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Marissa Mayer and her background
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More: Marissa Mayer (/category/marissa-mayer) Yahoo (/category/yahoo)
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The Truth About Marissa Mayer: AnUnauthorized Biography
Illustration by Mike Nudelman/Photo by Fortune Live Media (http://www.flickr.com/photos/63750402@N07
/9346261281/in/photolist-feU2RT-ff9dsu-ff9ie7-feTBUx-feTKDM-feTH1B-ff8NDS-feTBgH-feTDk8-feTAAT-ff8Qf1-
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feTr4e-feTe8R-ff8eZm-feSZHn-ff8m2u-ff8n6y-ff8k8s-feT7fn-feSYur-ff8nYL)
On the morning of Thursday, July 12, 2012, Yahoo’s
interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, still believed he was
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going to be named permanent CEO of the company.
He had just one meeting to go.
That meeting was a board meeting to be held that day
in a large conference room on the first floor of
Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters. Yahoo called
the room “Phish Food” — a funky room with lots of
glass and white leather couches and chairs.
The agenda for the meeting: Levinsohn was going to
brief the directors on his plan for Yahoo, should he be
named permanent CEO.
Levinsohn walked into the room; all of his top
executives followed.
There was Jim Heckman, Levinsohn’s top dealmaker, who’d spent
months negotiating a huge deal with Microsoft. There was Shashi Seth,
Yahoo’s top product management executive, already planning a
long-needed update to Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo homepage. There was
chief financial officer Tim Morse, who’d just completed a critical,
company-saving deal to sell a portion of Yahoo subsidiary Alibaba.
There was Mickie Rosen, a News Corp. veteran whom Levinsohn had
hired to run Yahoo’s media business. And there was Mollie Spillman,
whom he’d just made CMO.
Heckman, Seth, Morse, Rosen, Spillman, and handful
of others sat off to the side.
All of them believed that the meeting was a formality
— that Levinsohn was going to get the job.
They had good reason to be confident. For the two
months prior, the chairman of Yahoo’s board, Fred
Amoroso, had made it clear that he was going to do
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Ross Levinsohn
everything he could to make sure Levinsohn and his
team would be running the company for the
foreseeable future.
Amoroso told Levinsohn this in private. He told
Yahoo employees this during an all-hands meeting in
May. He’d even joined a sales call to express support
for Levinsohn to Yahoo advertisers — an 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 Levinsohn’s “interim” title was
only temporary — that it was safe to leave Google.
Levinsohn had another reason to be hopeful: For the
past few months, he’d been speaking with two of
Yahoo’s most important new directors, Dan Loeb and
Michael Wolf, almost every day. As important as it
was for Levinsohn to have Amoroso’s support, he
needed Loeb’s more. Loeb ran a hedge fund called
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Third Point, which owned more than 5 percent of
Yahoo and had, only months before, forced the
resignation of Yahoo’s previous CEO. Wolf was an
important ally for Levinsohn to have, too. Wolf, a
former president of MTV, was consulting for Third
Point on media investments when Loeb asked him to
join the Yahoo board and lead its search committee
for a new CEO.
Levinsohn began his presentation. It was going to be a
doozy, as he planned to seriously alter the direction of
Yahoo.
He wanted it to stop competing with technology
businesses like Google and Microsoft and focus
entirely on competing with media and content
businesses like Disney, Time Warner, and News
Corporation. As part of this transition, Levinsohn
wanted to spin off, sell, or shut down several Yahoo
business units. He said doing so would reduce
Yahoo’s head count by as many as 10,000 employees,
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 with Microsoft
to exchange Yahoo’s search business for Microsoft’s
portal, MSN.com, and large payments in cash.
Levinsohn and Heckman had also been talking with
Google executive Henrique De Castro about turning
over some of Yahoo’s advertising inventory. There
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Heidi Gutman/CNBC
Dan Loeb controlled 5 percent of Yahoo and joined the
board a5er a bloody proxy fight.
was also talk of unloading some of Yahoo’s enterprise-
facing advertising-technology businesses into a joint
venture involving New York-based ad tech startup
AppNexus.
It was during this
part of his
presentation that
Levinsohn began
to feel the
permanent Yahoo
CEO 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 to question the
wisdom of the deal.
Wolf asked, in a loud voice with a sharp tone, “I
understand why this is good for Microsoft, but why is
it good for Yahoo?”
Harry Wilson, another director brought onto the
board by Loeb, joined Wolf in his criticism of the deal
as “short-sighted.”
Their cross-examination of the deal eventually boiled
down to one question: Had Levinsohn and Heckman
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 another candidate
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for the CEO job would not be forced to follow through
on a deal they had not negotiated.
This was a bad sign for Levinsohn’s candidacy.
But Wilson and Wolf’s loud complaints about the
Microsoft deal weren’t the worst sign for Levinsohn’s
chances; Loeb’s behavior during the meeting was.
Loeb is the suited, slick, and handsome Wall Street
type. He wears his salt-and-pepper hair short and
messy on purpose. He’s actually from Southern
California, and sometimes he puts off a surfer vibe.
During Levinsohn’s presentation, Loeb looked bored.
He wasn’t paying full attention. As the interim 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 most
important part of the presentation,” getting up and
going to the bathroom for ten minutes.
This person remembers thinking: “Oh, OK. Sorry,
Ross, you’re 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 an annual
retreat for big-name media and technology
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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 the other Silicon Valley
bigwigs ran through a long list of names, trying to
figure out who might be getting 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 job the
Wednesday prior?
Levinsohn realized everything all at once.
Levinsohn now knew who Yahoo’s next CEO would
be.
Soon, so would everyone else.
On Monday, July 16, four days after Levinsohn’s last
board meeting, Yahoo made it official: Thirty-seven-
year-old Marissa Mayer was Yahoo’s new CEO.
The board had indeed already made Mayer an offer by
the time Levinsohn went into that final meeting to
present his plan for Yahoo.
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Flickr/Fortune Live Media (http://www.flickr.com/photos
/fortunelivemedia/8244371669/sizes/l/in/photolist-dywyt8-dywBji-
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em3c7P-em7NqU-eom67i-em8Bfn-e4hRDq-euva72-enjtq4-eomCBd-
enfCSt-9rxt6X/)
Marissa Mayer
After the news broke in public, Levinsohn admitted to
friends that he was disappointed. He had really
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.
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-dollar
company. She is a
woman in an
industry
dominated by men. In a world where corporations are
expected to serve shareholders before anyone else,
she is obsessed with putting the customer experience
first.
Worth at least $300 million, she isn’t afraid to show
off her wealth. Steve Jobs may have lived in a small,
suburban home with an apple tree out front, but
Marissa Mayer lives in the penthouse of San
Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel.
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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.
Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesn’t look the
part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and glamorous
style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks.
Young, powerful, rich, and brilliant, Mayer is a role
model for millions of women. And yet, unlike
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg,
Mayer resists calling herself a feminist. She even
infuriated working mothers across the world when
she banned Yahoo employees from working from
home.
Widely admired by the public at large, Mayer has
many enemies within her industry. They say she is
robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with
detail. They say her obsession with the user
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
company’s 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.
Questions persist
Most CEOs of Mayer’s stature — people running
multi-billion-dollar public companies the size of
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Yahoo — are gregarious, outgoing types — the kind of
person who might have been a politician if the world
of business and money hadn’t beckoned.
Baby-kissers. Back-slappers. Schmoozers. Mayer is
not that type. Peers from every stage of her life —
from her early childhood days to her first year at
Yahoo — say Mayer is a shy, socially awkward person.
How in the world has she overcome such a
disadvantage to rise so far, so fast?
To a public casually interested in her career, Mayer’s
career before Yahoo — spent entirely at Google — is
remembered as one success after another. It wasn’t.
Mayer started off at Google spectacularly well,
designing its homepage, creating its product
management structure, and becoming the face of the
company. She became one of the most powerful
people at one of the world’s most powerful
companies.
But then, suddenly, her peers were promoted past
her. Responsibility for the look and feel of Google’s
entire suite of consumer-facing products, including
the Google homepage, was taken away from her. She
was moved to a less important product: Google Maps.
