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Rather than the inevitable bashing of Marissa that will undoubtedly unfurl on this thread, I'd like to put in a little reminder that we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks and that we should commend her for taking on the immense challenge of steadying the Yahoo ship. Yes, she wasn't able to keep the ship from sinking. But I do think she put in a good-faith effort.
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I think there is absolutely no indication that anybody, other than Jesus Christ himself descending from the skies mounted on a Harley Davidson in flames, could have saved Yahoo. So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.
I don't think that is true. In 2012 Yahoo had $5B a year in revenue and was the second most visited property on the web. When Thompson stepped down the board were given two proposals. The first, revive Yahoo as a premium tech firm lead by someone like Mayer, or 2. admit that Yahoo is now a media co and double down on the verticals where Yahoo is winning - especially those where you can sell premium ads (Finance, Spor…
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Steve Jobs worked himself to the bone and took zero money for years when he was trying to save Apple. That's what a good faith effort looks like. If he had failed he would have wasted years and got nothing in return. If Mayer had done this I would be impressed. But Mayer had no vision, didn't put in the effort required, and milked Yahoo for a hundred million dollars she didn't earn. Silicon Valley loves failure like…
Not sure why a "good faith effort" requires taking such a crazy amount of personal risk. Yahoo was willing to pay millions to the exec they thought had the best chance to turn the company around. She should have declined that and and unnecessarily played on Extra Hard mode instead?
That's the only way you can have real change, instead of the moral hazard situation we have now.
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Or it was too much inertia to overcome, which is probably a huge factor.
It was both and more. I started there back when Bartz was CEO. Bartz continued down the media company path that was already established. Thompson doubled down and cut huge amount of tech talent to focus on media. Like he literally almost completely killed labs the PhD wing that did research. There are other things that elaborate on that really hurt and created the outcome we see today. When MM started she had no idea…
The alibaba investment was probably Jerry Yang's best ROI decision aside from being a part of starting the company in the first place...
Unfortunately for Yahoo itself that decision was SOOO good that it would eventually consume the company.
Because there was basically no way for the company to overcome how valuable it was as an Alibaba proxy and wall street started to look at all of its other endeavors as just high risk low chance of return gambling with the Alibaba money.
For those confused, this filing is reporting a name change because the operating business (including its brand, domain name, etc.) is being acquired by Verizon out of what is now Yahoo! Inc. So the Yahoo business, its name, domains, and so on are not going anywhere as a result of this announcement. Altaba is just the name of of the company that will hold the investments that Verizon didn't acquire, including Alibaba…
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She was very well compensated for her time sinking Yahoo. I think this kind of tone policing is unhealthy.
(reasonable) tone policing helps prevent a bunch of armchair quarterbacks with modestly successful programming backgrounds from assuming they have any idea what happens at the executive level of a company like Yahoo.
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Not sure why a "good faith effort" requires taking such a crazy amount of personal risk. Yahoo was willing to pay millions to the exec they thought had the best chance to turn the company around. She should have declined that and and unnecessarily played on Extra Hard mode instead?
You don't think that a public CEO's incentives should be aligned with their shareholders? That's the only way you can have real change, instead of the moral hazard situation we have now.