Case Study LL

8/11/2019 Case Study LL

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The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An

Unauthorized Biography

Illustration by Mike Nudelman/Photo by Fortune Live Media

On the morning of Thursday, July 12, 2012, Yahoos interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, stillbelieved he was going to be named permanent CEO of the company.

He had just one meeting to go.
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Amoroso told Levinsohn this in private. He told Yahoo employees this during an all-handsmeeting in May. Hed even joined a sales call to express support for Levinsohn to Yahooadvertisersan oddly hands-on move for a chairman.

In June, Amoroso helped Levinsohn recruit a high-profile Google executive named Michael

Barrett into Yahoo. During the recruiting process, Amoroso promised Barrett that Levinsohnsinterim title was only temporarythat it was safe to leave Google.

Levinsohn had another reason to be hopeful: For the past few months, hed been speaking withtwo of Yahoos most important new directors, Dan Loeb and Michael Wolf, almost every day.As important as it was for Levinsohn to have Amorosos support, he needed Loebs more. Loebran a hedge fund called Third Point, which owned more than 5 percent of Yahoo and had, onlymonths before, forced the resignation of Yahoos previous CEO. Wolf was an important ally forLevinsohn to have, too. Wolf, a former president of MTV, was consulting for Third Point onmedia investments when Loeb asked him to join the Yahoo board and lead its search committeefor a new CEO.

Levinsohn began his presentation. It was going to be a doozy, as he planned to seriously alter thedirection of Yahoo.

He wanted it to stop competing with technology businesses like Google and Microsoft and focusentirely on competing with media and content businesses like Disney, Time Warner, and NewsCorporation. As part of this transition, Levinsohn wanted to spin off, sell, or shut down severalYahoo business units. He said doing so would reduce Yahoos head count by as many as 10,000employees, and increase its earnings before taxes and interest by as much as 50 percent.

In fact, Levinsohn announced during his presentation that he and his team had already started

down this road.

Levinsohn told the board that, under his direction, Heckman had begun negotiating a deal withMicrosoft to exchange Yahoos search business for Microsofts portal, MSN.com, and largepayments in cash. Levinsohn and Heckman had also been talking with Google executiveHenrique De Castro about turning over some of Yahoos advertising inventory. There was alsotalk of unloading some of Yahoos enterprise-facing advertising-technology businesses into ajoint venture involving New York-based ad tech startup AppNexus.


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Heidi Gutman/CNBC

Dan Loeb controlled 5 percent of Yahoo and joined the board after a bloody proxy fight.

It was during this part of his presentation that Levinsohn began to feel the permanent YahooCEO job slipping away.

Others in the room got the same sinking feeling.

Wolf, the man in charge of the committee tasked with hiring a permanent CEO, began toquestion the wisdom of the deal.

Wolf asked, in a loud voice with a sharp tone, I understand why this is good for Microsoft, butwhy is it good for Yahoo?

Harry Wilson, another director brought onto the board by Loeb, joined Wolf in his criticism ofthe deal as short-sighted.

Their cross-examination of the deal eventually boiled down to one question: Had Levinsohn andHeckman made any irreversible commitments to either Microsoft or Google?

It was obvious to several people in the room that Wolf and Wilson wanted to make sure anothercandidate for the CEO job would not be forced to follow through on a deal they had notnegotiated.

This was a bad sign for Levinsohns candidacy.


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But Wilson and Wolfs loud complaints about the Microsoft deal werent the worst sign forLevinsohns chances; Loebs behavior during the meeting was.

Loeb is the suited, slick, and handsome Wall Street type. He wears his salt-and-pepper hair shortand messy on purpose. Hes actually from Southern California, and sometimes he puts off a

surfer vibe.

During Levinsohns presentation, Loeb looked bored. He wasnt paying full attention. As theinterim CEO talked, Loeb stood at the back of the room and played with his BlackBerry.

One person in the room remembers watching Loeb texting for a while and then, during the mostimportant part of the presentation, getting up and going to the bathroom for 10 minutes.

This person remembers thinking: Oh, OK. Sorry, Ross, youre not CEO anymore.

After the meeting, Barrett, the Google executive Amoroso had helped Levinsohn poach, called

Levinsohn to ask how it went. Levinsohn told him he no longer felt like he was getting the job.

But who was?

That night, Levinsohn flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, where investment bank Allen & Co. holds anannual retreat for big-name media and technology executives.

Over the weekend, Levinsohn played a guessing game with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen,Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. With each of them, Levinsohn and theother Silicon Valley bigwigs ran through a long list of names, trying to figure out who might begetting the job Levinsohn had so hoped for. For each name they came up with, they came up

with a persuasive reason why that person could not be it.

Whom had Wolf and Loeb so clearly already decided on?

Finally, late Sunday night, Levinsohn got a call from a friend of his at Google.

This person asked: Had Levinsohn heard that Marissa Mayer had interviewed for the Yahoo jobthe Wednesday prior?

Levinsohn realized everything all at once.

Levinsohn now knew who Yahoos next CEO would be.

Soon, so would everyone else.

On Monday, July 16, four days after Levinsohns last board meeting, Yahoo made it official:Thirty-seven-year-old Marissa Mayer was Yahoos new CEO.


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The board had indeed already made Mayer an offer by the time Levinsohn went into that finalmeeting to present his plan for Yahoo.

After the news broke in public, Levinsohn admitted to friends that he was disappointed. He hadreally wanted the job, and believed he would have done very well with it. He also felt bad for the

team he put in place, who would now have to report to an unfamiliar leader.

But Levinsohn was also at peace. If he had to lose out to someone, at least he lost out to an icon.

Flickr/Fortune Live Media

Marissa Mayer

There is no one else in the world like Marissa Mayer.

Now 38 years old, she is a wife, a mother, an engineer, and the CEO of a 30-billion-dollarcompany. She is a woman in an industry dominated by men. In a world where corporations areexpected to serve shareholders before anyone else, she is obsessed with putting the customer

experience first.

Worth at least $300 million, she isnt afraid to show off her wealth. Steve Jobs may have lived ina small, suburban home with an apple tree out front, but Marissa Mayer lives in the penthouse ofSan Franciscos Four Seasons Hotel.

While rival CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Google wear flip-flops,hoodies, and T-shirts, Mayer wears Oscar de la Renta on the red carpet.
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Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesnt look the part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, andglamorous style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks.

Young, powerful, rich, and brilliant, Mayer is a role model for millions of women. And yet,unlike Facebooks chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Mayer resists calling herself a

feminist. She even infuriated working mothers across the world when she banned Yahooemployees from working from home.

Widely admired by the public at large, Mayer has many enemies within her industry. They sayshe is robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail. They say her obsession with theuser experience masks a disdain for the money-making side of the technology industry.

There is some truth to what they say.

And yet, a year after Mayer took over Yahoo, the companys stock price was up 100 percent.Engineers wanted to work for Yahoo again. More importantly, so did sought-after startup CEOs

like Tumblr founder David Karp, who agreed to sell his company to Yahoo for $1.1 billion.

Marissa Ann Mayer was born May 30, 1975 to parents Margaret Mayer, a Finnish art teacher and homemaker, and Michael Mayer, anenvironmental engineer.

She grew up in Wausau, Wis., with a sports-playing brother, Mason Mayer. It was a middle-classupbringing. She went to public schools and worked a summer job as a grocery clerk, but herfamily had enough time and money to enroll her in countless activities.

Most press photos of Mayer today show her on a stage, speaking with an interviewer in front of alarge crowd or a TV audience. Shes usually wearing a designer dress probably from herfavorite designer, Oscar de la Rentaand looking strong, confident, and in charge of the

moment.

But Mayer, now 38 years old, wasnt always so larger-than-life. She describes the child andteenage version of herself as painfully shy.


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Owen Thomas, Business Insider

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the 2013 Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.

Indeed, the Mayer you see in photos today is not the one remembered by the peers she grew upwith in the small town of Wausau. For one, her style involved more T-shirts, sweaters, and jeansnice clothes, but nothing flashy. And while Mayer has always presented well in front of an

audience, her peers dont remember her as extroverted or larger-than-life.