She was removed from a council of executives that
met with Google’s CEO. To industry insiders, this
sudden change was a demotion for Mayer. Was it
actually? If it was, why did it happen? How did Mayer
recover?
Mayer’s move to the top of Yahoo during the summer
of 2012 was a shock for almost everyone — including
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the people who convinced her to do it. How did the
board pull it off?
Then there’s the biggest question about Mayer: Can
she save Yahoo?
Illustration by Mike Nudelman
Marissa Ann Mayer was born on May 30, 1975 to parents Margaret
Mayer, a Finnish art teacher and homemaker, and Michael Mayer, an
environmental engineer.
She grew up in Wausau, Wis., with a sports-playing
brother, Mason Mayer. It was a middle-class
upbringing. She went to public schools and worked a
summer job as a grocery clerk, but her family 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 a large
crowd or a TV audience. She’s usually wearing a
designer dress — probably from her favorite designer,
Oscar De La Renta — and looking strong, confident,
and in charge of the moment.
But Mayer, now 38 years old, wasn’t always so larger-
than-life. She describes the child and teenage version
of herself as “painfully shy.”
Indeed, the Mayer you see in photos today is not the one remembered
by the peers she grew up with in the small town of Wausau. For one, her
style involved more T-shirts, sweaters, and jeans — nice clothes, but
nothing flashy. And while Mayer has always presented well in front of an
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Owen Thomas, Business Insider
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the 2013 Goldman
Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.
audience, her peers don’t
remember her as
extroverted or larger-
than-life.
One of those peers
is named Brian
Jojade. He took
Advanced Math
with Mayer in 8th
grade. He
remembers Mayer
as someone who hated social attention. Once, Jojade
called the local radio station and told them it was
Mayer’s 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. It
didn’t. “She wasn’t amused at all. You could just tell it
wasn’t fun for her.”
Otherwise, Jojade’s overriding memory of Mayer is as
the “professional” girl who sat in the front of the
classroom and “always worked hard and made sure
no matter what she was going to do, it was going to
get done right.”
Mayer’s Wausau West High School classmate Elize
Bazter says she best remembers Mayer as the girl who
was “kind to everyone” but would dodge
conversations on her way to go study somewhere else.
Wausau West had a class schedule system where,
instead of periods, the day was broken up into
20-minute “mods.” Classes lasted for 40 minutes or
an hour. That meant there were 20-minute breaks
during everyone’s day. Bazter said most
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Wausau West High Yearbook 1993
Mayer introduces the 1992 homecoming court
upperclassmen would use the time to congregate in
the school’s commons.
“You could study,” says Bazter, “but mostly it was
talking and eating and gathering with your friends.”
Not for teenage Marissa
Mayer.
“She would be the
person to come
down, get
something to eat
from the kitchen or
the vending
machines, and then
she would go to the
library or the
science lab to
study. She wouldn’t
be the one 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 in hand, 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 didn’t. Mayer is fond
of Wausau.
When she got married to a San Francisco banker
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named Zachary Bogue in 2009, she held two
ceremonies: One was in California, and a second at
her childhood church, Immanuel Lutheran in
Wausau.
As a kid, Mayer’s peers in school had no idea what to
make of her. Likewise, Mayer says she was “painfully
shy” around them. But teachers? Teachers were
Mayer’s kind of people.
In 2010, Mayer returned to her hometown to be
inducted into the Wausau School District’s “Alumni
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 Mayer’s face how important these
people were to her growing up. About six names in,
the timbre of Mayer’s voice actually breaks toward a
sob, and she has to catch herself with a breath and a
small gulp. She can’t stop her eyes from swelling with
held-back tears, though.
Most teenagers fondly recall sneaking into high school
their senior year for a prank — setting chickens loose
or toilet-papering the hallways. Mayer once snuck
into her AP Lit teacher’s classroom to decorate it like
a jungle because she was so inspired by the teacher’s
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lesson on “Heart of Darkness.”
Mayer’s 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 middle school.
She told Flanagan she was worried that she wouldn’t
make it there, with all the new kids and teachers she’d
have to meet.
Flanagan says Mayer the little girl was “a home
person; she liked to be safe and know where she’s at.”
Flanagan, who says it was obvious even then how far
Mayer would go, told the reluctant little girl, “Oh, I
think you’re going to make it fine.”
Still, she wouldn’t go. Eventually Flanagan called
Mayer’s mother to let her know where her daughter
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 and basketball. She
went to swimming and skiing lessons. She took ballet
for as many as 35 hours a week during middle school
and high school. Her mother says ballet taught her
“criticism and discipline, poise and confidence.”
In high school Mayer was also on the curling team.
She was a “pompom” girl and a debater. She was on
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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 Mayer’s
mother would frequently stop by school to check on
her daughter’s progress. He says he “got to be good
friends” with the Mayers. “They were concerned
about her and that she was making the right progress.
And she was. And she knew that — that 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 major in computer science were
boys — obviously, that means just 16 percent were
women.
Mayer says she never felt that bias at Wausau West.
“It wasn’t until I was a professional woman mentoring
other girls in math and science that I learned that
openly liking math and science is unusual for girls.
It’s actually considered far too nerdy and far too much
for the boys.
“Wausau schools were so supportive that I never felt
strange for a second about pursuing math and science
and being good in them.”
Mayer credits her teachers for helping her become
less shy.
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Wausau West High School Yearbook
Mayer was on Wausau West's state championship
winning debate team.
They did this by
showing Mayer
that she could
“organize” more
than just her
backpack, desk,
and homework —
that she could
organize people, as
their leader.
Mayer’s childhood
piano teacher,
Joanne Beckman,
remembers Mayer
being very
different from
other children in
that she was
someone who
“watched people” in order to “figure out why they
were doing what they were doing.”
“A lot of kids that age are very interested in
themselves,” Beckman says, “She was looking at other
people.”
By “looking” at her teachers, figuring out why they
were doing what they were doing, Mayer overcame
her “painful” shyness with peers by taking on the
teacher’s role.
Even when she was in fifth grade, Mr. Flanagan could
see the pedagogical side of Mayer developing. He
thought she would become a teacher someday.
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In high school, Mayer took a leadership position in
every club she joined. She became president of 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 became captain
of the pompom squad, she wasn’t in with that clique
of girls, but she won them over in three ways.”
“First: sheer talent. Marissa could choreograph a
great routine. Second: hard work. She scheduled
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.
She picked Stanford. Her plan was to become a brain
doctor — a profession that doesn’t draw much on the
leadership traits Mayer was quickly developing.
But soon enough, Mayer would find herself once
again overcoming her shyness by taking charge of 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 people in the
way that came most natural to her — teaching them.
Teaching was her calling.
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Illustration by Mike Nudelman
The summer before Marissa Mayer went to Stanford,
she began asking herself a question that would 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 nerd heaven.
Picture science labs housed in wooden cabins shaded
by trees. Mayer especially loved one experiment
where they mixed water and corn starch to make a
sloppy goo-like substance that seemed to defy gravity.
One day, a post-doctoral student from Yale named
Zune Nguyen spoke to the campers as a guest
lecturer. He stunned all the smart kids in the room
with puzzles and brainteasers. For days, the campers
couldn’t stop talking about his talk.
Finally, one of Mayer’s counselors had enough.
“You know, you have it all wrong,” the counselor said
to Mayer and the campers. “It’s not what Zune knows,
it’s how Zune thinks.”
The counselor said that what made Nguyen so
amazing wasn’t the facts that he knew, but rather how
he approached the world and how he thought about
problems. The counselor said the most remarkable
thing about Nguyen was that you could put him in an
entirely new environment or present him with an
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entirely new problem, and within a matter of minutes
he would be asking the right questions and making
the right observations.
From that moment on, the phrase: “It’s not what Zune
knows, but how Zune thinks,” stuck with Mayer as a
sort of personal guiding proverb.
In the fall, Mayer went to Stanford and began taking
pre-med classes. She planned to become a doctor. 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 of
memorization.”
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, how they reason, how
they express themselves.”
“I had this nagging voice in my head saying ‘It’s not
what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks.’”
Mayer began to answer the voice in her head — and
find a course of study that helped her learn how to
think — when she took an introductory computer
science class: CS105.
