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, Sport)
The board had delusions of grandeur and saw Yahoo's as still being on the same level as Google rather than taking the safer bet and building out the media company.
Being a media company isn't as interesting - but there are a lot of public, medium sized tech media co's out there who get along just fine (and some even have an innovative breakthrough every now and then - like IAC) - and Yahoo, with the later plan, would have been the best of this bunch.
The problem is that Yahoo was never a media company, either. They never had a lot of success in media, at least not past their early properties like Finance and Autos. They failed to do anything meaningful with video, or mobile, or flickr, or much of anything past their early success.
Yahoo tried to be a media company for years. They called themselves "the premier media company". They had two different CEOs pulled from the media world, Terry Semel and Ross Levinsohn. Levinsohn didn't really have much time, but Semel did. If Yahoo was a media company, they were unsuccessful at it.
I always wanted Yahoo to rebound. I worked there for a few years and my team seemed quite good. But there was always the problem that the company didn't quite seem to know what it was trying to do. It didn't have a real plan for winning back search nor for winning in media, and it didn't have deep enough pockets to dig indefinitely. What it had were initiatives like Livestand that failed to compete with apps like Flipboard and an ad network that never competed with AdSense despite Yahoo actually buying Overture.
"They never had a lot of success in media, at least not past their early properties like Finance and Autos."
News was launched in 1996, roughly a year after Yahoo became Yahoo and only four months after the IPO. News is most definitely an early success.
Yahoo's problem (or one of them) is that they've failed to have any significant new successes in well over a decade (that I can recall at least). The best they've done is maintain their early wins, but those have been eroded, as they completely lost search and mail to Google, much of the news/finance/autos/sports traffic to dozens of competitors, etc.
I was surprised to learn at a conference in October that America Online still exists(!), and this (media) is the route that they took. Apparently they own the Huffington Post and Engadget now.
AOL was acquired by Verizon, so in a sense they still exist, but in another sense not. They did own/operate HuffPo, Engadget, and other properties for some time prior to the Verizon acquisition.
I agree with you, and would like to add that Yahoo was in denial of who it was and what strengths it had.
Still however, comparing it to a company like IAC is quite insulting. Yahoo was something more, it was a chance for a media company to rule the internet once again. It was how tech did media.
there is a middle ground too. Two of the verticals Yahoo doesnt experience a lot of competition in are Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Sports. (edit: rereading your comment, I see you mentioned the exact same thing and I skimmed over it.) And then there is a squandered userbase of Yahoo Messengers that were left to dry.
If I were Yahoo CEO, and the company had chosen the media empire route, I would have explored a Yahoo Finance 2.0 as a social network. Step one, acquire or clone OpenFolio and Robinhood and maybe buy something like SumZero for its social graph slash userbase. Create a Free and Pro tier. Other companies I have mentioned before as a good fit in this idea are Forcerank and Sparkfin. Motif is another company trying to make stock picking more social. Having a unified messaging layer across the bottom of ALL its properties (like Facebook) would have benefited here too.
Yahoo should have made a push to be THE fantasy company, instead of covering its product in daily fantasy ads, trying to squeeze out the last of the value. Sports is a huge vertical other tech giants like Google and Microsoft and Apple dont play much in. Being cash rich, they could have bought one of the major Daily Fantasy empires, which basically print money. I cant think of many better easy ways to return shareholder value. Again, a messenger bar at the bottom of the screen would have really tied the place together.
Now if I want to talk with my group of friends about my fantasy picks or my stock picks (or my fantasy stock picks in the case of Forcerank) my group conversations carry over between properties. The thing about Finance and Fantasy is they both involve an element of competitive "I know more than you and can make better predictive decisions." Stock Picking and Fantasy Drafting slash Lineup Setting are more closely related mental tasks than they are given credit for. Both are pleasurable when you are right.
I think its odd to say Yahoo went the tech route, because outside her acquisitions, it does seem they doubled down on the editorial media vertical side (tv shows, news anchors, major tech journalists) without creating any sort of modern cms, without actually introducing ANY tech innovation in house.
