't justify the time and energy.

crazygringo 13y ago

This is 22,424 words long. Literally the length of a light book. (Even long-form journalism usually tops out at around 7-8,000 words.) Anyone got a TL;DR?

bryanlarsen 13y ago
TLDR: everything you need to know to predict how Marissa Mayer will run Yahoo. I would say that the article is very short. It's supposed to be a biography; those things are usually massive. It's a great condensation of a biography; just enough detail from the early years to get a sense of Marissa as a person and what guides her, the detail increasing through her Stanford and Google years to fill out her style and her strengths and weaknesses. And then a bunch of detail about why she was hunted and how, and on some of the pivotal actions she took at Yahoo (like the Tumblr acquisition and Mail redesign). It's long, but it's very much story telling so it reads well. If it was half the length it could contain the same amount of information but would be much harder to read. In many cases the best way to convey information is to tell a story.

af3 13y ago

print version?

moondowner 13y ago
I guess this will do it: http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fmarissa-mayer-biography-2013-8%3Fop%3D1 http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%...
pavs 13y ago
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-...

jacquesm 13y ago

Buried in there this gem: "The first is that she would recreate the technological circumstances of her users in her own life. Mayer went without broadband for years in her home, refusing to install it until it was also installed in the majority of American homes. She carried an iPhone at Google, which makes Android phones, because so did most mobile Web users." edit: this one is funny: " As she spoke, two of the people seated near her typed away like crazy, trying to take verbatim notes in Google Docs." Yahoo using google docs for their email strategy :) Who is leaking to Kara Swisher? Having a leaky board member can be lethal. "She said that Tumblr was an excellent product — an amazing tool for self-expression. She noted that it was beating Facebook with younger consumers." Aha. Younger generation+mobile->tumbler acquisition. Funny how in the same breath that Yahoo acquires companies to shut them down they can state with a straight face the new way of doing this is to let them stay independent post acquisition.

wdewind 13y ago
> Funny how in the same breath that Yahoo acquires companies to shut them down they can state with a straight face the new way of doing this is to let them stay independent post acquisition. I don't think that's fair. There is a huge difference between acquiring a successful startup and letting them continue to be themselves, and acqui-hiring a failing startup and stripping it for parts. The point is tumblr isn't a repeat of flickr, delicious etc. Summly etc., are in a different category altogether, and it's not like they are being misled about what's going to happen when they are being acquired.

ahk 13y ago

The dollar numbers being talked about in the article are kind of stunning, for a website that dropped off my radar more than a decade ago. Who are all these people with all that much money and where are they getting it from??

jacquesm 13y ago
Yahoo is still the 4th largest internet property. It has more than half a billion unique visitors monthly.
pavs 13y ago
You are giving too much credit to your internet usage preference and its relation to a company being relevant and successful.
mojuba 13y ago
Similar sentiments here. Those numbers are likely to reflect something, but the fact that Yahoo is so irrelevant to geeks and highly self-aware Internet users is a good sign that their position is very unstable. Somehow reminds of Microsoft gradually sliding into irrelevance (while still generating some dollars) for geeks first, and then for everyone else.

jokoon 13y ago

Misleading title, does this article dig up some dirt about mayer or not, I don't get it. The title sounds like people have been lied to about Mayers, but what lies ?

techboots 13y ago

Anyone else find this line offensive & presumptious of the author? "Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesn’t look the part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and glamorous style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks."

krakensden 13y ago

Is it meaningful that everyone she didn't get along with at Google had a name from southern Asia?

adharmad 13y ago
Kamangar is from Iran
- meepmorp 13y ago
  Which is in south(western) Asia.
slurry 13y ago
I noticed that too.
jgalt212 13y ago
Outside of the US/Western Europe, many men don't have the most enlightened view of women in the workplace. Perhaps this was her response to biases she rightly or wrongly perceived directly or indirectly.

andrewljohnson 13y ago

I would call this historical fiction, not a biography. The author says as much (after tens of thousands of words that almost no one will read all of). Quoting someone else, he writes: "As part of the narrative, I have included passages of dialogue. Dialogue— what words were said— is a fact like any other. It is not necessarily a quotation from an interview with me and I would discourage readers from inferring that one or both of the speakers is a direct source." The article ends up being overwhelmingly flattering, and subtly balances the flattery by bringing up and then dispelling muckety-muck from the news, with an insider POV. And of course no one has to vouch for a word of it.