Mayer was engrossed by the challenge of
programming — taking a problem and using her mind
to solve it.
During the semester, she entered a class-wide design
contest for extra credit. Calling on the same part of
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Stanford University (http://www.flickr.com/photos/stanforduniversity
/5670897249/in/photolist-9D7Qbv-82faUa-8GFoCu-8GFoEG-
8GCdAR-8GCdwi-8GFovA-aFXn3p-bzchRw-bkHtjf-cZ2CV7-cZ2CnS
/lightbox/)
Stanford professor Eric Roberts says Mayer was an
incredible teacher.
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 Mayer’s CS105
professor, Eric Roberts, would also use an adaptation
of the screen saver as an assignment for the next
several years.
Roberts was also
impressed enough with
Mayer’s 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 systems — a combination of disciplines
straight out of Zune Nguyen’s head: Linguistics,
philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer
science classes.
Symbolic systems has become a famous Stanford
major in Silicon Valley. Besides Mayer, other alumni
include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; former
senior vice president of iOS software at Apple, Scott
Forstall; and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.
Mayer’s teacherly leadership streak came out in a big
way when she took Philosophy 160A, then considered
a “weed-out course” for prospective symbolic systems
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majors.
During Philosophy 160A, the students break into
study groups of a half dozen or so students, and the
groups are assigned problem sets. Mayer’s group —
just like all the others — put off doing their 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.
Mayer ended up in a group that included Josh Elman,
now a venture capitalist. Looking back on those study
sessions, Elman remembers “times when people in
the group were bouncing off the walls.”
He says, “Marissa was always like, ‘OK, back to work.
Let’s 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 knew those two
things about her. Very smart. Very serious.”
The social dynamic of the group was typical for
Mayer. As usual, she commanded the room —
organized the group’s work in an all-business fashion
— but was otherwise shy, and somewhat reclusive.
In the years ahead, this combination — Mayer’s
willingness to be authoritative and demanding the
way a teacher would, with a “painful” fear or
reluctance of being personal — would cause problems
for Mayer.
One Stanford classmate interpreted Mayer’s shyness
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as being “kind of stuck up.”
“She would do her work and then leave. When other
people would stay and hang out and have pizza, she’d
just be out of there because the work is done.”
Indeed, Mayer doesn’t 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 “not much for
socializing.”
“She wasn’t 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 Mayer’s social behavior
at Stanford remains that Mayer was, as she has 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 a class.
She took to it naturally.
Computer science professor Eric Roberts, still Mayer’s
mentor, supervised her teaching. He says she was
“unusually good at it” and “extremely effective.”
After Mayer taught a course in the spring, Roberts
took a survey of her students. The results were
astounding: They loved her — even 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; she readily
agreed.
“She loved teaching,” says Roberts.
Of course she did. Stanford students called her “stuck
up” when they were her classmates. But when she was
their teacher, they thought she was great.
Mayer
excelled
the rest
of her
years as
an
undergraduate at Stanford. After she got her
bachelor’s degree, she stayed at the school to get a
master’s in computer science, with a speciality in
artificial intelligence.
As graduate school drew to a close, word got out
about Mayer’s 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?
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Taking A 2 percent Chance On Google
When people ask Mayer why she joined Google after
getting her masters in symbolic systems at Stanford,
she likes to tell them her “Laura Beckman story.” It’s
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 end of the
tryouts, she was given a hard choice: bench on varsity,
or start on JV.
“Most people, when they’re 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 would become a much
better player, even if I didn’t get to play in any of the
games.’”
The moral of Mayer’s story is that it’s always better to
surround yourself with the best people so that they
will challenge you and you will grow.
“My quest to find, and be surrounded by, smart
people is what brought me to Google,” she says.
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Larry Page and Sergey Brin
And that’s the overriding reason why Mayer joined
Google. But quests for self-improvement aside, it’s
also true that Mayer almost missed her chance to join
the company that would make her rich and powerful
someday.
Late on a Friday in mid-April of her last year at
Stanford, Mayer sat at her computer, eating pasta and
reading emails.
She already had 12 job offers to choose from, and
wasn’t looking for any more hard choices.
So when yet another pitch from a recruiter popped up
in her inbox, she tapped on her keyboard’s delete key
to get rid of it.
Only, she missed.
Instead of hitting delete, Mayer hit the space bar and
opened the email.
That email’s subject line: “Work at Google?”
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 talk
about the
recommendation engine
she’d 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
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Roberts' recommendation, she replied to an email she
had meant to delete, writing that she’d 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, where her clients
would be Silicon Valley companies.
Google was a riskier career choice. In her typical,
precise way, she’d crunched the data and had decided
that the company only had a 2 percent chance of
succeeding.
Also, some small part of Mayer was worried about
Google’s weird name, which she imagined would 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 to build a
company, regardless of whether we failed or
succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies
I had offers from.”
For the next 13 years, Marissa Mayer worked at
Google.
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Mayer during her early Google days.
Illustration by Mike Nudelman
Marissa Mayer joined Google as a programmer and
rose to become the executive in charge of the way
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 and hundreds 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, and people in the industry
wondered what went wrong.
Google in its early
days was a fun
place to work,
energized by
incredible success
and perks like free
food. But it was
also a grinding,
stressful
environment.
On Mayer’s 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. It’s all gone
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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 on the Web, and
it was rapidly taking share from older search engines
like AltaVista and Lycos. In fact, the site was down
that day because Google had just signed a deal with
Netscape to handle search queries from Netscape.com.
Google only had 300 computers serving search
results, and it asked Netscape to send just a fraction
of its traffic. Netscape ignored the request and sent all
of its users.
Down went Google.com.
Google went back online that day, but only after hours
of work from Mayer, Silverstein, and her new
colleagues. She went home at 3 a.m.
Perhaps because of long nights like that one, Mayer
and Page eventually grew very close. At one point
during Mayer’s 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 worked 100 hours a
week as a programmer.
Mayer thrived working the tough hours. She only
needed four hours of sleep a night, and when she was
awake, she would work harder than anyone. She
found a niche at Google: guardian of the clean,
easy-to-use look and feel of Google products. She
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Mayer in 2005.
obsessed over pixels; their hue, shade, and placement.
She co-authored a handful of patents, including an
important one for Google: “Graphical user interface
for a universal search engine.”
By 2005, Mayer moved into management, overseeing
the look and feel of Google’s most important products.
She was very good at it.
During her first several
years at Google, Mayer
had been able to
continue teaching at
Stanford. She taught
3,000 undergraduates by
the time she was
promoted, so the part of
managing that has to do
with leading, teaching,
and organizing came
easy to her. She enjoyed working with younger Google employees so
much that she even started teaching classes at Google.
She created a mentorship program called “APM”
which stood for “associated product manager.” Each
year Mayer would select junior Google employees for
the APM program, give them assignments, and teach
them classes. Then, at the end of the program, Mayer
would take the entire APM “class” on a weeklong trip
abroad to Google offices around the globe.
When it came to developing Google products, Mayer
had a bigger challenge.
Mayer has never been someone who easily relates
with others. That’s why people call her robotic or
“stuck up.” This trait is why people sometimes walk
out of meetings with her feeling deeply insulted by a
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Mayer at the height of her power at Google.
perceived slight.
But being in charge of how Google products should
look, Mayer’s job was, basically, to relate with
Google’s millions of users. How would she do that?
In the end, it proved to be an advantage for Mayer
that empathy doesn’t come naturally to her. It forced
her to be intentional about figuring out what users
want and how they behave.
She came up with two clever methods of relating.
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.
Mayer’s second method was to lean on data. She
would track, survey, and measure every user
interaction with Google products, and then use that
data to design and re-design.
Mayer’s 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
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San Francisco Magazine
Julian Guthrie profiled Marissa Mayer in San Francisco
Magazine's March 2008 issue.
Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re
testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one
performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a
border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked
to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment
like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule
design decisions. There are more exciting design
problems in this world to tackle.”
Bowman went to Twitter.
Mayer’s obsession with data-driven design would only
gain more and louder critics over the years. But
Mayer’s methods also made her one of the Internet’s
most effective design and product development
leaders during her years at Google. People at Google
credit her with the success of not just Google search,
but also many others, including Gmail, Google Maps,
and Google News.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin says: “Marissa makes
the decisions she feels are right, and history proves
that she probably calls it right.”