They also scrapped Yahoo Voices, right as Medium and Kinja and Chorus and Wordpress forged a new era of blogging. Ive said before, Atavist would have been a great fit in their tech/media empire niche. After buying the tech, they should have acquired some really popular high quality independent blogs/bloggers.
I'm reminded of Second Life, where a vital arts colony turned into a gambling and pornography den. Its kind of like how depressed town centers turn into just antique shops and hair stylists - its the lowest form of life, turned to when everything else is gone.
So yeah, Yahoo could have given up and become a gambling site only.
this is sad tho in some fields yahoo contributions where huge even as of today just look the research they published and contributed to in the machine learning field. this is definitely premium tech firm level
Bashing her may also be naive. She may not have been hired to "save Yahoo!". She may have been hired to make a lot of money for Dan Loeb's hedge fund, and succeeded at that, if you believe the telling in this piece: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/marissa-mayer-biography-20...
Summary:
- Loeb decides he can make a bunch of money if he can invest in Yahoo!, clean out the board, and get a more compelling CEO in charge.
- Loeb buys 5% of Yahoo! (presumably at a price in the mid-teens) and starts a campaign.
- Loeb ousts then-CEO Thompson and recruits Marissa Meyer from Google to take the CEO job. She is announced in July 2012 to massive fanfare and media attention.
- Yahoo!'s stock rises to $28 or so over the next year. Seeing as how they shipped no new products of note during that time, it's fair to assume this was largely due to Meyer joining the company. In July 2013, Loeb sells off most of his holdings and is removed from the board.
Given this, it seems unfair to bash Meyer for not saving Yahoo!. She was never hired to do that. She was hired to make money for Dan Loeb and did a great job. All the handwringing about "saving Yahoo!" is a fake narrative foisted on the public by the tech press and Yahoo!'s PR people.
Once a company becomes a zombie, there's generally no saving it. If you can get enough people to believe it might happen though, you can make some money.
Also: This reading helps make sense of some of the other weirdness around Meyer's tenure. Why did Henrique De Castro get such a rich contract? Why did Meyer? Perhaps in part because some of the people negotiating those deals (Loeb and Wolf, ex president of MTV hired by Loeb to help with the Yahoo! affair) knew they'd be gone in a year and didn't care about the fallout.
Loeb's thesis was simple - that Yahoo is worth a lot more as the sum of its parts as it was a combined entity. He was right - there were long periods of time where Yahoo on its own had a negative value.
The stock price was largely driven by Alibaba - hence why attributing stock growth to Mayer's appointment was misplaced.
The idea was that you sell off the BABA holding, distribute that to investors and then you end up with Yahoo on it's own which is then pivoted to being a tech company (higher PE's) rather than a boring media company.
Mayer ended up becoming far from the ideal hedge fund CEO. She kept more of the BABA sales for acquisitions than the activists wanted, she spent hundreds of millions on silly recruiting like Henrique De Castro and then spent $2.5B+ on 50+ acquisitions - all of which didn't move the needle and ended up being written down to near-zero.
That's a lot to spend for a company that had a negative value - and Mayer hastened / worsened the situation (hence why Loeb got the hell out of there when offered $29 by Mayer)
I like your narrative and Dan Loeb should certainly send Mayer a Christmas card. Still, if indeed she was hired to make money for Dan Loeb then that does not speak any better to her managerial competence.
Walter exactly right. Not even Marissa feels sorry for Marissa given the payout she has received. A couple of hundred million dollars heals a lot of hurt feeelings.
Everyone loves a good turnaround story versus slow-death story. As Google's 20th employee she was already approaching the tres commas league.
Remember when she was confirmed as a hire, the feeling around the Valley was less of "wow, a new CEO" and more of "how did someone like Yahoo get someone like Marissa". The previous CEOs include alumni from PayPal and AutoDesk, so getting someone as successful was a win for Yahoo at the time.
For sure. For perspective, that's around 2000X more than an average tech salary in Silicon Valley. I'd be thrilled to [Not Turn Around Yahoo] for that much money. Hell, I could have done it for a fraction of the cost!