ISL 13y ago
The disclaimer regarding dialogue may have belonged at the top of the article. I was surprised to find it at the end.
wdewind 13y ago
You left out the next sentence of that, which completely changes the meaning A person will often share thoughts about pivotal moments in their lives with a large group of people. The author meant you should not assume that because someone is quoted that they directly spoke to him. He got some quotes from public sources.
- andrewljohnson 13y ago
  And of course you left out the weasel words thereafter: Readers should bear in mind that, given the vagaries of human memory, remembered dialogue is rarely the same as actual recordings and transcripts. At the same time, it is no more nor less accurate than many other recollections.
  - wdewind 13y ago
    Which means there are two types of quotes in this article: 1) Those which are public and on some kind of record and 2) Those which are recollection The quote you gave does not speak to 2, it speaks to 1 as a way to make sure people do not get confused when reading the article and think that he spoke to certain sources. It's a way of covering the source's asses. As for 2, the same standard applies to journalistic quoting in general: for instance, it is unlikely you will be able to sue someone successfully for misquoting you (ie: libel) if the general meaning of the quote is the same.

BlackJack 13y ago

A terrific read! I learned a lot about what kind of a person Marissa is. If I had to summarize, I'd say she's "firm but fair". An observation: There are 8 pages in total, but pages 1-3 were much shorter than 4-7, and 8 was the sources page. I think it's pretty smart of them to keep the first few pages short to keep you moving, and let the latter half be longer as you're committed to finishing if you've made it that far. I don't know of this is common practice for longer articles, but it's a great thing to do!

yo-mf 13y ago
Good point, though I just read it on mobile where is automatically shows as one page, something I find to be a smoother reading experience.

simplezeal 13y ago

Personally I find it amusing that she mixed personal life with work - her dating Larry and all. You lose a lot of respect from peers if you are rising fast and they find out a powerful person has soft spot for him/her. I am wondering if that had something to do with so many Googlers hating her. She was always pain to work with - office hours etc. What changed?

rhizome 13y ago
lose a lot of respect from peers if you are rising fast and they find out a powerful person has soft spot for him/her. The only place this kind of favoritism is a negative is with personal relationships. Nobody bats an eye when the riser is a fraternity or alma mater cohort, where that kind of thing is expected. If I were a betting man, I'd say it's a class argument that the favoritism wasn't "earned" in the proper way, without the old school tie. Aside from that, in contemporary business culture, losing respect of your peers is no loss when you're upwardly mobile. They're the ones you're leaving behind.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  >The only place this kind of favoritism is a negative is with personal relationships. Nobody bats an eye when the riser is a fraternity or alma mater cohort, where that kind of thing is expected. I suspect that you're projecting here. I think favoritism in any of those situations is both expected and resented. I don't see how sexual relationships are any less class-based than alma mater or frat stuff. People are more likely to have been in the same frat with someone outside of their class than to have dated someone outside of their class.
  - rhizome 13y ago
    I think you're thinking that class necessarily means economics. Think more "cohort."
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      I am thinking cohort. People tend to date people who hang out in the exact social circles as they do. Which is what happened in this case, really. There are lots of token and outsider members of colleges and frats that the insider groups will never even notice. The person dating the boss or the bosses' daughter/son is more likely to be a member of an insider group than somebody who attended the same elite university at the same time - especially if the frat/college person is of a different race or economic class than the boss. Went to the same school, in the same frat, from the same town, went to the same camp, dated your sister once are all shorthand for describing insider groupings, not the cause of them. People who work hard who are not insiders in that way will resent it.

wj 13y ago

That tidbit about her piano teacher's daughter was from a great talk about creativity she gave at Stanford in 2006. My notes on the lecture: http://personalopz.com/blog/nine-lessons-learned-creativity-google/ http://personalopz.com/blog/nine-lessons-learned-creativity-...

anuraj 13y ago

I am very interested to see how a dead horse can be brought to life again - it would be an incredible feat if Marissa does it.

nwzpaperman 13y ago

When do we get another Vogue photo shoot?