One of those peers is named Brian Jojade. He took Advanced Math with Mayer in eighth grade.He remembers Mayer as someone who hated social attention. Once, Jojade called the local radiostation and told them it was Mayers birthday. He asked the DJ to read her name out on air.Jojade, who had a small crush on Mayer, figured hearing her name would make her laugh. Itdidnt. She wasnt amused at all. You could just tell it wasnt fun for her.

Otherwise, Jojades overriding memory of Mayer is as the professional girl who sat in the frontof the classroom and always worked hard and made sure no matter what she was going to do, itwas going to get done right.

Mayers Wausau West High School classmate Elize Bazter says she best remembers Mayer asthe girl who was kind to everyone but would dodge conversations on her way to go studysomewhere else.

Wausau West had a class schedule system where, instead of periods, the day was broken up into20-minute mods. Classes lasted for 40 minutes or an hour. That meant there were 20-minute


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breaks during everyones day. Bazter said most upperclassmen would use the time to congregatein the schools commons.

You could study, says Bazter, but mostly it was talking and eating and gathering with yourfriends.

Wausau West High Yearbook 1993

Mayer introduces the 1992 homecoming court


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Not for teenage Marissa Mayer.

She would be the person to come down, get something to eat from the kitchen or the vendingmachines, and then she would go to the library or the science lab to study. She wouldnt be theone to stay and sit there and converse for 20 minutes.

Bazter says the image she thinks of when she remembers Mayer is of her in school, books inhand, walking down the hallway to do something else.

None of this is to say that Mayer had a sad, lonely time growing up in Wausau. She didnt.Mayer is fond of Wausau.

When she got married to a San Francisco banker named Zachary Bogue in 2009, she held twoceremonies: One was in California, and a second at her childhood church, Immanuel Lutheran inWausau.

As a kid, Mayers peersin school had no idea what to make of her. Likewise, Mayer says shewas painfully shy around them. But teachers? Teachers were Mayers kind of people.

In 2010, Mayer returned to her hometown to be inducted into the Wausau School DistrictsAlumni Hall of Fame. At a luncheon held in honor of her and 25 teachers retiring that year,Mayer gave a speech that the school district recorded in a video.

In the video, Mayer stands at a podium in a blue designer dress with a yellow corsage pinned on.She begins the speech by thanking her teachers, each of whom changed my life forever.

Then she begins to list her teachers by name. As she does Mr. Freedly, Mrs. Stay, Mr.

Flanagan you can see on Mayers face how important these people were to her growingup. About six names in, the timbre of Mayers voice actually breaks toward a sob, and she has tocatch herself with a breath and a small gulp. She cant stop her eyes from swelling with held-back tears, though.

Most teenagers fondly recall sneaking into high school their senior year for a pranksettingchickens loose or toilet-papering the hallways. Mayer once snuck into her AP Lit teachersclassroom to decorate it like a jungle because she was so inspired by the teachers lesson onHeart of Darkness.

Mayers fifth-grade teacher at Stettin Elementary, Wayne Flanagan, remembers that Mayer

refused to leave his classroom the last day of that school year. She did not want to go to middleschool.

She told Flanagan she was worried that she wouldnt make it there, with all the new kids andteachers shed have to meet.

Flanagan says Mayer the little girl was a home person; she liked to be safe and know whereshes at.


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Flanagan, who says it was obvious even then how far Mayer would go, told the reluctant littlegirl, Oh, I think youre going to make it fine.

Still, she wouldnt go. Eventually Flanagan called Mayers mother to let her know where herdaughter was.

Certainly the people Mayer spent most of her childhood with were a particular kind of nurturing,mentoring adult: coaches, teachers, counselors, and instructors.

As a little kid, she was in Brownies. She took piano lessons. She played volleyball andbasketball. She went to swimming and skiing lessons. She took ballet for as many as 35 hours aweek during middle school and high school. Her mother says ballet taught her criticism anddiscipline, poise and confidence.

In high school Mayer was also on the curling team. She was a pompom girl and a debater. Shewas on the precision dance team.

Mayer was so busy in part because her mother, Margaret Mayer, pushed her to be.

Flanagan, the fifth-grade teacher, says Mayers mother would frequently stop by school to checkon her daughters progress. He says he got to be good friends with the Mayers. They wereconcerned about her and that she was making the right progress. And she was. And she knewthatthat her parents were supportive of her.

In one way, Mayer owes her career to the relationships she was able to form with teachers.

Statistics show that many high school girls do not feel like they belong in math or science

classes. In 2003, 84 percent of high schoolers who took the SAT and said they wanted to majorin computer science were boysobviously that means just 16 percent were women.


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Wausau West High School Yearbook

Mayer was on Wausau West's state championship winning debate team.

Mayer says she never felt that bias at Wausau West.

It wasnt until I was a professional woman mentoring other girls in math and science that Ilearned that openly liking math and science is unusual for girls. Its actually considered far toonerdy and far too much for the boys.

Wausau schools were so supportive that I never felt strange for a second about pursuing mathand science and being good in them.

Mayer credits her teachers for helping her become less shy.

They did this by showing Mayer that she could organize more than just her backpack, desk,

and homeworkthat she could organize people, as their leader.

Mayers childhood piano teacher, Joanne Beckman, remembers Mayer being very different fromother children in that she was someone who watched people in order to figure out why theywere doing what they were doing.

A lot of kids that age are very interested in themselves, Beckman says, She was looking atother people.

By looking at her teachers, figuring out why they were doing what they were doing, Mayerovercame her painful shyness with peers by taking on the teachers role.

Even when she was in fifth grade, Mr. Flanagan could see the pedagogical side of Mayerdeveloping. He thought she would become a teacher someday.

In high school, Mayer took a leadership position in every club she joined. She became presidentof the Spanish club, treasurer of Key Club, and captain of the debate team.

One of her closest friends from Wausau, Abigail Garvey Wilson, says, When Marissa becamecaptain of the pompom squad, she wasnt in with that clique of girls, but she won them over inthree ways.

First: sheer talent. Marissa could choreograph a great routine.Second: hard work. Shescheduled practices lasting hours to make sure everyone was synchronized. And third: fairness.With Marissa in charge, the best dancers made the team.

In 1993, Mayer applied to, and was accepted into, 10 schools, including Harvard, Yale, Duke,and Northwestern.

To decide which one she would go to, Mayer created a spreadsheet, weighing variables for each.


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She picked Stanford. Her plan was to become a brain doctora profession that doesnt drawmuch on the leadership traits Mayer was quickly developing.

But soon enough, Mayer would find herself once again overcoming her shyness by taking chargeof a room full of peers, pushing them to work for hours.

Soon enough, she would find herself at the front of a Stanford classroom, interacting with peoplein the way that came most natural to her teaching them.

Teaching was her calling.

Page 3 of 8)

Illustration by Mike Nudelman

The summer before Marissa Mayer went to Stanford, she began asking herself a question thatwould guide her through college and for the rest of her life.

What does Zune think?

That summer, Mayer attended the National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia. It was nerdheaven. Picture science labs housed in wooden cabins shaded by trees. Mayer especially lovedone experiment where they mixed water and cornstarch to make a sloppy goo-like substance thatseemed to defy gravity.

One day, a postdoctoral student from Yale named Zune Nguyen spoke to the campers as a guestlecturer. He stunned all the smart kids in the room with puzzles and brainteasers. For days, thecampers couldnt stop talking about his talk.

Finally, one of Mayers counselors had enough.

You know, you have it all wrong, the counselor said to Mayer and the campers. Its not whatZune knows, its how Zune thinks.


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The counselor said that what made Nguyen so amazing wasnt the facts that he knew, but ratherhow he approached the world and how he thought about problems. The counselor said the mostremarkable thing about Nguyen was that you could put him in an entirely new environment orpresent him with an entirely new problem, and within a matter of minutes he would be asking theright questions and making the right observations.

From that moment on, the phrase: Its not what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks, stuck withMayer as a sort of personal guiding proverb.

In the fall, Mayer went to Stanford and began taking pre-med classes. She planned to become adoctor. But by the end of her freshman year, she was sick of it.