If that's really the case then Silicon Valley salaries have gone through the floor recently. That would be considered an insulting salary for a developer in London, in GBP.
If you search for web designer jobs in the UK on Indeed, most jobs are in the £25k to £30k range, with a slightly smaller selection between £30k and £35k.
London may be in a class of its own, but elsewhere in the UK £35k is considered decent money.
Don't disagree about £35k being decent in the UK - easy to take for granted how well paid the tech industry is.
That said, a "Web designer" role and a "Developer" role are two completely different things. £35k is about right for a decent web designer salary; but for a developer, that's more of junior to mid-level role, even outside of London.
(Good) developer jobs tend not to make it job sites like Indeed. I'd expect a developer job somewhere other than a small agency to be starting at ~£30k anywhere in the country, and £35k in London. In London a half-decent developer can make ~£50k easily, and much more than that if they're good, or willing to do contract work.
Of course not, but then when I failed which would have been pre-ordained and actually entirely foreseeable, bashing me here would NOT be really, really pointless and sad. However, if you are respecting her for picking up a paycheck, that is your right.
I think it's pointless and sad to bash her because, once again, I don't think it can reasonably be said that somebody else had the expertise to save Yahoo. We'll never know, of course.
Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays leaves you open to lots of undeserved bashing. So bashing her is easy. But she should be bashed if she was a bad CEO (which she wasn't, I think) or if somebody else would've done better than her (a person that most probably doesn't exist). So there's that.
(Yes, most of my comment was facetious. Don't take it literally)
Basically, Yahoo has had exactly two successes: its investment in Google signed in 2001 when Yahoo used Google's search results and Jerry Yang's heroic investment in Alibaba. Everything Meyers did was simply spending that money.
It's easy to spend money, especially when you have a lot and you are getting paid bank.
This "bashing" seems to be an attempt to deflect any and all criticism of her countless mistakes at Yahoo! - not least of which was that they helped leak vast swathes of personal data due to their CEO's reckless indifference to security.
>Also, being the CEO of an "old and out of touch" company with services that only grannies use nowadays leaves you open to lots of undeserved bashing.
So are CEOs responsible for the company or not?
Because HackerNews seems to want bank executives to go to prison for actions taken by the company and its employees. However, we don't want to even hold a tech CEO accountable for the financial results of the company because the culture is "stodgy"? One of the CEO's jobs is to change the culture.
Where can I sign up for a job making 7 figures with no "performance clause?" Even better, she probably had something like a "no downside performance clause," but would still receive lavish bonuses for any upside.
Whatever. Yahoo was already going down, and she just looted it for an order of magnitude more than "f-you money" on its way down, without much steepening its decline. Things end as they always would have, and Mayer retires to the island she just bought.
Well I work for a company where C level execs have 100m+ contracts and they are behaving in exceptionally bad ways. Also Dir/Sr Dir level may have around 1m+ contracts and they seem quite indifferent to project health. At this point I guess they think reward is enough for indifference or non-performance.
This is not a convincing argument. The odds are certainly against Yahoo, and the promise of MM was it will turn Yahoo into a Engineering powerhouse, which never happened. On top of that the Yahoo hack handling was not leadership.
She tried, well but her Participation Trophy was worth $300 million including Golden Parachute. That is a grave sign!
Yahoo was dying. They were dying no matter who was at the head. And whoever was holding the reins when Yahoo went down would get to be known as the person who killed Yahoo with the appropriate reputation hit. They might never work again, almost certainly never be the CEO of any significant company.
Meanwhile the board needs a big name at the helm. Someone to goose the stock price at the end, someone to guide the company on a smooth glide back down. Someone to take the blame. If the board doesn't get someone big and credible, they lose money, they take the blame.
Marissa Mayer didn't get paid $300 million despite presiding over a sinking ship. She got $300 million to preside over a sinking ship. That was the price of her reputation as a CEO.
Yahoo was dying when I was there in 2005-6 - the internal political structure, in-fighting, and general disdain from the US for anything not made there was terrifying.
But with billions of dollars propping it up, it takes a long time for a corpse to actually fall over.