Fame and
Glory
As Google
became a
world-
famous
company,
Mayer
began to
get
attention
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from the media. Newsweek called her one of the “10
Tech Leaders of the Future.” Business 2.0 named her
to the “Silicon Valley Dream Team.” Now-defunct
technology news site Red Herring said Mayer was one
of “15 Women to Watch.”
Then, in 2004, Google went public. Its stock price
soared. This made Mayer and hundreds of her
colleagues rich in an instant. The media’s fascination
with Google kicked up several notches. Mayer, in
charge of the look of Google’s most important
product, and a rare photogenic woman in the
technology industry, was a natural subject of the
media’s fixation.
Mayer also boosted her public profile by deciding to
spend her new riches conspicuously. She bought the
$5 million penthouse suite at the Four Seasons in San
Francisco, and another home closer to Google’s
Mountain View campus. She started throwing
fabulous parties at both, jumping feet first into San
Francisco’s high-end social scene. Guests at her
homes would see expensive original artwork from
famous artists, like the 400-piece glass installation
Mayer commissioned from Dale Chihuly.
Mayer did not mind the attention. In fact, she asked
Google public relations staff to get her more of it, but
in the right outlets.
Mayer’s eagerness to be known by the public may
appear to contradict her claim that she suffers from
shyness. It doesn’t. She describes her shyness as a
need to withdraw from social situations almost as
soon as she enters them. Being featured in a glossy
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Mayer in Vogue in 2009
magazine does not require her to interact with every
reader, so she probably doesn’t have as much anxiety
about it as she does making small talk at a party.
Plus, there is such a thing as overcompensation.
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 was supposed to be
quietly spent, and engineers were supposed to rule,
Mayer would soon be under siege.
Demoted
At the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, Marissa
Mayer’s remarkable career suddenly lost momentum.
First, in Oct. 2010, Mayer was removed from the top
of Google’s search organization and put in charge of
Google Maps and other “local” products.
Technically, this was a lateral move, if not a
promotion, because Mayer retained her vice president
title and she was, at the same time, given a seat on
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By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Google CEO Larry Page did not put Mayer on his
executive team.
Google’s Operating Committee — then CEO Eric
Schmidt’s roundtable of top executives from the
company.
In reality, it was a demotion. Mayer was no longer in
charge of what Google’s most important product
looked like or how it worked. At Google, there is
search, which generates nearly all of the company’s
revenues and profits, and then there is everything
else. Running Google search, Mayer was managing
the most important product at the world’s most
important Internet company. Running Google Maps,
she was not.
Still, there was the mitigating factor that Mayer was
on Google’s Operating Committee, and she therefore
reported directly to CEO Eric Schmidt.
That went away too.
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.
When Page
formally took
control of Google
in April 2011, he
dissolved the
Operating Committee and created a new council of
executives who would report directly to him. This
group came to be known as the “L-Team.” Mayer was
not named to it.
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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 now reported to Huber,
who joined Google in 2003 — four years after her.
Mayer’s loss of authority was felt across the company.
One former colleague says that prior to 2010, Mayer
was always able to “get what she needed” from
management.
“If her boss [Google senior vice president of product]
Jonathan Rosenberg didn’t approve of something —
didn’t give her head count or didn’t give her an
acquisition or whatever — she’d just go right above
him and get what she needed.”
That now stopped.
“She would try to do something and HR would say
that’s not the kind of thing she could do anymore.”
“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 company’s own, public list of
executives in the “About Google” section of Google.com.
In November 2005, Mayer’s name and bio finally
appeared on Google’s management page. By May
2011, her name was off the site.
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What happened to Marissa Mayer’s career?
One explanation is that Mayer’s career stalled as 2010
ended and 2011 began because that is exactly 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 never allow
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 issue — it
was too taboo to bring up.
One Googler explains: “Google is one of those places
where, like a cult, there are things that are OK to talk
about and things that are not OK to talk about. That
was one of those things that was not OK to talk
about.”
It’s actually hard to find someone at Google who was
bothered by the fact that there once was a romantic
relationship between Mayer and Page.
Perhaps this is because both of them have so publicly
moved on.
In 2007, Page married a Stanford graduate student named Lucy
Southworth. The ceremony was on Richard Branson’s private island.
That same year, a Google colleague emailed Mayer to
say: “I’m bringing a boy I think you’d be interested in.
Be cool.” The “boy” was Zachary Bogue. Tall and
dark-haired, Bogue looks like he could be the star of
“The Bachelor.” He had played football at Harvard,
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FameGame (http://newsletter.famegame.com/page/14/)
Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue
and was now a
banker in San
Francisco. In
2009, Mayer
and Bogue
married. Vogue
covered the
ceremony. Of
their married
life, he says:
“We continue to do work in the evening. There’s never
a distinct line between work and home. Marissa’s
work is such a natural extension of her. It’s not
something she needs to shed at the end of the day.”
It’s possible that Mayer’s romantic history with Page
stalled her career at Google. But that’s not a widely
held belief among Mayer’s former colleagues.
A more common explanation was that she may not
have had the right kind of ambition to go much
further.
There’s a philosophy that corporations exist to benefit
three constituencies: shareholders, employees, and
customers. At Google, there are two kinds of
customers: the users of Google’s services and the
advertisers who pay Google to be seen by users.
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 Google’s earliest days, Mayer had always been
tasked with making products that users love. And she
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Doug Edwards, Xooglers
Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar during Google's early
years
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 pursuit — at least for the sake of her future 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 that’s telling.”
This executive says that even before Mayer joined
Google’s Operating Committee, she had an open
invitation to join its meetings — out of respect for her
importance to the company and in an effort to develop
her career. But while Mayer would always show up for
meetings about Google’s products, “she would never
show up for a business review.”
By contrast, two of
Mayer’s peers —
Susan Wojcicki and
Jeff Huber — “would
make the time and be
there because they
were interested in
expanding their
horizons.”
By 2010, when
Mayer’s Google
career started
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Matt Rosoff
stalling, Wojcicki and Huber were getting promotions.
Both would end up reporting directly to Larry Page.
Huber would become Mayer’s boss. Today, Wojcicki
is considered one of the two or three most powerful
executives at Google.
Mayer missed several of these types of opportunities.
In the months before he became CEO again, Larry
Page would hold two-hour, post-Operating
Committee meetings on Mondays that were more
focused on long-term strategy.
One executive who was flattered to be invited says, “I
was pretty interested in understanding the connection
between Chrome and Android.”
But Mayer would hardly ever show, “either because
she was traveling or who knows.”
Several of the regular attendees at those meetings
ended up with positions reporting directly to Page.
One of them was Sundar Pichai, now leading
development of both Google’s Chrome and Android
products. Pichai’s ascent had to be bittersweet to
Mayer. He used to work for her, and she had
promoted him. Now he was passing her by.
But a former
colleague says Pichai
was a perfect contrast
to Mayer when it
came to being
involved with Google
as a whole.
“Sundar would
do anything to
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Sundar Pichaihelp the
company. He
was internally working cross-functionally to get
results. If someone was offline and didn’t get the
strategy he’d sit down with them one-on-one. He
really put work into it. Marissa didn’t do that at all.”
One of Mayer’s former colleagues says she skipped all
those meetings because, when it 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 Mayer’s career at
Google, and it would be very important later at Yahoo.
But more than her lack of interest in the business side
of Google, and certainly more than her history with
Page, there was one overriding reason for Marissa
Mayer’s 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 them featuring
Marissa Mayer as a speaker, says of her: “I've never
had a conversation with her when she wasn’t
completely certain she was right.”
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http://ashleyannphotography.com (http://ashleyannphotography.com)
Mayer and and Salar Kamangar clashed o5en.
This pedantic style works when you are the traffic cop
in a room full of designers and product managers, but
it alienated some of Mayer’s colleagues over the years.
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 Mayer’s that drove Kamangar
nuts was her ability to speak incredibly fast, not
allowing him to re-enter the debate.
