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What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

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Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#231

Post by dbenhur »

1024core wrote: post #170
ebbv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years Why? That is $50mil/year which is an insane amount of money for any one person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes per year to fail. It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already…

> She did fail at the job she was hired to do. But did she? The market had valued Yahoo's core assets at -7B (that is, negative 7 Billion), if you added all of Yahoo's assets and compared it to the market price. But she sold those same assets for +5B. That's a decent turnaround, isn't it?

This right here. Saving Yahoo was impossible. If I had been an investor I would be quite satisfied paying the CEO $200M to secure $12B increase in valuation.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#233

Post by smhost »

freyir wrote: post #203
smhost wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculation is how we judge other people, and our social space doesn't have objective truths. Narratives are all there is, so narratives are what matter most. It's legitimate to correct offending narratives that conflict with your version of reality.

> It's legitimate to correct offending narratives that conflict with your version of reality. You're not "correcting" someone's interpretation simply by stating a different interpretation, unless there's some grounding in evidence and objective truth. Core1024 may have evidence that supports his interpretation, but he didn't present it. As such, it doesn't qualify as a correction.

> You're not "correcting" someone's interpretation simply by stating a different interpretation

But that's how people use the word, that's what politics is. There are no objective truths to social narrative, and facts aren't the only things that have the property of correctness. Perspectives have correctness, as in moral perspectives etc. It's not an objective scale, but people don't have to conduct their lives scientistically.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#234

Post by kafkaesq »

finid wrote: post #169
1024core wrote: post #37

Heh, I remember Jelena from discussion on devel-random. I would like to correct (mildly) a couple of anecdotes in her article, because I was there and closer. > A friend relayed this story: The Sunnyvale campus had a building with redundant turnstiles, which required a badge scan seconds after employees had scanned their badges to open the main doors. People complained about it when the building was remodeled years b…

>She was the best CEO of all the ones Yahoo had seen So the best CEO Yahoo! has ever seen couldn't turn the ship around. does that say more about the state of Yahoo! or the competence of the CEO?

Probably more about the state of Yahoo. Mayer really was quite talented, by all accounts. But Yahoo's problems really were quite fundamental - down to the fundamental questions of what its line if business could have, or should have been - beyond simply issues of morale and revenue.

So another spin on the whole sage might well be, "If Marissa Mayer couldn't turn Yahoo around -- maybe no one could."

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#235

Post by rhizome »

phamilton wrote: post #222
rhizome wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in addition to the $22 million provided to replace salary, pension and bonuses Walter forfeited... Shouldn't investors at any company that does this be angry at having to reimburse executives for opportunity cost?

It's not reimburse. It's just negotiation. Why leave something near guaranteed for something uncertain? Last time I changed jobs I negotiated hard using my current situation to leverage a decent signing bonus. This is no different.

Was your signing bonus a ~5x multiple of your annual salary? It just smells to me like the company is effectively paying for two employee positions, one at another company.

Back of the napkin calc says John R. Walter's compensation + forfeited shares in 1997 added up to maybe $7MM (being generous, perhaps $10MM if he had stayed through vesting), so the reimbursement by AT&T was easily 2-3x the real-world numbers.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#236

Post by yuhong »

jonnathanson wrote: post #182
pavlov wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs famously used a Thinkpad after returning to Apple. A Time interview from August 1997 confirms that: http://allaboutstevejobs.com/sayings/stevejobsinterviews/tim...

In that specific case, Jobs had just come back from NeXT, and Mac OS hadn't yet incorporated elements from NeXTSTEP. It sounds as though Jobs used some early precursor version of Keynote, which may have been more easily ported onto a Thinkpad than onto a Powerbook at the time. Also, in fairness, the circa 1997 Thinkpad was the best business machine on the market. Period. Macs had to catch up. The Macbook wasn't even…

This reminds me me that Rhapsody eventually had limited unofficial PowerBook support. I wonder if Steve Jobs ever used it.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#237

Post by burkaman »