BerislavLopac 13y ago

The most interesting detail to me is this mentioned so off-handedly that it's easy to miss it: "At one point during Mayer’s early years at Google, she and Page started dating." Now, I'm not saying that this had anything to do with her later success, on the contrary -- she obviously proved repeatedly that she is amazingly capable. But it's interesting that this kind of power shuffle that's going on in large companies inevitably includes some dose of sexual attraction; it reminds me of Salman Rushdie's Moth podcast appearance[0], where he described something similar in a Latin American coup. [0] http://www.podcast-directory.co.uk/episodes/salman-rushdie-writer%E2%80%99s-block-14492745.html http://www.podcast-directory.co.uk/episodes/salman-rushdie-w...

mrwnmonm 13y ago

what did you feel while reading this?

graycat 13y ago

For the context, that is, computing, the Internet, mobile, etc., there is a fundamental problem: We are awash in cheap processor cycles, main memory bytes, solid state and rotating disk bytes, infrastructure software, LAN and Internet bandwidth, client devices, sensors, transducers, etc. and for most of these are getting more rapidly. The fundamental problem is what the heck to do of high value -- change the world size -- with these fantastic, cheap resources? Open ocean sailing? Permitted trading without the many 'tolls' from long paths across land. Personal cars? Killed off the horses and passenger trains and opened up suburbia. Trucks? Killed off a lot of freight trains. Electric lights? Got rid of lighting by burning candles, whale oil, kerosene, and coal gas. Big stuff. Computing's done a lot so far. The fundamental problem now is, now what? The common assumption is that a big IT company must frequently 'reinvent' itself and 'create' its future. If so, then the big IT companies -- and related companies in 'media', cars, etc. -- just must successfully address significant parts of this fundamental problem. So, the fundamental problem must be (no choice) shared by Yahoo, Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, newspapers, TV, movies, DARPA, essentially all information technology (IT) startups and venture capital, etc. Efforts that successfully address significant parts are coming forward quite slowly, maybe only a few such efforts each 10 years. Not fast enough. Big IT companies, I hate to say it, but a lot of you guys stand to go the way of buggy whips if you fail successfully to address significant parts of this fundamental problem. So, better set up a group, issue thinking caps, and get to work. Maybe the projects look 'blue sky', but at least some of them have to go all the way to revenue, earnings, and big changes in the world. Gotta be willing to stand there on the sea shore and think "open ocean sailing" and, then, make it real, make a lot of money, and change the world. Do that or you are in line for a buggy whip award. In a musical analogy, a little, student's piano sonata won't cut it; think more like Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony'. One way -- not the only one -- is to look at some 'economics', i.e., how to take some work needed in the economy and do it better and/or cheaper. Yahoo? So, you have a lot of stock market data. Now what? Envision an investor, see what else they need, and start to provide it. Yes, there should be a mobile tie in. Yahoo? Yes, you have some headline news, maybe some of it is entertaining. What about information that is really valuable? Find some such categories and how to get the information out there. Yahoo? There's lots of stuff on the Internet, and recently at AVC.COM Fred Wilson has been complaining that he doesn't know how to find blogs, videos, etc. he wants. A solution is needed. With just the economic driver, we can go on and on. I didn't say that it was all easy, but neither was Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony', and when he wrote it he had been stone deaf for years. Get on it Marissa or be in line for a buggy whip award. And, f'get about picking colors or numbers of screen pixels. And, to think better, get some sleep.