“In an academic situation, that’s okay because the
best ideas rise and you have discussion,” says one
Googler, familiar with Kamangar’s complaints about
Mayer. “But in a place where there are personal
feelings involved, if you can’t win the debate
regardless of how hard you try, because she will
out-talk you, that’s a challenging situation.”
The rivalry between Mayer and Kamangar was so
intense that when Kamangar was made a vice
president 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.
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For many years at Google, Mayer insisted that if her
colleagues wanted to speak with her, they had to do so
during her “office hours.” Mayer would post a
spreadsheet online, and ask that anyone who wanted
to speak with her sign up for a five-minute window.
When Mayer’s “office hours” rolled around in the
afternoon, a line would start to form outside of her
office and spill over into the nearby couches.
“Office hours” are socially acceptable in an academic
environment because the power dynamic is clear. The
students are subordinate to the professor, usually
their elder and mentor.
But Mayer’s 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 latest
assignment or a class trip to Zurich, sat Google vice
presidents — people who had been at the company 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 Mayer’s sign-off.
“Her weakness was an unwillingness to delegate,”
says Craig Silverstein, the Google engineer who hired
Mayer years ago. “She doesn’t need any sleep. When
you have four or five more hours in the day than most
people do, you don’t learn to delegate because you
don’t need to.”
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sigir2006 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sigir2006/210350950/sizes
/o/in/photolist-jA71w-J9Ey8-5vqdFY/)
One story is that Amit Singhal told Larry Page that
Mayer had to go.
The team who grew most frustrated with Mayer over
the “office hours” and, more generally, the need for
her to sign off on product changes, were the engineers
in charge of Google search.
Several of Mayer’s
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
engineers in
charge of creating
the algorithms that actually power the search engine.
After he re-wrote Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s
original code in 2001, he was named a “Google
Fellow.” He’s a big deal inside the company.
One of Mayer’s former Google colleagues says that it
was actually Singhal and three other search engineers
who finally went to Larry Page and asked that Mayer
be removed from the top of Google’s search
organization.
“These four guys, they were constantly being
hampered. They’d say: ‘We want to roll out this
ranking change.’ Marissa’s like, ‘until I review it, you
can’t launch it.’ They’re like: ‘But it’s been three
weeks.’”
Finally, says this source, Singhal and the other
engineers went to Larry Page and said, “Take your
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pick. Her, or us.”
In this person’s telling, Page made his choice and
that’s why Mayer was moved out of search. She had
become a bottleneck.
Other people say Page removed Mayer from her perch
atop search after lots of input from lots of people.
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 needed to change.”
This Googler wonders if Mayer was unfairly punished
in 2010 and 2011.
“Sometimes she got into trouble because she’s
ambitious and a woman and that’s tough in a man’s
world. People take potshots at her because she was
very young and successful. I also think she’s young
and learning and you sometimes don’t get things
right.”
Another reason for Mayer’s career stall in 2011 was
that Google, as a company, had grown up.
By 2010, Google had 24,000 employees. It wasn’t
going to be the kind of place where, just because an
executive had been there a long time and knew the
co-founders personally, she was going to be able to
get whatever she wanted.
“You couldn’t run the company like that anymore,”
says one person who lived through the transition.
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AdMeld
Michael Barrett had only joined Yahoo weeks before
Mayer.
“As you grow you have to hire people who have done
this stuff before, and having people who haven’t lord
over them doesn’t work.”
So, by early 2011, Marissa Mayer’s progress at Google
had stalled. But another, greater opportunity was
about to come her way.
Illustration by Mike Nudelman
On the afternoon of Monday, July 16, 2012, Yahoo chief revenue officer
Michael Barrett stood at a gate in New York’s JFK airport, waiting to
board a plane to London.
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
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less than a month before.
Barrett’s job at Google had been a good one. He’d only
left because Yahoo chairman Fred Amoroso 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.
That’s when Dan Loeb, the manager of a hedge fund
called Third Point, decided he could make a lot of
money investing in Yahoo if he could force a few
people to quit its board and install a CEO of his
choosing.
There were two simple reasons Loeb believed Yahoo
was a worthwhile investment, despite a decade of
mismanagement. The first was that 700 million or so
people still went to Yahoo.com every month, even
though the company hadn’t 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 advantage of by
management.
So Loeb took a 5 percent stake in Yahoo and began a
letter-writing, shareholder-activist campaign to
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David Needleman
Dan Loeb asked Michael Wolf to find a CEO for Yahoo.
unseat its CEO and several of its board members. In
his letters, Loeb accurately pointed out that Yahoo
had been mismanaged for a decade, and that it was
largely the board’s fault. In December, Yahoo’s board
hoped to appease Loeb by hiring PayPal president
Scott Thompson to be Yahoo’s new CEO.
Loeb was not appeased. Publicly, he began lobbying
Thompson to install new board members. Privately,
Loeb asked a consultant he’d hired, former MTV
president Michael Wolf, to begin looking for someone
who could replace Thompson.
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
Web browser company, Andreessen had gone on to
found two other billion-dollar companies and a
successful venture capital firm. By the winter of 2012,
Andreessen had become Silicon Valley’s go-to wise
man.
Loeb and Wolf asked Andreessen if he’d join their
slate for Yahoo’s board. He refused to participate in a
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deal perceived to be hostile to Yahoo’s founders and
current management, but said 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 television network or
magazine publisher, but on the Internet. This person’s
specialties would be the ability to identify great
content, close deals with the people who create it and
those who could distribute it, and the skill set to sell
ads against it. CBS chief executive Les Moonves and
former News Corp chief operating officer Peter
Chernin are this kind of executive. So was Michael
Eisner when 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 and designers to
build software tools that consumers find useful,
addictive, or fun. Facebook CEO Mark 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 and buying content
and distributing it through Yahoo.com? Or should Yahoo
act like a “products” company — where Internet
software tools like search, Webmail, stock charts, and
photo storage attract 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
be selling 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 a steady stream
of innovative products if the company was going to
survive in a competition with large companies like
Google, Facebook, and Apple or even some of the
Valley’s many startups.
The message stuck.
In May 2012, Loeb finally figured out a way to get
Scott Thompson out of the CEO job.
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Flickr/Yodel Anecdotal (http://www.flickr.com/photos/yodelanecdotal
/6643144387/sizes/l/in/photostream/)
Scott Thompson resigned from Yahoo a5er Dan Loeb
revealed his bio was false.
Loeb learned that Thompson had graduated from
Stonehill College in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in
accounting — not a “bachelor’s degree in accounting
and computer science” as Yahoo claimed on its
website, and more importantly, in an SEC filing from
April.
On May 3, Loeb drafted a letter containing this
information, and sent it to the Yahoo board and the
SEC, which would publish it for the public. On May
13, Thompson resigned, citing health issues.
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 he’d
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
board’s transaction committee, which meant he would
have sign-off power on any sale of Yahoo’s valuable
Asian assets. Wolf would lead the executive search
committee, which had the immediate task of finding
Yahoo’s next CEO.
Wolf had someone in mind — just the kind of
“products” CEO Andreessen had recommended. He
hired executive recruiter Jim Citrin of Spencer Stuart,
and gave him a description of the Yahoo CEO job.
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The document Wolf gave Citrin said Yahoo needed to
hire someone who can “modernize” Yahoo’s “user
experiences” on mobile devices by building a culture
that attracts the best “content, developer, product
innovation, advertising, marketing and managerial
talent.” The document said the board sought someone
who could “reestablish Yahoo!’s credibility and
reputation in the tech-innovator community” and
build partnerships with companies such as
“Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.”
At Citrin’s 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 Wolf’s document. Citrin said those
people were at companies like Amazon, Apple, and
Google. He said that it was going 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 directors was Ross
Levinsohn, who became interim Yahoo CEO when
Thompson stepped down.
Levinsohn, who worked in Yahoo’s Santa Monica
office, is the kind of executive who looks like he
belongs in the CEO’s office of a West Coast
entertainment company. He'll point at the camera
when he’s having his picture taken. He’s got a wide
smile. His hair is combed back. He wears suits. He
looks good in the fleece zip-up sweater vests they give
out at Allen & Co’s Sun Valley conference for media
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AP
Apple's Eddy Cue was a candidate for the Yahoo CEO
job.
moguls.