I was just doing too many flashcards, she says. They were easy for me, but it was just a lot ofmemorization.

She says she wanted to find a major that really made me think that would train her to think

critically, and become a great problem-solver. She also wanted to study how people think, howthey reason, how they express themselves.

I had this nagging voice in my head saying Its not what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks.

Mayer began to answer the voice in her headand find a course of study that helped her learnhow to thinkwhen she took an introductory computer science class: CS105.

Mayer was engrossed by the challenge of programmingtaking a problem and using her mindto solve it.

During the semester, she entered a classwide design contest for extra credit. Calling on the samepart of her brain that made her such an excellent pompom choreographer, Mayer made a screensaver featuring exploding fireworks. In a class of 300, Mayer came in second.

The design was good enough that Mayers CS105 professor, Eric Roberts, would also use anadaptation of the screen saver as an assignment for the next several years.


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Stanford University

Stanford professor Eric Roberts says Mayer was an incredible teacher.

Roberts was also impressed enough with Mayers exploding fireworks that he invited her and a few

other top finishers over for dinner at his house. He became her mentor, as once again, Mayer bonded

with a teacher.

Mayer had also found her major.

Mayer opted for symbolic systemsa combination of disciplines straight out of Zune Nguyenshead: Linguistics, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer science classes.

Symbolic systems has become a famous Stanford major in Silicon Valley. Besides Mayer, otheralumni include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; former senior vice president of iOS softwareat Apple, Scott Forstall; and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

Mayers teacherly leadership streak came out in a big way when she took Philosophy 160A, thenconsidered a weed-out course for prospective symbolic systems majors.

During Philosophy 160A, the students break into study groups of a half dozen or so students, andthe groups are assigned problem sets. Mayers group just like all the othersput off doingtheir problem sets until the day before they were due.

So that semester at Stanford was full of all-nighters for Mayer and her Philosophy 160A group.
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Mayer ended up in a group that included Josh Elman, now a venture capitalist. Looking back onthose study sessions, Elman remembers times when people in the group were bouncing off thewalls.

He says, Marissa was always like, OK, back to work. Lets get this done. She was focused on

making sure we got the right answer quickly.

It felt like she was the smartest student in the room and the most serious. You always knewthose two things about her. Very smart. Very serious.

The social dynamic of the group was typical for Mayer. As usual, she commanded the roomorganized the groups work in an all-business fashionbut was otherwise shy, and somewhatreclusive.

In the years ahead, this combinationMayers willingness to be authoritative and demandingthe way a teacher would, with a painful fear or reluctance of being personal would cause

problems for Mayer.

One Stanford classmate interpreted Mayers shyness as being kind of stuck up.

She would do her work and then leave. When otherpeople would stay and hang out and havepizza, shed just be out of there because the work is done.

Indeed, Mayer doesnt seem to have had a very active social life in college.

One person who lived in her dorm said she appeared to always be down to business and notmuch for socializing.

She wasnt one of those people into making new friends around the dorm. She was always doing something more important than just chilling.

The simplest explanation for Mayers social behavior at Stanford remains that Mayer was, as shehas said many times, painfully shy.

Later at Stanford, Mayer found herself in a group setting that was less social, more comfortable,and more familiar for her. As an upperclassman in symbolic systems, she was tapped to teach aclass.

She took to it naturally.

Computer science professor Eric Roberts, still Mayers mentor, supervised her teaching. He saysshe was unusually good at it and extremely effective.

After Mayer taught a course in the spring, Roberts took a survey of her students. The resultswere astounding: They loved hereven if she did sometimes talk a mile a minute.


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Roberts asked Mayer to stick around Stanford to teach another class over the summer; shereadily agreed.

She loved teaching, says Roberts.

Of course she did. Stanford students called her stuck up when they were her classmates. Butwhen she was their teacher, they thought she was great.

WATCH: Marissa Mayer teaches a class at Stanford

Mayer excelled the rest of her years as an undergraduate at Stanford. After she got her bachelorsdegree, she stayed at the school to get a masters in computer science, with a speciality inartificial intelligence.

As graduate school drew to a close, word got out about Mayers teaching ability.

She soon faced a choice.

Should she become a teacher, and step full time into a role that had always suited her so well?

Or should she challenge herself and work somewhere in the technology industry?

Taking A 2 percent Chance On Google

When people ask Mayer why she joined Google after getting her masters in symbolic systems atStanford, she likes to tell them her Laura Beckman story. Its about the daughter of her middle

school piano teacher, Joanne Beckman.

Mayer begins: Laura tried out for the volleyball team her junior year at high school. At the endof the tryouts, she was given a hard choice: bench on varsity, or start on JV.

Most people, when theyre faced with this choice, would choose to play - and they'll pick JV.Laura did the opposite. She chose varsity, and she benched the whole season.

But then an amazing thing happened. Senior year she tried out and she made varsity as a starter,and all the JV starters from the previous year benched their whole senior year.

I remember asking her: How did you know to choose varsity?

And she said, I just knew that if I got to practice with the better players every day, I wouldbecome a much better player, even if I didnt get to play in any of the games.

The moral of Mayers story is that its always better to surround yourself with the best people sothat they will challenge you and you will grow.


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My quest to find, and be surrounded by, smart people is what brought me to Google, she says.

And thats the overriding reason why Mayer joined Google. But quests for self-improvementaside, its also true that Mayer almost missed her chance to join the company that would makeher rich and powerful someday.

Late on a Friday in mid-April of her last year at Stanford, Mayer sat at her computer, eating pastaand reading emails.

She already had 12 job offers to choose from, and wasnt looking for any more hard choices.

So when yet another pitch from a recruiter popped up in her inbox, she tapped on her keyboardsdelete key to get rid of it.

Only, she missed.

Instead of hitting delete, Mayer hit the space bar and opened the email.

That emails subject line: Work at Google?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Mayer read the email and remembered a conversation she had with Eric Roberts who was still a mentor

years after she took his computer science class for non-majors. The prior fall, Roberts listened to Mayer


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talk about the recommendation engine shed built, and then told her she should meet with a pair of

Ph.D. students who were working on similar stuff. Their names: Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Mayer realized that Google was their startup. Trusting Roberts' recommendation, she replied toan email she had meant to delete, writing that shed like an interview.

She got one, and met with engineer Craig Silverstein. Silverstein blew her away with his smarts.In the Laura Beckman analogy, he was varsity.

Google offered Mayer a job. She seriously considered it.

Her reservations were that she had planned on taking a job at consulting firm McKinsey, whereher clients would be Silicon Valley companies.

Google was a riskier career choice. In her typical, precise way, shed crunched the data and haddecided that the company only had a 2 percent chance of succeeding.

Also, some small part of Mayer was worried about Googles weird name, which she imaginedwould be the punch line of family jokes for years to come.

She got over it.

The turning point for me, she says, was realizing that I would learn more at Google, trying tobuild a company, regardless of whether we failed or succeeded, than I would at any of the othercompanies I had offers from.

For the next 13 years, Marissa Mayer worked at Google.

(Page 4 of 8)



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Marissa Mayer joined Google as a programmer and rose to become the executive in charge of theway Google search and many other popular Google products looked to Web users.

She became a senior vice president, with thousands of Google employees reporting to her andhundreds of millions of people around the world using products she helped build. The job made

her worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But then something strange happened to Mayer, andpeople in the industry wondered what went wrong.

Google

Mayer during her early Google days.

Google in its early days was a fun place to work, energized by incredible success and perks likefree food. But it was also a grinding, stressful environment.

On Mayers second day at Google in 1999, she went to the kitchen for a snack at around 11 A.M.There, she bumped into Larry Page, then CEO of the company. He was standing in a corner.

I'm hiding, he said. The site is down. Its all gone horribly awry.

He was exaggerating, of course. Google was actually doing too well at the moment.

In 1999, Google.com was a cleaner-looking and faster search engine than any of the others onthe Web, and it was rapidly taking share from older search engines like AltaVista and Lycos. In


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fact, the site was down that day because Google had just signed a deal with Netscape to handlesearch queries from Netscape.com. Google only had 300 computers serving search results, and itasked Netscape to send just a fraction of its traffic. Netscape ignored the request and sent all ofits users.

