Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google

Post by mintplant » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

antt wrote: post #220

shaki-dora wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be far more willing to believe this if it happened in a discussion of Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey. But I do not remember this point ever being made in discussions of those workaholics. Until a woman came along. Also: the same user calls Mayer (and Holmes) „attention whores“ downthread. I rest my case.

If you're going to stalk me do it right. I called Holmes, Musk, Jobs and Gates attention whores. That's three men and one woman. One of them is dead and I'm still shitting on them, and it's not a woman. You also missed the post (just above the one you selectively read) where I call male CEOs coked up failures who come off badly when compared to chimps. You must really want to see sexism everywhere you look to have re…

Post by mathattack » Wed, Apr 10, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

eledumb wrote: post #221

mathattack wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Execs rewriting corporate history after the fact. Go figure.

And unless the people who were at Google at the time were in the meetings, they are merely speculating. I was at Netscape and was actually in meetings that marca, and others were not in, and it's funny to hear what they say happened, when they weren't in the room, nor were they consulted. Even the people at the top can be guilty of speculation.

Post by johnrgrace » Thu, Apr 11, 2019, 1:42 AM UTC

shostack wrote: post #160

NelsonMinar wrote: post #46

I was also at Google when the AOL deal was signed and remember the decision and outcome quite differently. It was definitely a high risk deal, deliberately so, but in no way was it only "the best-case scenario had us breaking even". Nor was it the case that "all of our models were wrong". The product manager in charge of ads at the time had a clear understanding of exactly how the deal could be hugely profitable for…

Can you speak at all to what sort of modeling work is done around this sort of major partnership? I'm really curious how many people are involved in that sort of exercise at that level and how clean the data is, what sorts of data are used, etc.

  It's often one guy with a spreadsheet, and 1-2 people to review the spreadsheet and a few business people to validate assumptions.  The modeling is easy, getting the assumptions right is hard.                                
  To be honest, if you're skilled very simple models that you can do in your head or in a few minutes usually give you a perfectly good answer.  The more complex exhaustive models are usually there to make sure you didn't overlook something or 20 small inputs all cross multiplied to throw your answer off.                             
    Getting the answer exactly right also doesn't matter, if you make $90m in profit off a deal or $100m your going to do it.  What you are most concerned about is making sure that you don't lose money and what factors would push you to do that.

Post by macspoofing » Sun, Apr 14, 2019, 3:30 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #218

macspoofing wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tumblr wasn't a bad acquisition. I would also challenge that she ruined Yahoo. Yahoo was already on a downward trajectory with an existential identity crisis. At worst, she couldn't change the direction.

>Tumblr wasn't a bad acquisition. I would like to see your justification for this. Because Yahoo paid 1.1 billion dollars for it and they wrote down pretty much all of the value within a few years. It looks especially bad when compared with Facebook buying Instagram around the same time for about the same price.