Levinsohn joined Yahoo in October 2010 as an
executive vice president in charge of the “Americas”
region. Levinsohn had impressed shareholders with
his performance at Yahoo’s annual shareholder
meeting in 2011, when he presented a vision for
Yahoo as “the world’s premier digital media
company.” For a moment, he’d ended the confusion
about what kind of company Yahoo was — a “product”
company or a “media” company. To many directors, it
seemed like Levinsohn understood the value of
Yahoo’s audience, and had a plan to tap it.
Among the other names
were Nikesh Arora, the
chief business officer at
Google; Eddy Cue,
Apple’s senior vice
president of Internet
Software and Services;
and Jason Kilar, then the
CEO of Web TV site
Hulu.
The board also
asked Citrin to
approach Google’s Marissa Mayer.
Citrin cautioned that Mayer appeared to be a lifer at
Google and was unlikely to be interested in the job.
Many of the directors wondered whether Mayer was
actually capable of leading a large public corporation.
They asked question like: Had she ever managed a
balance sheet? Hadn’t she been demoted only a year
before?
Citrin said he’d call Mayer anyway.
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World Economic Forum (http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum
/8412862071/sizes/k/in/photostream/)
- - -
In the middle of
June 2012,
Marissa Mayer
sat on a plane,
thinking and
preparing. That
Monday, she’d
gotten a call
from Jim Citrin
of executive
search firm
Spencer Stuart.
He’d been
retained by
Yahoo, and he
had Yahoo director Michael Wolf with him.
Would she like to speak to Wolf? She would.
Now Mayer was flying to New York to have dinner at
Wolf’s 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 considering leaving.
The past two years at Google — since 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, she’d taken over a much more
massive operation than the one she’d been running at
Google.
Whenever people asked her about the “demotion,” as
Wolf and the other directors might over dinner,
Mayer always pointed out how she had gone from
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managing 250 product managers in search to
supervising a much larger, more diverse group of
managers — 1,100 people managing engineering,
design, marketing, and sales. Mayer would tell people
that she was supervising some 6,000 contractors.
She’d figured out that by the fraction of the company,
the geo and local piece that she was running was
something like 20-25 percent of the company’s overall
headcount.
The business challenges she’d dealt with in those
years had been as diverse as the types of people 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 Google’s tenth-
largest acquisition ever. More than that, the
integration of Zagat into Google search signaled a
major change in Google’s philosophy.
Previously, the company had steadfastly refused to
own or produce content that would show up in its
search engine. It would just index what was already
out there being created by the rest of the world.
But after Mayer joined geo in 2010, she found that the
“rest of the world” wasn’t as good at gathering
geographic data and putting it on the Web as it was
creating websites for Google to index. 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 of content for location-based searches — a
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popular kind of search to do on mobile, which was
quickly 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 of its
toughest competitors in mobile: Apple. Months
before, she’d noticed that Apple had started buying
companies in the mapping space. Then executive
recruiters sent by Apple had started reaching out to
her people.
Obviously, they were up to something big. Mayer
didn’t know — Apple would never announce it until it
was done — but she figured it planned to remove
Google Maps from the iPhone and replace it with its
own Apple Maps. She’d already countered Apple’s
offers by giving her people what they really wanted.
Sometimes it was raises. Sometimes it was
independence. Sometimes it was 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 team working on a new Google
Maps app for iPhone. She was confident it was going
to beat anything Apple’s people could come up with.
Mayer knew that her job switch in 2010 looked like a
demotion to some people outside the company —
especially people in the media. But as she flew to New
York that day in June 2012, Marissa Mayer knew that
she’d spent the previous two years learning a lot from
a bigger job than she’d ever had before.
And now she knew that she was ready for an even
bigger one.
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On the evening of June 24, Mayer arrived at Wolf’s
modern, Fifth Avenue apartment. An informal dinner
was served.
Mayer read for the part of Yahoo CEO.
Throughout the conversation, Mayer touted a
surprisingly thought-out plan for overhauling Yahoo’s
culture, executive suite, and product line-up.
After Mayer left, one of the board directors said to
Citrin: “That’s the next CEO of Yahoo.” The
committee 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 served a very
expensive bottle of wine, and Mayer hadn’t had a sip.
Probably she was just nervous.
Wolf wants to hire Mayer, but everyone else?
After that dinner, Wolf, the chair of Yahoo’s search
committee, had decided that Marissa Mayer should 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 man Marc 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 Ross Levinsohn should
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Yahoo Advertising (http://www.flickr.com/photos/56984041@N00
/6969638374/in/photolist-bBTdES-asRrcg-asRr7P-a7YqRc-a82k1G-
a7Ysxa-a82iks-a7YrmX-a82j7Q-a7YsrR-a82i8A-a7Ymjg-a7YroD-
a7YsyK-dSDrzC-dSDt6L-dSxUb2-dSDqp1-dSDs4y-dSDrn7-dSDqbw-
dSxUsD-dSxUWx-dSDqHh-dSDr7U-dSDpXN-dSDtxd-dSxVoB-
dSDshm-dSxTrc-dSxRmZ-dSDqVJ-9RB2T6-biVYb2-biVYe6-biVY8g-
bQMVnr-aCR7mS-aCNpCM-aCR7pE-aCNpv6-aCNpAT-
a9JFW8-9Vz3yM-a82icJ-a82jwb-a7YqBg-a82jHy-a82idN-a7YqJF-
a82jDq)
Ross Levinsohn and Katie Couric
get the full-time job.
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 Yahoo’s
employees. He wrote,
“I’m fired up and I hope
you are too. I believe in
the power of what we’re
doing. We have an
incredibly talented team,
unparalleled strengths in
key areas and most importantly, I see the purple pride building
everywhere. Let’s move forward quickly with conviction and
confidence.”
Levinsohn ran with the opportunity, and by the end of
June — really, just a few weeks — he’d accomplished a
lot. He’d signed a deal with Facebook over patents. He
was able to quickly recruit impressive executives into
Yahoo, including Google advertising executive
Michael Barrett. Levinsohn and his top dealmaker,
Jim Heckman, were also able to nail down several
content 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 under pressure from
the rest of the industry to hand him the job.
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All Things D (http://allthingsd.com/video
/?video_id=D36F34C7-3485-4DCC-9CC1-EE6BD8C68FE1)
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and cofounder Reid
Hoffman lobbied for Ross Levinsohn.
Levinsohn’s allies across the media, advertising, and
entertainment industries wrote Yahoo directors
letters recommending him.
At The Wall Street
Journal’s 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, even Marc Andreessen
wrote a note to Loeb suggesting that Yahoo should
just put Levinsohn in the job 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 Swisher —
who had, over the years, covered Yahoo closer than
anyone thanks to board-level sources — seemed to be
actively pushing for Yahoo to hire Levinsohn. She said
the only reason the board hadn’t hired him yet was
that it was looking for 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.
The top secret interviews
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moooster (http://www.flickr.com/photos/moooster/512631847/sizes
/o/in/photolist-MinA8-2irZBx-2ncJgh-2UyJk7-2UyJs3-44soQt-
44wDGo-44xrUA-44ya77-4q4jps-4vSyJv-4Rveg4-55WH6S-581iWb-
581j7L-581jbw-5ki9Wz-5uJWU9-5vNgpe-652ckZ-652cBF-656t4J-
6i2uGk-6i4o1M-6i4pZv-6i8wMj-6i8z7o-6HZEV1-6M2ywz-6M2yAR-
6M2yCi-6M2yD6-6M2yFi-6M2yHB-6M2yJZ-6M2yNr-6M2yPx-
6M2yQr-6M2yRn-6M2yUg-6M2yWn-6M2yYV-6M6HNA-6M6HRh-
6M6HSo-6M6HTo-6M6HXy-6M6J1w-6M6J5J-6M6J6J-6M6Jbq/)
The Four Seasons in Palo Alto
On the morning of
Wednesday, July 11,
2012, a small bus pulled
in front of the Four
Seasons Hotel in East
Palo Alto, California; a
squat all-glass building
in the middle of a
parking lot next to a
highway. As the bus
idled, about a dozen
middle-aged executives
quietly boarded.