Down went Google.com.

Google went back online that day, but only after hours of work from Mayer, Silverstein, and hernew colleagues. She went home at 3 a.m.

Perhaps because of long nights like that one, Mayer and Page eventually grew very close. At onepoint during Mayers early years at Google, she and Page started dating.

Long hours would prove the norm for Mayer. During her first two years at Google, she worked100 hours a week as a programmer.

Mayer thrived working the tough hours. She only needed four hours of sleep a night, and whenshe was awake, she would work harder than anyone. She found a niche at Google: guardian ofthe clean, easy-to-use look and feel of Google products. She obsessed over pixels; their hue,shade, and placement. She co-authored a handful of patents, including an important one forGoogle: Graphical user interface for a universal search engine.

By 2005, Mayer moved into management, overseeing the look and feel of Googles mostimportant products.

She was very good at it.

Google


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The first is that she would recreate the technological circumstances of her users in her own life. Mayer

went without broadband for years in her home, refusing to install it until it was also installed in the

majority of American homes. She carried an iPhone at Google, which makes Android phones, because so

did most mobile Web users.

Mayers second method was to lean on data. She would track, survey, and measure every userinteraction with Google products, and then use that data to design and re-design.

Mayers design-by-numbers approach to product development was not always popular.

Famously, a lead designer named Doug Bowman quit Google over it.

In a farewell blog post, Bowman wrote: a team at Google couldnt decide between twoblues, so theyre testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had arecent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove mycase. I cant operate in an environment like that. Ive grown tired of debating such minuscule

design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Bowman went to Twitter.

Mayers obsession with data-driven design would only gain more and louder critics over theyears. But Mayers methods also made her one of the Internets most effective design andproduct development leaders during her years at Google. People at Google credit her with thesuccess of not just Google search, but also many others, including Gmail, Google Maps, andGoogle News.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says: Marissa makes the decisions she feels are right, and

history proves that she probably calls it right.


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San Francisco Magazine

Julian Guthrie profiled Marissa Mayer in San Francisco Magazine's March 2008

issue.

Fame and Glory

As Google became a world-famous company, Mayer began to get attention from the media.Newsweek called her one of the 10 Tech Leaders of the Future. Business 2.0 named her to theSilicon Valley Dream Team. Now-defunct technology news site Red Herring said Mayer wasone of 15 Women to Watch.

Then, in 2004, Google went public. Its stock price soared. This made Mayer and hundreds of hercolleagues rich in an instant. The medias fascination with Google kicked upseveral notches.Mayer, in charge of the look of Googles most important product, and a rare photogenic womanin the technology industry, was a natural subject of the medias fixation.

Mayer also boosted her public profile by deciding to spend her new riches conspicuously. Shebought the $5 million penthouse suite at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, and another homecloser to Googles Mountain View campus. She started throwing fabulous parties at both,jumping feet first into San Franciscos high-end social scene. Guests at her homes would seeexpensive original artwork from famous artists, like the 400-piece glass installation Mayercommissioned from Dale Chihuly.


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Mayer did not mind the attention. In fact, she asked Google public relations staff to get her moreof it, but in the right outlets.

Mayers eagerness to be known by the public may appear to contradict her claim that she suffersfrom shyness. It doesnt. She describes her shyness as a need to withdraw from social situations

almost as soon as she enters them. Being featured in a glossy magazine does not require her tointeract with every reader, so she probably doesnt have as much anxiety about it as she doesmaking small talk at a party.

Plus, there is such a thing as overcompensation.

Mayer in Vogue in 2009

By the end of the decade, Vogue magazine would profile Mayer, and describe her as the 34 -year-old

mega-millionaire, Oscar de la Renta-obsessed, computer-programming Google executive who lives in a

penthouse atop the Four Seasons.

Outside Google, her star was never brighter. Inside Google, however, where wealth wassupposed to be quietly spent, and engineers were supposed to rule, Mayer would soon be undersiege.

Demoted

At the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, Marissa Mayers remarkable career suddenly lostmomentum.


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First, in Oct. 2010, Mayer was removed from the top of Googles search organization and put incharge of Google Maps and other local products.

Technically, this was a lateral move, if not a promotion, because Mayer retained her vicepresident title and she was, at the same time, given a seat on Googles Operating Committee

then CEO Eric Schmidts roundtable of top executives from the company.

In reality, it was a demotion. Mayer was no longer in charge of what Googles most importantproduct looked like or how it worked. At Google, there is search, which generates nearly all ofthe companys revenues and profits, and then there is everything else. Running Google search,Mayer was managing the most important product at the worlds most important Internetcompany. Running Google Maps, she was not.

Still, there was the mitigating factor that Mayer was on Googles Operating Committee, and shetherefore reported directly to CEO Eric Schmidt.

That went away too.

By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Google CEO Larry Page did not put Mayer on his executive team.

In December 2010, co-founder Larry Page announced that a decade after giving the CEO job up to Eric

Schmidt, he was going to take it back.


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When Page formally took control of Google in April 2011, he dissolved the OperatingCommittee and created a new council of executives who would report directly to him. This groupcame to be known as the L-Team. Mayer was not named to it.

Then, to make matters worse for Mayer, Page put another Google executive, Jeff Huber, in

charge of Geo/Local, the group Mayer had been tasked to run only months before. Mayer nowreported to Huber, who joined Google in 2003four years after her.

Mayers loss of authority was felt across the company. One former colleague says that prior to2010, Mayer was always able to get what she needed from management.

If her boss [Google senior vice president of product] Jonathan Rosenberg didnt approve ofsomethingdidnt give her head count or didnt give her an acquisition or whatevershedjust go right above him and get what she needed.

That now stopped.

She would try to do something and HR would say thats not the kind of thing she could doanymore.

That whole paradigm broke apart.

Another former colleague says, When I first turned up, Marissa was very powerful at Google.Marissa used to issue edicts and everyone did them. Over time that proved not to be so true.

Another way to track the rise and fall of Mayer at Google is to look at the companys own,public list of executives in the About Google section of Google.com.

In November 2005, Mayers name and bio finally appeared on Googles management page. ByMay 2011, her name was off the site.

What happened to Marissa Mayers career?

One explanation is that Mayers career stalled as 2010 ended and 2011 began because that isexactly when Larry Page decided he was going to become Google CEO again.

Because Mayer and Page had dated years before, some wonder if Page decided he could neverallow Mayer to report directly to him because it would be unethical or show favoritism.

Everyone at Google had long known about the relationship, and no one ever made it an issueit was too taboo to bring up.

One Googler explains: Google is one of those places where, like a cult, there are things that areOK to talk about and things that are not OK to talk about. That was one of those things that wasnot OK to talk about.


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Its actually hard to find someone at Google who was bothered by the fact that there once was aromantic relationship between Mayer and Page.

Perhaps this is because both of them have so publicly moved on.

FameGame

Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue

In 2007, Page married a Stanford graduate student named Lucy Southworth. The ceremony was on

Richard Bransons private island.

That same year, a Google colleague emailed Mayer to say: Im bringing a boy I think youd beinterested in. Be cool. The boy was Zachary Bogue. Tall and dark-haired, Bogue looks like hecould be the star of The Bachelor. He had played football at Harvard, and was now a banker inSan Francisco. In 2009, Mayer and Bogue married. Vogue covered the ceremony. Of theirmarried life, he says: We continue to do work in the evening. Theres never a distinct linebetween work and home. Marissas work is such a natural extension of her. Its not somethingshe needs to shed at the end of the day.

Its possible that Mayers romantic history with Page stalled her career at Google. But thats not

a widely held belief among Mayers former colleagues.

A more common explanation was that she may not have had the right kind of ambition to gomuch further.

Theres a philosophy that corporations exist to benefit three constituencies: shareholders,employees, and customers. At Google, there are two kinds of customers: the users of Googlesservices and the advertisers who pay Google to be seen by users.
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Mayer spent all her years at Google worried about just half of one of those constituencies: users.

To be fair, that was her job.