> 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.
I mean, Yahoo has essentially failed so there is no way to validate your or my claims, but I disagree very much with this. If Yahoo had focused on its core strengths versus its flipping and flopping between becoming a media company or not, I think it could have become great. They also lost quite a bit of their best talent due to policy changes, work changes, etc.
Honestly I still think there are ways to turn the ship around. It may never become as big as it was before but I see no reason it can't become profitable and stick around for a long time.
What are Yahoo's core strengths? Near as I can tell, its core strength is possession of heaps of Alibaba stock. What core pieces of Yahoo, aside from its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stock, could be focused on in a way that would make it meaningful as a multi-billion dollar company?
- It's still #5 in the Alexa website ranks. That's HUGE. Hugehugehuge.
- Trumblr is still huge (arguably mismanaged but still huge)
- Their fantasy football is the largest in the world as far as I can tell. Huge user base.
- Yahoo mail is also huge.
Their core strength is their hugely popular front page and their web applications. Sorta similar to Google in a way. Or even Microsoft and some of its properties. Arguably they could focus on these web products and continue making cash though they'd likely need to downsize a bit.
She was paid to succeed and paid excessively on any level. Why should we not hold stars in the tech industry to higher standards. Why should we not vilify them like any other CEO presiding over a failing or failed company which sheds thousands if not tens of thousands of employees? She is the quintessential example of the CEO type many dislike. Overpaid, doesn't deliver, and walks off with money in the bank.
>So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad
If this was actually evident, what's the point of hiring her for the position with huge compensation? What's the point of taking the job, and why should that decision deserve praise? It sounds to me like she accepted an impossible task for tons of money. That isn't impressive.
I think back to Gillard and Australia. I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment. Abbott was and Rudd..ugh..something something party implosion; whatever.
It has nothing to do with her being a women. There just aren't many people who can put up with that endless rubbish.
With Yahoo, you have to give her credit. She has been there for a while and has attempted quite a bit. Saving Yahoo was going to be a totally chance attempt, as its competitors are crushing it in ... everything. From the surface it looked like she was in a better environment overall as well (compared to my Aussie politics stretching example anyway).
I think a company like Yahoo could have, and may still turn itself around. AOL did, mostly by investing itself in news and editorial sites. Maybe Verizon will be able to do something with their data, customers and brand -- and maybe like AOL we won't even realize they're the company owning the articles we're reading or the services we're using.
> she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment
What are you talking about? She managed to make enough backroom deals to oust a standing Prime Minister. That's pretty strong evidence that she is Machiavellian enough to play the game of politics.
> I liked her as a PM and felt that the reason she didn't make it is she simply wasn't heartless and evil enough to fight in that chaotic, insane and corrupt political environment.
She became PM by playing that game. Her public persona was ruined because she played it too publicly and she should be held responsible for starting a decade long period of political instability.
She ousted a sitting first term PM through backroom deals to make herself PM. This kicked off a decade where the Prime Ministers office had to get a revolving door installed.
I don't blame you. In Australia we have had a marathon run of the most monumental moments of bastardry, incompetence, bigotry and squandering of opportunities. I mean, this inevitably happens at the best of times but we got Rudd (who was, for his flaws, quite visionary), then Gillard who ousted him because of the negativity of Tony Abbott. Then we got Tony Abbott because of the way Gillard and co. shafted Rudd. Abbott, it turns out, was more arrogant, had less ability to govern, showed what those who watched him over the years already knew: he has terrible judgement, and thus led the least successful government of any era in Australia and lasted less time in the job than either Gillard or Rudd before Turnbull (who Abbott had actually ousted when in opposition) ousted him.
The Turnbull government has no chance of doing anything other than warm the seats for the next bunch.
So I sort of wish this was only Yahoo we were speaking about, but it's not: it's Australia's Federal Government and every Australian is currently looking into the abyss as the likes of Brandis, Dutton, Morrison, Barnaby Joyce, George Christianson and Eric Abetz destroy our society and economy for their own personal agendas.
So, bashing Marissa here would be really, really pointless and sad.