These executives
were the Yahoo
board of directors,
and as they boarded that bus, they had no idea where
they were going. Their destination was a secret
because these people — people who would soon have
to come together and decide the fate of Yahoo — did
not trust each other.
That day, the board was going to interview, for the last
time, four finalist candidates for the Yahoo CEO job.
The search committee had decided that if the entire
board knew where the final interviews were taking
place, one of the directors would inevitably leak the
location to All Things D reporter Kara Swisher. For
years, the aviators-wearing, tough-talking Swisher
had been reporting Yahoo layoffs, firings, hirings, and
acquisitions before they actually happened. The new
directors assumed she had a source, or sources, on
the old board, and they were determined not to
provide her new ones.
Six days before, Swisher had reported, accurately,
that the board was considering Hulu CEO Jason Kilar
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Google Street View
This is the secret location of the Yahoo CEO
interviews
for the job. The report had made things awkward for
Kilar with Hulu’s corporate parents, Disney and News
Corporation, and he’d pulled himself out of the
running — taking a good option away from the board.
Some members of the board felt Swisher had meant to
nuke Kilar in order to help Levinsohn get the job.
(Swisher denies this, and there isn't any evidence to
back the allegation.)
David Kenny was particularly insistent on secrecy.
The fall prior, before Scott Thompson was hired,
Kenny had interviewed for the CEO job at Yahoo.
Word of his meetings in Sunnyvale had gotten out,
and Kenny had to resign from Akamai, where he was
president. Kenny recovered nicely — he’d become the
CEO of The Weather Channel — but he didn’t want
the same thing happening to any of the executives
interviewing that day.
The directors rode in the bus for exactly five miles —
south on University, south on 101, off the highway at
Oregon Expressway, and continuing onto Page Mill
road.
After 10 to 15 minutes,
the the bus pulled into
an office park, and
everyone got out.
They’d arrived at
the offices of Third
Point’s law firm,
Gibson Dunn. The
location was
ostensibly picked
by headhunter Jim Citrin, who’d also arranged the
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buses. But some of the directors took it as a signal
from the Third Point board members about whose
show this really was.
Citrin had also arranged for a car to pick up
Levinsohn. He had no idea where he was going,
either. He also didn’t know who the other finalists
were.
Levinsohn went first. He presented his plan, which
the board was familiar with by then. He wanted to get
Yahoo out of the “platform” business, where it was
competing with Google, Microsoft, and Facebook —
and move it into the content business. Levinsohn
knew some of the directors were worried that he’d
ignore Yahoo’s engineers and product development
people, so he talked about how he’d been spending a
lot of time with product boss Shashi Seth and his
team.
The interview felt strange to Levinsohn. He’d been
talking to Loeb a handful of times, every day. He said,
“You guys know where I’m at. You know what I'm
doing.”
After, Jim Citrin told Levinsohn he’d done well.
Levinsohn was told that if the board decided to go in
the “media” direction, the job was his.
Levinsohn left.
After enough time had passed to ensure that they
wouldn’t spot each other, Mayer arrived by limo.
Anyone remotely familiar with her childhood, studies,
and career could have predicted what happened next.
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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 extraordinary amount of detail on
Yahoo’s search business, audience analytics, and
data. She talked about fixing Yahoo’s culture with
more transparency, perks, and accountability. She
named her perceived weaknesses, and explained how
she planned to address them — including by hiring
people who had the skills she didn’t have.
When Mayer was done, Jim Citrin told her he’d call
her with the board’s 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 didn’t have enough
corporate experience. Some of the directors favored
Levinsohn because they felt that the Third Point
directors were just trying to install someone they
could control. They had not overlooked that the
“secret” location of the final interviews had been the
offices of Third Point’s lawyers.
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 upside
— she was more likely to come up with the next
Facebook or Google Maps or Twitter — but that
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Intuit (http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_kit
/intuit_town_hall/)
Brad Smith worried Mayer didn't have enough
corporate experience.
Levinsohn was the
safer bet, a more
guaranteed return.
Loeb, who had
fought a bloody
fight to get onto
the board, and
whose vote
undoubtedly
mattered the most,
didn’t mind that Mayer was a high-risk, high-reward
play. In his view, the sale of Yahoo’s Asian assets and
the returning of those proceeds through share
buybacks or dividends would provide enough of a
“floor” in Yahoo’s value that it was worth betting on
the greater upside 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 to stop
checking her phone.
At 9:45 p.m., the board still hadn’t called her. She
signaled to her husband, Zachary Bogue, that she
wanted to leave the party.
Wolf lobbied his fellow directors in favor of Mayer to
the point of annoyance.
Finally, the pro-Mayer directors proposed a solution.
What if they made Mayer the CEO and offered
Levinsohn a huge amount of money to stay on as her
COO? That way she’d be able to pursue her “products”
strategy, and he could keep running the sales force
and making deals with major media companies.
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Spencer Stuart
Jim Citrin called Marissa Mayer to offer her the job.
An informal vote was cast. The pro-Mayer directors
were in the majority, with Amoroso and others 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 to go. As
they began to say their goodbyes, Mayer’s phone
finally rang. It was Jim Citrin. She let it go to
voicemail.
Citrin told her: “Marissa
… you should be smiling.
We’re smiling. Call me
ASAP.”
When the board
reached Mayer to
offer her the job,
she did not accept
it right away. First
she had some
news to share.
She was five months pregnant. That’s why she hadn’t
touched her wine at Michael Wolf’s apartment 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 had
already been sealed. Once again he presented his plan
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for Yahoo to the board — this time with his executive
team there to fill in the details.
He’d woken up that morning still feeling confident
that he was going to get the job. But this was the
meeting where, midway through, Loeb left to go to the
bathroom and Wolf stood with Wilson to loudly
question the deals Heckman had been negotiating
with Google, Microsoft, and others.
Levinsohn went into the weekend at Allen & Co.’s
mogul conference at Sun Valley sure he’d lost 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 Morse’s team to prepare some
remarks for the company’s conference call with
analysts. Levinsohn kept telling the team, “don’t write
this for me, write it for a CEO. It should be generic.”
When that was done, Levinsohn went back to his
office to wait for the news. He’d wanted this job. He’d
fought for it. He’d done well.
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.
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Fox Business News (http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4487781/rovi-the-new-
netflix-/)
Fred Amoroso broke the bad news to Levinsohn.
He said, “We
love Ross. We
thank Ross. We
want him to
stay. We weren’t
looking for
someone like
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 different level of
perspective and talent to the organization we couldn’t
pass up.”
Illustration by Mike Nudelman
On Tuesday, July 17, 2012, David Filo stood waiting at
the entrance of Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale,
Calif. He was very excited.
Filo is a quiet, unassuming engineer for Yahoo. He
works in a cubicle. He also happens to be a
co-founder of the company.
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
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Marissa Mayer's Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marissamayer
/8295066273/)
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and co-founder David Filo.
more money than
him.
And yet, the
reason Filo was
waiting near the
entrance of Yahoo
was so that when
Marissa Mayer
arrived, he would
be able to unfurl a
long purple carpet before her feet.
Yahoo’s hero was coming. But huge challenges faced
her.
Yahoo’s websites were getting fewer and fewer visitors
every year. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s mobile apps were
being largely ignored.
For years, Yahoo’s most talented executives and
engineers had been quitting the company to join
faster-moving rivals like Facebook and Google. Those
who stayed at Yahoo tended to show up late and leave
early, or log-in from home. Mayer had to fix Yahoo’s
culture.
Mayer also walked into the office that day seven
months pregnant. Her new colleagues looked to see if
she was showing. They wondered how in the world
she would manage a baby and the huge job ahead of
her.
The excitement was everywhere in the building. One
enthusiastic Yahoo employee had made a poster with
Mayer’s face on it in the style of Shepard Fairey’s
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2008 campaign
poster for Barack
Obama. Across the
lower third, the
poster has one
word in all-caps:
“HOPE.”
When she finally arrived, Mayer’s first job was to meet
the one group of Yahoo employees who were not as
excited by her arrival — Yahoo’s senior executives,
several of whom had risen to their jobs thanks to Ross
Levinsohn.