From Googles earliest days, Mayer had always been tasked with making products that users

love. And she pursued this task with a single-minded passion, sleeping four hours a night,working 100-hour weeks, grinding through back-to-back meetings without breaks.

But Mayer may have been a bit too single-minded in this pursuitat least for the sake of herfuture at Google.

Compared to some Google executives who joined the company around the same time as Mayer,Mayer showed much less interest in learning about the business side of the company.

One former Google executive who worked in ad sales says, I did not work with her, and thatstelling.

This executive says that even before Mayer joined Googles Operating Committee,she had anopen invitation to join its meetingsout of respect for her importance to the company and in aneffort to develop her career. But while Mayer would always show up for meetings aboutGoogles products, she would never show up for a business review.

Doug Edwards, Xooglers

Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar during Google's early years


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Sundar would do anything to help the company. He was internally working cross-functionallyto get results. If someone was offline and didnt get the strategy hed sit down with them one-on-one. He really put work into it. Marissa didnt do that at all.

One of Mayers former colleagues says she skipped all those meetings because, when i t came to

the business side of Google, Mayer was always less interested.

She has a disposition toward the consumer side, and users.

This trait undoubtedly shaped Mayers career at Google, and it would be very important later atYahoo.

But more than her lack of interest in the business side of Google, and certainly more than herhistory with Page, there was one overriding reason for Marissa Mayers sudden decline in power.

Her great strength, her teacherly I-know-best leadership style had finally begun to grate on

people at Google. Worse, it had begun to slow the company down.

Eventually, a group of Google engineers decided to try and do something about it.

John Battelle, who has put on several large tech conferences in the Bay Area, many of themfeaturing Marissa Mayer as a speaker, says of her: I've never had a conversation with her whenshe wasnt completely certain she was right.

This pedantic style works when you are the traffic cop in a room full of designers and productmanagers, but it alienated some of Mayers colleagues over the years.

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Mayer and and Salar Kamangar clashed often.

One peer it irked in particular was Salar Kamangar. Now the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Kamangar

joined Google as its ninth employee. He drafted its original business plan, and handled financing and

legal early on. Younger than Mayer, he rose along with her at Google, though not as conspicuously.

Mayer and Kamangar clashed often.

The specific habit of Mayers that drove Kamangar nuts was her ability to speak incredibly fast,not allowing him to re-enter the debate.

In an academic situation, thats OK because the best ideas rise and you have discussion, saysone Googler, familiar with Kamangars complaints about Mayer. But in a place where there arepersonal feelings involved, if you cant win the debate regardless of how hard you try, becauseshe will out-talk you, thats a challenging situation.

The rivalry between Mayer and Kamangar was so intense that when Kamangar was made a vicepresident before her, she threatened to quit the company. She got her promotion months later.

Another Mayer habit that annoyed colleagues was one she picked up straight from academia.

For many years at Google, Mayer insisted that if her colleagues wanted to speak with her, theyhad to do so during her office hours. Mayer would post a spreadsheet online, and ask thatanyone who wanted to speak with her sign up for a five-minute window.

When Mayers office hours rolled around in the afternoon, a line would start to form outside ofher office and spill over into the nearby couches.

Office hours are socially acceptable in an academic environment because the power dynamicis clear. The students are subordinate to the professor, usually their elder and mentor.

But Mayers office hours were not just for her subordinates, but also her peers.

So there, amid the associate product managers waiting to visit with Mayer to discuss their latestassignment or a class trip to Zurich, sat Google vice presidentspeople who had been at thecompany as long as Mayer, and in some cases held jobs as important as hers.

What made the office hours even more obnoxious for some Google engineers and product

managers was that all consumer-facing product launches or updates required Mayers sign-off.

Her weakness was an unwillingness to delegate, says Craig Silverstein, the Google engineerwho hired Mayer years ago. She doesnt need any sleep. When you have four or five morehours in the day than most people do, you dont learn to delegate because you dont need to.

The team who grew most frustrated with Mayer over the office hours and, more generally, theneed for her to sign off on product changes, were the engineers in charge of Google search.


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sigir2006

One story is that Amit Singhal told Larry Page that Mayer had to go.

Several of Mayers former Google colleagues confirm that among the most put off was Amit Singhal.

While Mayer was in charge of the way Google Search looked, Singhal, was one of the engineersin charge of creating the algorithms that actually power the search engine. After he re-wroteLarry Page and Sergey Brins original code in 2001, he was named a Google Fellow. Hes abig deal inside the company.

One of Mayers former Google colleagues says that it was actually Singhal and three othersearch engineers who finally went to Larry Page and asked that Mayer be removed from the topof Googles search organization.

These four guys, they were constantly being hampered. Theyd say: We want to roll out thisranking change. Marissas like, until I review it, you cant launch it. Theyre like: But itsbeen three weeks.

Finally, says this source, Singhal and the other engineers went to Larry Page and said, Takeyour pick. Her, or us.

In this persons telling, Page made his choice and thats why Mayer was moved out of search.She had become a bottleneck.
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Other people say Page removed Mayer from her perch atop search after lots of input from lots ofpeople.

Says one Googler: What Larry saw as he became CEO was that Marissa has a tough user-interface that causes problems with other stakeholders.

Another Googler familiar with those discussions says: Everyone agreed that something neededto change.

This Googler wonders if Mayer was unfairly punished in 2010 and 2011.

Sometimes she got into trouble because shes ambitious and a woman and thats tough in amansworld. People take potshots at her because she was very young and successful. I also thinkshes young and learning and you sometimes dont get things right.

Another reason for Mayers career stall in 2011 was that Google, as a company, had grown up.

By 2010, Google had 24,000 employees. It wasnt going to be the kind of place where, justbecause an executive had been there a long time and knew the co-founders personally, she wasgoing to be able to get whatever she wanted.

You couldnt run the company like that anymore, says one person who lived through thetransition.

As you grow you have to hire people who have done this stuff before, and having people whohavent lord over them doesnt work.

So, by early 2011, Marissa Mayers progress at Google hadstalled. But another, greateropportunity was about to come her way.

(Page 5 of 8)



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On the afternoon of Monday, July 16, 2012, Yahoo chief revenue officer Michael Barrett stood at a gate in New Yorks JFK airp ort, waiting toboard a plane to London.

AdMeld

Michael Barrett had only joined Yahoo weeks before Mayer.

Suddenly, his phone rang. It was a reporter. She said, Oh my God. You have a new boss. What do you

think?

The reporter told Barrett the news: Yahoo had a new CEO. It was Marissa Mayer from Google.

Barrett was shocked.

Barrett himself had only joined Yahoo from Google less than a month before.

Barretts job at Google had been a good one. Hed only left because Yahoo chairman FredAmoroso had told him that interim CEO Ross Levinsohn was going to get the full-time job.

As Barrett got back off the plane, he thought: What the hell happened?

- - -

The story of how Marissa Mayer came to Yahoo begins in the summer of 2011.

Thats when Dan Loeb, the manager of a hedge fund called Third Point, decided he could make alot of money investing in Yahoo if he could force a few people to quit its board and install aCEO of his choosing.


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There were two simple reasons Loeb believed Yahoo was a worthwhile investment, despite adecade of mismanagement. The first was that 700 million or so people still went to Yahoo.comevery month, even though the company hadnt come up with a cool new product in years.

The second was that Yahoo had made a brilliant investment in two Asian Internet companies,

Alibaba and Yahoo! Japan, and Loeb did not believe this investment was being taken advantageof by management.

So Loeb took a 5 percent stake in Yahoo and began a letter-writing, shareholder-activistcampaign to unseat its CEO and several of its board members. In his letters, Loeb accuratelypointed out that Yahoo had been mismanaged for a decade, and that it was largely the boardsfault. In December, Yahoos board hoped to appease Loeb by hiring PayPal president ScottThompson to be Yahoos new CEO.

Loeb was not appeased. Publicly, he began lobbying Thompson to install new board members.Privately, Loeb asked a consultant hed hired, former MTV president Michael Wolf, to begin

looking for someone who could replace Thompson.

David Needleman


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Dan Loeb asked Michael Wolf to find a CEO for Yahoo.

With this mission in mind, Loeb and Wolf flew to San Francisco for a series of meetings in January 2012.

