She seems like a lucky Elizabeth Holmes type.
Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
61–70 of 237 posts
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wholeheartedly agree, and I think it comes down to "signalling by association". For sure she is a workaholic and that gets you far, but to me it seems like she is filling the gap of providing confirmation to insecure overachievers after she - being one herself - made mistakes and reflected on them. Mistakes that could have been avoided had you taken out the ego in the first place. In contrast to my hypothesis: If you…
Marissa is one of the smartest people I have ever been around. Most of my knowledge comes from running in neighboring circles at Stanford. The (then) girl just had an amazing ability to remember things, get things, and analyze them. She also has outstanding social intelligence, and a bit of a reality distortion field. Of course she chose the rocketship in 1999 while the rest of us fumbled around in the dot com bust.…
I've known Marissa since Stanford too, and you're wrong. I'm not sure if you're lying or what, but you're wrong.
Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#63She ruined Yahoo! Made stupid acquisitions like Tumblr and shit.
Yahoo was already dying when she joined. Fundamentally the ‘portal’ model was already doomed and there was little she could do to fix it other than buy a social network like tumblr. Yahoo and aol both had levels of technical debt that are hard to imagine from outside of the company.
OK, then why didn't Yahoo just hire me to run the company? Same outcome but my salary would have been MUCH lower :)
In all seriousness, just because Yahoo was in a downspin doesn't mean that leadership can't save the company. Look at John Chen and Blackberry
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#64Marissa described possibly the most thorough and analytical job search process I've heard from anyone, when she was talking about how she joined Google. I really liked her reflection on this in hindsight on how being overly analytical is dangerous and it's something I try to remind myself of when I'm in danger of overthinking a decision: "I think this is a common thing that very analytical people trip themselves up w…
This reminds me of Jacob Falkovich's approach to picking a girlfriend:
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#65The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.
I like her because she's one of the very very few 'famous' women in tech who's not Alexa or Siri ( https://www.fastcompany.com/40547212/people-were-asked-to-na... ). Running companies and being featured in Vogue? Iconic.
Do some reading for f*'s sake. Take a look at this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)
Marissa is a fake computer scientist. There are real female computer scientists out there, and very good ones at that.
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> despite her successes Only going by what I've read she was never extremely successful at Google, only hired early and managed to stay, but never incredibly impactful. Honest question because I likely only know half the story what are her real successes at Google?
She was very successful at Google. Her taste drove much of Google's early design aesthetic. Why is the landing page mostly blank? In large part because Marissa insisted. "There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever." She said that in 2005. And a clean design was quite revolutiona…
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/about-aol-announceme...
She said that after the announcement of a partnership with AOL. But I believe it to be very, very unlikely that she was the main force to avoid this change. Since it was a characteristic that had come from the creation of the site. But maybe make the other products have a similarity. Or rather, always remember the central page of google was her responsibility.
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too much focus on utility functions, not enough focus on novelty functions, even though it's been proven that utility functions decline in usefulness as a search space expands. Given an infinite search space, a utility function can only find local optima, there is no global optima. In such situations, a novelty function that finds a path from one happy local optima to another happy local optima is a better bet than u…
How would you prove that? Here's a simple counterexample to what I understand your theorem to say: consider an infinite search space: 𝕽∞ and a utility function: 1-|x|. There's a single global optimum at (0, ...), and the gradient of the utility function would find it quickly.
Counter example: R^1 with a random function. There is no algorithm that can find a global maximum other than checking every point in R^1, of which there is an uncountable number.
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#68"I realized that, while I had a very deep understanding of artificial intelligence, I did not yet have some of the basics down. I knew how a database worked. I knew how an operating system worked. I knew how a compiler worked. But I hadn't taken classes on those topics, so I went back for my master's and took the rest of the AI offerings as well as a lot of programming basics. That way, I could actually go and market…
She's talking about foundation CS courses. She talk 7 (!) AI courses in Undergrad but apparently missed out on core CS courses. In Masters she got to cover those off. I think her majoring in Symbolic Systems not CS meant she missed out on compilers, DBs, etc..
Because she didn't study CS.
A university here has a cognitive science degree. Many people doing it and then a masters in CS to get at least a bit more practical with all the AI stuff they learned.
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#69I 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…
That's what I've heard from other early Googlers who were there at the time. It was a calculated risk. If the deal went badly, it would bankrupt the company, but the best estimates from existing revenue numbers and likely ad inventory increases had it being hugely profitable for Google. Their internal numbers supported that but few people outside the company believed it, hence the need for a guaranteed revenue clause. It certainly wasn't a shot-in-the-dark, though.
Re: Marissa Mayer on career growth and how a revenue guarantee almost killed Google
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marissa is one of the smartest people I have ever been around. Most of my knowledge comes from running in neighboring circles at Stanford. The (then) girl just had an amazing ability to remember things, get things, and analyze them. She also has outstanding social intelligence, and a bit of a reality distortion field. Of course she chose the rocketship in 1999 while the rest of us fumbled around in the dot com bust.…
I've known Marissa since Stanford too, and you're wrong. I'm not sure if you're lying or what, but you're wrong. Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.
Apparently our experiences in her orbit were pretty different.
That doesn't mean I'm lying, and I don't think you are either.
I have no idea what your experience is, and I have absolutely no reason to lie. I doubt Marissa could pick me out of a police lineup if her life depended on it.
But I watched her kick ass at Stanford--both socially and intellectually--and it takes more than a pretty face to do that.