Bartweiss wrote: post #171
burkaman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the evidence is sort of mixed. Here's an article responding to the study that quote came from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984315... As for explanations that could explain this particular case: Men are more likely to get another chance at a CEO job, so they can afford to turn down a crisis position. When an organization is in crisis, they are likely to look for a candidate as differe…

Thanks, this is a good summary. I suspect there's probably something to the phenomenon (even in terms of turnaround CEOs), although I'm immensely skeptical of the people who explain this with "women are seen as caring and sensitive so they get positions where morale is bad". That narrative seems like a terrible way to explain many of the other outcomes, like preferring women for hotly-contested political races. I'm a…

Totally reasonable comment. But "Does anyone think this exit is going to actually harm Mayer's employability?" Yes, absolutely. The overwhelming narrative from the media and the public is that she failed, she made terrible decisions, and someone else could have done a lot better. I'm sure the people in charge of choosing CEOs are capable of seeing through that narrative and assessing her actual performance, but if they care about their stock price, they have to care about what the public thinks. Choosing Mayer will no longer get you articles about your fresh new direction, it will produce stories about her past failures. This certainly would apply to male CEOs as well, but I don't agree that taking the Yahoo job was basically a win/win.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#238

Post by yuhong »

jessaustin wrote: post #119
woliveirajr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was OS/2 bad? :-|

Everybody I knew who used it said it was better than Windows, but that's sort of a self-selecting crowd. More to the point, OS/2 wasn't a M$ product, so that sort of success for it would have been bad for M$.

It was a MS product (even the early OS/2 2.0 SDKs from the 1990 period). The entire OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, partly because of how horrible and unethical it was.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#239

Post by discardorama »

sokoloff wrote: post #136
ebbv wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me angry and sad to see all the sniping about her $200M (or thereabouts) earnings over 4 years Why? That is $50mil/year which is an insane amount of money for any one person to receive. Yes you can point to tons of examples of people earning even more, but that's still way more money than most people will ever see in their lifetimes per year to fail. It's a total cop-out to say that "Well Yahoo was already…

Executives have [employment] options. If you believe you need a talented executive to have a chance at turning around your company and your company is in dire straits, you may very well have to offer a golden parachute package to have any hope of engaging the services of the talented exec you seek, particularly when that's the norm at that level. Failing to offer such terms amounts to forfeiting any chance to hire th…

That is the stated narrative: that it's hard to hire CEOs who are good, and we need to give them every dollar we can.

But there's a darker, and (IMHO) more accurate narrative: corruption or nepotism. Company A's CEO serves on the boards of companies B and C; and company B's CEO serves on the boards of A & C; and C's CEO on A & B. When the time comes, CEO_A votes for a big raise for CEO_B (and so does CEO_C). Now, when their turns come, they point to CEO_B and say: "look, the market is valuing CEOs so much! You've got to do something!". And CEO_B and CEO_C express outrage and vote to give CEO_A a huge raise. And the cycle repeats.

Of course the connections are not as direct, but the club is a very exclusive club, and they all know how the game is played.

Re: What Marissa Mayer Brought to Yahoo That Can’t Be Bought or Sold

#240

Post by discardorama »

Bartweiss wrote: post #54
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that was the only way at that point to bring in fresh creative talent. No creative person probably wanted to quit their existing job and leave for Yahoo at that point. And why would they? If you're really talented, you could either go work for Google/Facebook/etc. (if you want a stable life), or start your own company (if you're adventurous). Yahoo was stuck in the purgatory somewhere in between.

I don't really buy this argument. There are reasons for acqui-hires, but it's usually to bring on board a strong existing team, a world-class domain expert, or a tech base with employee support. Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support…

> Summly was none of those. They got one 17 year old dev, and a fairly-decent product they made basically no use of. I don't know how good D'Aloisio is, but he's not that good. Especially without the kind of status and support that could turn out a bold new product within Yahoo.

Summly was not D'Aloiso's product in terms of development. He may have had the idea, but the technology was SRI's (the same guys who developed Siri), and IIRC, Summly had exclusive use of that. So please stop demeaning it as "some 17-year-old's app".

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