One morning during their trip, Loeb and Wolf drove south to meet with venture capitalist Marc

Andreessen for breakfast at his house. Famous for co-founding Netscape, the original Webbrowser company, Andreessen had gone on to found two other billion-dollar companies and asuccessful venture capital firm. By the winter of 2012, Andreessen had become Silicon Valleysgo-to wise man.

Loeb and Wolf asked Andreessen if hed join their slate for Yahoos board. He refused toparticipate in a deal perceived to be hostile to Yahoos founders and current management, butsaid he was happy to talk about Yahoo strategy.

The New Yorkers asked him: Whom should Yahoo hire: a media person or a product person?

By a media person, they meant an executive who could run Yahoo almost like a televisionnetwork or magazine publisher, but on the Internet. This persons specialties would be the abilityto identify great content, close deals with the people who create it and those who could distributeit, and the skill set to sell ads against it. CBS chief executive Les Moonves and former NewsCorp chief operating officer Peter Chernin are this kind of executive. So was Michael Eisnerwhen he spent 20 years transforming Disney from a sleepy studio into a corporate giant.

By a product person, Loeb and Wolf meant someone who could get teams of engineers anddesigners to build software tools that consumers find useful, addictive, or fun. Facebook CEOMark Zuckerberg is this kind of executive. So was Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs.

Almost since its beginning, Yahoo had struggled with its identity.

Should it act like a media company one that tries to attract consumers by producing andbuying content and distributing it through Yahoo.com? Or should Yahoo act like a productscompanywhere Internet software tools like search, Webmail, stock charts, and photo storageattract users?


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AP

Marc Andreessen

Andreessen said: If you get the chance to run Yahoo, the only way you'll be able to save it is if you hire

someone who can make great Yahoo products.

Andreessen talked about the difference between technology companies and normal companies.He said the output of normal companies is their product: cars, shoes, life insurance. In his view,the output of technologies companies is innovation. Whatever they are selling today, they will beselling something different in five years. If they stop innovating, they die.

Andreessen said the person at the top of Yahoo needs to know how to pioneer and produce asteady stream of innovative products if the company was going to survive in a competition withlarge companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple or even some of the Valleys many startups.

The message stuck.

In May 2012, Loeb finally figured out a way to get Scott Thompson out of the CEO job.

Loeb learned that Thompson had graduated from Stonehill College in 1979 with a bachelorsdegree in accountingnot a bachelors degree in accounting and computer science as Yahooclaimed on its website, and more importantly, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filingfrom April.


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On May 3, Loeb drafted a letter containing this information, and sent it to the Yahoo board andthe SEC, which would publish it for the public. On May 13, Thompson resigned, citing healthissues.

Flickr/Yodel Anecdotal

Scott Thompson resigned from Yahoo after Dan Loeb revealed his bio was false.

The Yahoo board, which had hired Thompson without the help of an outside executive search firm, also

capitulated. In a legal settlement, it gave Loeb much of what hed been asking for since the summer

before.

Five directors resigned immediately. Loeb and Wolf gained board seats, and more importantly,the chairmanship of two important committees. Loeb would chair the boards transactioncommittee, which meant he would have sign-off power on any sale of Yahoos valuable Asianassets. Wolf would lead the executive search committee, which had the immediate task offinding Yahoos next CEO.

Wolf had someone in mindjust the kind of products CEO Andreessen had recommended.He hired executive recruiter Jim Citrin of Spencer Stuart, and gave him a description of theYahoo CEO job.

The document Wolf gave Citrin said Yahoo needed to hire someone who can modernizeYahoos user experiences on mobile devices by building a culture that attracts the bestcontent, developer, product innovation, advertising, marketing and managerial talent. The
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document said the board sought someone who could re-establish Yahoo!s credibility andreputation in the tech-innovator community and build partnerships with companies such asMicrosoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.

At Citrins first meeting with the board the week of May 21, 2012, he told the directors there

were only a few people in the industry who could do the job described in Wolfs document.Citrin said those people were at companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google. He said that it wasgoing to be very difficult for Yahoo to hire any of them.

The board came up with a list of candidates for Citrin to approach.

Though he was a media, not a products executive, the top prospect for most of the directorswas Ross Levinsohn, who became interim Yahoo CEO when Thompson stepped down.

Levinsohn, who worked in Yahoos Santa Monica office, is the kind of executive who looks likehe belongs in the CEOs office of a west coast entertainment company. He'll point at the camera

when hes having his picture taken. Hes got a wide smile. His hair is combed back. He wearssuits. He looks good in the fleece zip-up sweater vests they give out at Allen & Cos Sun Valleyconference for media moguls.

Levinsohn joined Yahoo in October 2010 as an executive vice president in charge of theAmericas region. Levinsohn had impressed shareholders with his performance at Yahoosannual shareholder meeting in 2011, when he presented a vision for Yahoo as the worldspremier digital media company. For a moment, hed ended the confusion about what kind ofcompany Yahoo wasa product company or a media company. To many directors, itseemed like Levinsohn understood the value of Yahoos audience, and had a plan to tap it.


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AP

Apple's Eddy Cue was a candidate for the Yahoo CEO job.

Among the other names were Nikesh Arora, the chief business officer at Google; Eddy Cue, Apples

senior vice president of Internet Software and Services; and Jason Kilar, then the CEO of Web TV siteHulu.

The board also asked Citrin to approach Googles Marissa Mayer.

Citrin cautioned that Mayer appeared to be a lifer at Google and was unlikely to be interested inthe job.

Many of the directors wondered whether Mayer was actually capable of leading a large publiccorporation. They asked question like: Had she ever managed a balance sheet? Hadnt she beendemoted only a year before?

Citrin said hed call Mayer anyway.

- - -

World Economic Forum

In the middle of June 2012, Marissa Mayer sat on a plane, thinking and preparing. That Monday, shed

gotten a call from Jim Citrin of executive search firm Spencer Stuart. Hed been retained by Yahoo, and

he had Yahoo director Michael Wolf with him.
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Would she like to speak to Wolf? She would.

Now Mayer was flying to New York to have dinner at Wolfs Manhattan apartment with Wolf,Citrin, and three other Yahoo directors: David Kenny, John Hayes, and Thomas McInerney.

After 13 years at Google, she was surprised to find herself actually, finally, truly consideringleaving.

The past two years at Googlesince she was, according to the rest of the world demoted had been quieter than the first 11, but in many ways more challenging and exciting.

In local and geo, shed taken over a much more massive operation than the one shed beenrunning at Google.

Whenever people asked her about the demotion, as Wolf and the other directors might overdinner, Mayer always pointed out how she had gone from managing 250 product managers in

search to supervising a much larger, more diverse group of managers1,100 people managingengineering, design, marketing, and sales. Mayer would tell people that she was supervisingsome 6,000 contractors.

Shed figured out that by the fraction of the company, the geo and local piece that she wasrunning was something like 20-25 percent of the companys overall headcount.

The business challenges shed dealt with in those years had been as diverse as the types ofpeople she managed.

In September 2011, she went and bought Zagat for $125 million. It was not the kind of deal

someone who had been demoted could do. It was Googles 10th-largest acquisition ever. Morethan that, the integration of Zagat into Google search signaled a major change in Googlesphilosophy.

Previously, the company had steadfastly refused to own or produce content that would show upin its search engine. It would just index what was already out there being created by the rest ofthe world.

But after Mayer joined geo in 2010, she found that the rest of the world wasnt as good atgathering geographic data and putting it on the Web as it was creating websites for Google toindex. So she decided it was time for Google to start owning data. Her boss, Jeff Huber, and

Larry Page had backed her on the deal and the philosophical change, and now Google had lots ofcontent for location-based searchesa popular kind of search to do on mobile, which wasquickly becoming the future of the Internet.

Even as Mayer was on the plane, she was playing a crucial part in helping Google fend off one ofits toughest competitors in mobile: Apple. Months before, shed noticed that Apple had startedbuying companies in the mapping space. Then executive recruiters sent by Apple had startedreaching out to her people.


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Obviously, they were up to something big. Mayer didnt know Apple would never announceit until it was donebut she figured it planned to remove Google Maps from the iPhone andreplace it with its own Apple Maps. Shed already countered Apples offers by giving her peoplewhat they really wanted. Sometimes it was raises. Sometimes it was independence. Sometimes itwas new titles. Sometimes it was actually more work, more responsibility. She knew what her

people wanted. None of her reports ended up quitting to join Apple. Now, Mayer had her teamworking on a new Google Maps app for iPhone. She was confident it was going to beat anythingApples people could come up with.

Mayer knew that her job switch in 2010 looked like a demotion to some people outside thecompanyespecially people in the media. But as she flew to New York that day in June 2012,Marissa Mayer knew that shed spent the previous two years learning a lot from a bigger job thanshed ever had before.

And now she knew that she was ready for an even bigger one.

On the evening of June 24, Mayer arrived at Wolfs modern, Fifth Avenue apartment. Aninformal dinner was served.

Mayer read for the part of Yahoo CEO.

Throughout the conversation, Mayer touted a surprisingly thought-out plan for overhaulingYahoos culture, executive suite, and product line-up.

After Mayer left, one of the board directors said to Citrin: Thats the next CEO of Yahoo. Thecommittee agreed that Wolf would stay in touch with her.

One of the directors noticed something funny, but decided to keep it to himself. Wolf had serveda very expensive bottle of wine, and Mayer hadnt had a sip. Probably she was just nervous.

Wolf wants to hire Mayer, but everyone else?

After that dinner, Wolf, the chair of Yahoos search committee, had decided that Marissa Mayershould be the next CEO of Yahoo.

With her experience running cornerstone Google products like Search, Google Maps, and Gmail,she was exactly the kind of innovative, products-oriented CEO that Silicon Valley wise manMarc Andreessen had told him to hire back in January.

But Wolf, and his pro-Mayer allies on the board, had a problem.

By mid-June, other Yahoo directors had already all but decided that interim CEO RossLevinsohn should get the full-time job.


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Yahoo Advertising

Ross Levinsohn and Katie Couric

When Thompson resigned in the middle of May, and Levinsohn was named interim CEO, new chairman

Fred Amoroso pulled Levinsohn aside and told him to run Yahoo like he was going to be the full-time

CEO. After that conversation, Levinsohn sent a memo to all of Yahoos employees. He wrote, Im fired

up and I hope you are too. I believe in the power of what were doing. We have an incredibly talented

team, unparalleled strengths in key areas and most importantly, I see the purple pride building

everywhere. Lets move forward quickly with conviction and confidence.

Levinsohn ran with the opportunity, and by the end of Junereally, just a few weekshedaccomplished a lot. Hed signed a deal with Facebook over patents. He was able to quicklyrecruit impressive executives into Yahoo, including Google advertising executive MichaelBarrett. Levinsohn and his top dealmaker, Jim Heckman, were also able to nail down severalcontent partnerships in just a few weeks, including one with on-demand music service Spotify.

Levinsohn and Heckman were also busy working on much larger deals with Microsoft, Google,and a fast-growing ad tech company based in New York called AppNexus.

As Levinsohn worked hard to earn the full-time job, Yahoo directors began to come underpressure from the rest of the industry to hand him the job. Levinsohns allies across the media,advertising, and entertainment industries wrote Yahoo directors letters recommending him.
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All Things D

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and cofounder Reid Hoffman lobbied for Ross Levinsohn.

At The Wall Street Journals D: All Things Digital conference, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn co -

founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman enthusiastically endorsed Levinsohn, and said Yahoo would

finally be in good hands if it put him in charge.

After several weeks went by without Yahoo naming a full-time replacement for Thompson, evenMarc Andreessen wrote a note to Loeb suggesting that Yahoo should just put Levinsohn in thejob permanently and commit to a media strategy, since it seemed unlikely they could get a top-end product CEO, and continued delays would permanently damage the company.

Meanwhile, All Things D reporter Kara Swisherwho had, over the years, covered Yahoocloser than anyone thanks to board-level sourcesseemed to be actively pushing for Yahoo tohire Levinsohn. She said the only reason the board hadnt hired him yet was that it was lookingfor a unicorn CEO one who actually does not exist but who sounds just dreamy.

By the beginning of July, several board members were almost completely sold. They wanted

Levinsohn to keep the job.
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parents, Disney and News Corporation, and hed pulled himself out of the running taking agood option away from the board. Some members of the board felt Swisher had meant to nukeKilar in order to help Levinsohn get the job. (Swisher denies this, and there isn't any evidence toback the allegation.)

David Kenny was particularly insistent on secrecy. The fall prior, before Scott Thompson washired, Kenny had interviewed for the CEO job at Yahoo. Word of his meetings in Sunnyvale hadgotten out, and Kenny had to resign from Akamai, where he was president. Kenny recoverednicelyhed become the CEO of The Weather Channel but he didnt want the same thinghappening to any of the executives interviewing that day.

The directors rode in the bus for exactly five milessouth on University, south on 101, off thehighway at Oregon Expressway, and continuing onto Page Mill road.

Google Street View

This is the secret location of the Yahoo CEO interviews

After 10 to 15 minutes, the the bus pulled into an office park, and everyone got out.

Theyd arrived at the offices of Third Points law firm, Gibson Dunn. The location wasostensibly picked by headhunter Jim Citrin, whod also arranged the buses. But some of thedirectors took it as a signal from the Third Point board members about whose show this reallywas.


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Citrin had also arranged for a car to pick up Levinsohn. He had no idea where he was going,either. He also didnt know who the other finalists were.

Levinsohn went first. He presented his plan, which the board was familiar with by then. Hewanted to get Yahoo out of the platform business, where it was competing with Google,

Microsoft, and Facebookand move it into the content business. Levinsohn knew some of thedirectors were worried that hed ignore Yahoos engineers and product development people, sohe talked about how hed been spending a lot of time with product boss Shashi Seth and histeam.

The interview felt strange to Levinsohn. Hed been talking to Loeb a handful of times, every day.He said, You guys know where Im at. You know what I'm doing.

After, Jim Citrin told Levinsohn hed done well. Levinsohn was told that if the board decided togo in the media direction, the job was his.

Levinsohn left.

After enough time had passed to ensure that they wouldnt spot each other, Mayer arrived bylimo.

Anyone remotely familiar with her childhood, studies, and career could have predicted whathappened next.

Mayer walked into that room at Gibson Dunn and blew them away.

She described her long familiarity with Yahoo and its products. She described how Yahoo

products would evolve over time under her watch. Her presentation included an extraordinaryamount of detail on Yahoos search business, audience analytics, and data. She talkedaboutfixing Yahoos culture with more transparency, perks, and accountability. She named herperceived weaknesses, and explained how she planned to address themincluding by hiringpeople who had the skills she didnt have.

When Mayer was done, Jim Citrin told her hed call her with the boards decision by 8 p.m.

She left. The board still had a tough final decision to make.

A number of the Yahoo directors still opposed hiring Mayer. They argued that she didnt have

enough corporate experience. Some of the directors favored Levinsohn because they felt that theThird Point directors were just trying to install someone they could control. They had notoverlooked that the secret location of the final interviews had been the offices of Third Pointslawyers.


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Intuit

Brad Smith worried Mayer didn't have enough corporate experience.

The directors who opposed Mayer most vocally Amoroso, but also Brad Smith and David Kenny

argued that Levinsohn, with his media strategy, had a better plan for Yahoo than Mayer and her

products strategy.

They argued that Mayer may present a greater upsideshe was more likely to come up with thenext Facebook or Google Maps or Twitterbut that Levinsohn was the safer bet, a moreguaranteed return.

Loeb, who had fought a bloody fight to get onto the board, and whose vote undoubtedly matteredthe most, didnt mind that Mayer was a high-risk, high-reward play. In his view, the sale ofYahoos Asian assets and the returning of those proceeds through share buybacks or dividendswould provide enough of a floor in Yahoos value that it was worth betting on the greaterupside Mayer brought to the table.

The 8 p.m. deadline came and went. Mayer, at a dinner party on the other side of town, tried tostop checking her phone.

At 9:45 p.m., the board still hadnt called her. She signaled to her husband, Zachary Bogue, thatshe wanted to leave the party.

Wolf lobbied his fellow directors in favor of Mayer to the point of annoyance.
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Finally, the pro-Mayer directors proposed a solution. What if they made Mayer the CEO andoffered Levinsohn a huge amount of money to stay on as her chief operating officer? That wayshed be able to pursue her products strategy, and he could keep running the sales force andmaking deals with major media companies.

An informal vote was cast. The pro-Mayer directors were in the majority, with Amoroso andothers voting against.

It was over. A formal vote was cast.

This time the board unanimously voted to name Marissa Mayer the new CEO of Yahoo.

Meanwhile, Mayer and Bogue had decided to stay at their dinner party, but it was finally time togo. As they began to say their goodbyes, Mayers phone finally rang. It was Jim Citrin. She let itgo to voicemail.

Spencer Stuart

Jim Citrin called Marissa Mayer to offer her the job.

Citrin told her: Marissayou should be smiling. Were smiling. Call me ASAP.

When the board reached Mayer to offer her the job, she did not accept it right away. First she hadsome news to share.


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She was five months pregnant. Thats why she hadnt touched her wine at Michael Wolfsapartment the month before.

The offer stood. After three days of negotiation with Wolf, she accepted.

The morning after Mayer got the voicemail from Citrin, Levinsohn was unaware that his fate hadalready been sealed. Once again he presented his plan for Yahoo to the boardthis time withhis executive team there to fill in the details.

Hed woken up that morning still feeling confident that he was going to get the job. But this wasthe meeting where, midway through, Loeb left to go to the bathroom and Wolf stood withWilson to loudly question the deals Heckman had been negotiating with Google, Microsoft, andothers.

Levinsohn went into the weekend at Allen & Co.s mogul conference at Sun Valley sure hedlost the job, but unsure to whom. By Sunday, Ross Levinsohn had found out that the board had

also interviewed Marissa Mayer. When he heard her name, he knew it was over.

On Monday, Levinsohn went to work. Yahoo had to report its second quarter earnings that week,and he worked with CFO Tim Morses team to prepare some remarks for the companysconference call with analysts. Levinsohn kept telling the team, dont write this for me, write itfor a CEO. It should be generic.

When that was done, Levinsohn went back to his office to wait for the news. Hed wanted thisjob. Hed fought for it. Hed done well.

Fox Business News
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Fred Amoroso broke the bad news to Levinsohn.

Finally, Fred Amoroso walked into Levinsohn's office and delivered the blow.

Back in New York and barely off a British Airways plane now heading for London, Michael

Barrett joined a conference call with other top Yahoo executives.

Amoroso explained the news.

He said, We love Ross. We thank Ross. We want him to stay. We werent looking for someonelike Marissa, but when she showed up, boy were we impressed.

Although it was a hard decision, and we think Ross is doing a great job, she brings a differentlevel of perspective and talent to the organization we couldnt pass up.

(Page 6 of 8)


On Tuesday, July 17, 2012, David Filo stood waiting at the entrance of Yahoos headquarters inSunnyvale, Calif. He was very excited.

Filo is a quiet, unassuming engineer for Yahoo. He works in a cubicle. He also happens to be aco-founder of the company.


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Marissa Mayer's Flickr

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and co-founder David Filo.

In 2012, Filo still owned 6 percent of Yahoo. He was its largest individual shareholder.According to Forbes, there were only 959 people on the planet with more money than him.

And yet, the reason Filo was waiting near the entrance of Yahoo was so that when MarissaMayer arrived, he would be able to unfurl a long purple carpet before her feet.

Yahoos hero was coming. But huge challenges faced her.

Yahoos websites were getting fewer and fewer visitors every year. Meanwhile, Yahoos mobileapps were being largely ignored.

For years, Yahoos most talented executives and engineers had been quitting the company to joinfaster-moving rivals like Facebook and Google. Those who stayed at Yahoo tended to show uplate and leave early, or log in from home. Mayer had to fix Yahoos culture.

Mayer also walked into the office that day seven months pregnant. Her new colleagues looked tosee if she was showing. They wondered how in the world she would manage a baby and the hugejob ahead of her.
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The excitement waseverywhere in the building. One enthusiastic Yahoo employee had made a poster with Mayersface on it in the style of Shepard Faireys 2008 campaign poster for Barack Obama. Across thelower third, the poster has one word in all-caps: HOPE.

When she finally arrived, Mayers first job was to meet the one group of Yahoo employees whowere not as excited by her arrivalYahoos senior executives, several of whom had risen totheir jobs thanks to Ross Levinsohn.

Levinsohn, despite personal pleas from Amoroso and whispers of a generous compensationpackage, was not staying as Mayers chief operating officer. Since he took the interim job inMay, hed warned the board that if he didnt get the permanent gig, he was going to try tobecome a CEO somewhere else.

If Levinsohn ever had any notion of reconsidering, that was squashed by his first scheduledmeeting with Mayer.

After hed learned that she was getting the job, hed flown back home to Los Angeles. WhenMayer said she wanted to meet, he agreed to fly back up to Sunnyvale. But when he showed up

at their appointed time, Mayers assistant told Levinsohn she was running late.

Levinsohn said to the assistant, My office is three doors down. I'll be in there.

Suddenly anxious, the assistant said: You have to wait here.

She wanted him to wait so that when Mayer was done with whatever she was doing, he would beimmediately available.


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Levinsohn said, Not so much. He walked away.

Soon he walked out of the building for good.

Levinsohn decided that no good would come of him staying. He could see what would happen:

Yahoo would devolve into a place where there were his people and there were Mayers people.The whole media versus products battle would rage on, and it would be an ugly fight.

And so, feeling that the rug had just been ripped out from underneath them, Yahoos seniorexecutives walked into Mayers new office at Yahoo the one Fred Amoroso had been usingdays before.

Many of these people were meeting Mayer for the first time, and they expected to sit across fromthe woman theyd read about in so many fluffy profiles and had seen on TV or onstage atconferencessomeone who was charismatic and warm; personal.

That was not what they got.

TechCrunch

One by one, they walked in and sat down at a table across from Mayer. Then, she launched into

questions. She asked: Where did you get your education? Where are you from? What do you do

here? And so on.
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As Yahoo executives answered, Mayer took notes on their answers with pen on paper, hardlylooking up.

It kind of felt like you were summoned to the principals office, says one executive who wentthrough one of these introductory meetings with Mayer.

You would have thought a fair portion of [that meeting] would have been about so what areyou going through? How are you feeling? Sorry about Ross. We love him. Wed like to keephim. Realistically, he wont stay but that doesnt have any impact on you.

There wasnt any kind of commiseration or any kind of bear hug. There wasnt even a questionof Are you in or are you out? It was: I assume youre in. Let me know otherwise.

There was no time for short conversation or human emotions. It was very boom, boom, boom.

Most people walked away from that meeting saying, Holy shit.

One Yahoo executive attended such an introductory meeting between his boss and Mayer. Hisboss asked Mayer Would you like to meet the people I brought?

Mayer looked at them.

No.

The truth is, the person Yahoos top executives sat across from in those first meetings was notthe Marissa Mayer they thought they knew from the media coverage of her. It was the MarissaMayer her Stanford classmate Josh Elman remembers from late night study sessions.

Just as during those all-nighters almost 20 years before, Mayer wasnt at Yahoo to socialize. Inone early meeting Mayer said that Yahoo was going to failshut downin the next few yearsif it did not get things going soon. She told a top product executive that Yahoo lagged ininnovation and talent, and that its culture was broken.

She was there to save the company, and that was going to take a lot of work. It was past time toget started.

Some of the executives Mayer met with had a hard time connecting with her. Just as some of herStanford study mates mistook her shyness for being stuck up, some of her new Yahoo

colleagues took her all-business attitude as being demeaning.

For the people who were making Yahoos products at the time, the meetingswere even moreintense.

A designer or a top product manager would sit down and Mayer would assault them with a seriesof questions.


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How was that researched?

What was the research methodology?

How did you back that up?

One person who went through a Mayer grilli

Documents

Case Study LL