Levinsohn, despite personal pleas from Amoroso and
whispers of a generous compensation package, was
not staying as Mayer’s chief operating officer. Since
he took the interim job in May, he’d warned the board
that if he didn’t get the permanent gig, he was going to
try to become a CEO somewhere else.
If Levinsohn ever had any notion of reconsidering,
that was squashed by his first scheduled meeting with
Mayer.
After he’d learned that she was getting the job, he’d
flown back home to Los Angeles. When Mayer said
she wanted to meet, he agreed to fly back up to
Sunnyvale. But when he showed up at their appointed
time, Mayer’s 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
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wait here.”
She wanted him to wait so that when Mayer was done
with whatever she was doing, he would be
immediately available.
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 Mayer’s 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, Yahoo’s senior executives
walked into Mayer’s new office at Yahoo — the one
Fred Amoroso had been using days before.
Many of these people were meeting Mayer for the first
time, and they expected to sit across from the woman
they’d read about in so many fluffy profiles and had
seen on TV or on stage at conferences — someone
who was charismatic and warm; personal.
That was not what they got.
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.
As Yahoo executives answered, Mayer took notes on
their answers with pen on paper, hardly looking up.
“It kind of felt like you were summoned to the
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TechCrunch (http://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/7257855608/)
principal’s office,” says one executive who went
through one of these introductory meetings with
Mayer.
“You would have thought a fair portion of [that
meeting] would have been about ‘so what are you
going through? How are you feeling? Sorry about
Ross. We love him. We’d like to keep him.
Realistically, he won’t stay but that doesn’t have any
impact on you.’
“There wasn’t any kind of commiseration or any kind
of bear hug. There wasn’t even a question of ‘Are you
in or are you out?’ It was: ‘I assume you’re 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. His boss asked
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Mayer “Would you like to meet the people I brought?”
Mayer looked at them.
“No.”
The truth is, the person Yahoo’s top executives sat
across from in those first meetings was not the
Marissa Mayer they thought they knew from the
media coverage of her. It was the Marissa Mayer her
Stanford classmate Josh Elman remembers from late
night study sessions.
Just as during those all-nighters almost 20 years
before, Mayer wasn’t at Yahoo to socialize. In one
early meeting Mayer said that Yahoo was going to fail
— shut down — in the next few years if it did not get
things going soon. She told a top product executive
that Yahoo lagged in innovation 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 to get
started.
Some of the executives Mayer met with had a hard
time connecting with her. Just as some of her
Stanford 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 Yahoo’s products at
the time, the meetings were even more intense.
A designer or a top product manager would sit down
and Mayer would assault them with a series of
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jdlasica (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/3921911015/)
Jim Heckman's and Marissa Mayer's personalities
clashed.
questions.
“How was that researched?”
“What was the research methodology?”
“How did you back that up?”
One person who went through a Mayer grilling says,
“It was scary for a lot of people because of its
intensity.”
The most pivotal
meeting Mayer had in
her first few days at
Yahoo was with
Levinsohn’s dealmaker,
Jim Heckman.
She had to learn
exactly what
Heckman had
been negotiating
with Yahoo’s
competitors. She had to decide whether or not to
finalize these deals or to unwind them altogether.
More broadly, Mayer had to understand the direction
Heckman and Levinsohn had been taking Yahoo, and
decide whether to keep it going that way or to slam on
the brakes.
It is possible that, in the history of business, there has
never been a meeting between two people whose
personalities, styles, and priorities clash more than
Mayer’s and Heckman’s.
Mayer is passionate about the pixels in the picture.
She’s shy. She’s careful. She’s bold, but not reckless.
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She’s idealistic about people. She'll pay $60,000 to
meet a designer, but wear his dress modestly.
Jim Heckman breaks glass. He’s squinty-eyed and
caffeinated. He makes deals. He uses your first name.
He quotes the comedian Daniel Tosh of Tosh.0. He
doesn’t care about the headcount; he cares about the
bottom line. Once, at a Yahoo party held on a yacht
during the Cannes Lions Festival in France, Heckman
brought a date who decided to go topless. There was a
lot of shouting on the yacht.
Heckman met with Mayer during her first few days at
Yahoo. Heckman laid out the plan he and Levinsohn
had been working on for the past year. If
implemented it would have completely changed the
way Yahoo did business.
Yahoo makes its money by selling advertising.
Heckman and Levinsohn believed that Yahoo had
spent too much money and too much time trying to
invent advertising technology that would allow Yahoo
to charge higher ad rates. He believed that companies
like Google, Microsoft, and AppNexus were far ahead
of Yahoo in the world of ad tech, and that Yahoo was
better off partnering with one of those companies and
getting rid of the people it employed to work on ad
tech.
Heckman told Mayer he believed partner ad
technology would immediately raise Yahoo’s ad rates.
Moreover, with the money Yahoo would save by
getting rid of the people it had working on ad tech, it
could go out and buy high quality video content from
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Microsoft
Steve Ballmer was ready to give MSN.com to Yahoo.
Hollywood studios. He argued that advertisers would
be willing to pay much higher ad rates if Yahoo’s
content quality were higher. He said rates could go
from under $2 per 1,000 impressions to $20.
In Heckman’s vision, Yahoo.com was more like a cable
TV provider with a large, installed audience, than it
was a maker of technology products.
Heckman said he already
had a deal negotiated
with Google executive
Henrique De Castro to
begin using Google’s
advertising technology
instead of Yahoo’s.
Heckman said the
same theory could
be applied to other
second-, third-, or
fourth-place Yahoo businesses. He talked about how
Boeing lets GE, Rolls-Royce, and Pratt-Whitney make
the actual engines for its airplanes.
He told Mayer that he’d negotiated a deal with
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, wherein Yahoo would
turn over its entire search business — patents and all
— in exchange for Microsoft’s large online media
property, MSN.com, and long-term, guaranteed cash
payments.
Heckman said his plan would allow Yahoo to run with
just 4,000 full-time employees, far fewer than the
15,000 full-timers and thousands more contractors
Yahoo employed then. He said Yahoo EBITDA
(Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and
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Amortization) would increase by 50 percent if Mayer
closed his deals.
Mayer heard him out, taking notes the whole time.
Within 24 hours, Mayer let Heckman know that she’d
canceled all his deals and that his services were no
longer needed by Yahoo.
Heckman flew to Ibiza, Spain for a 30-day vacation.
Mayer began to hire her own people.
Ironically, one of her biggest hires in her first few
months at Yahoo was the Google executive Jim
Heckman had been negotiating with, Henrique De
Castro.
Mayer made De Castro Yahoo’s COO, and agreed to
pay him as much as $62 million over four years, not
counting annual stock grants.
This hire came as a surprise to Michael Barrett, the
Google executive Ross Levinsohn had hired to run
Yahoo ad sales. Though Barrett had been hired by
Levinsohn, he was trying to make a go of things at
Mayer’s Yahoo.
Barrett had heard rumors that Mayer was going to
hire someone to replace him, but when he confronted
her about them she said she wasn’t going to hire
anyone above him, and certainly not Henrique De
Castro. She even hinted that Barrett could be Yahoo’s
chief operating officer.
But then Barrett read a story on AllThingsD.com saying
that De Castro had been hired.
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Hurt, but politic, he called Mayer’s office intending to
congratulate her on the big hire. He wanted to begin
discussing his own exit, as well.
Barrett got Mayer’s assistant.
She said, “Marissa is unavailable. I’m sure she’d love
to hear from you. Could I have her call you back?”
Barrett said fine.
Mayer called him back while he was out to dinner in
San Francisco.
As he picked up the phone, he expected her to begin
the conversation with an apology for blindsiding him.
But all Mayer said was, “You called?”
Stunned that Mayer would either pretend to not know
why he called or actually didn’t know why, Barrett
said, “Yeah, I just wanted to say congrats on
Henrique. He sounds like a really great hire.”
Mayer said, “I wasn’t able to tell anyone I was hiring
him. I don’t think you should feel bad.”
“I don’t really feel bad at all,” he said.
The two never talked again, and Barrett left Yahoo
with a severance package worth many millions of
dollars.
De Castro has a distinct reputation among his former colleagues on the
advertising side of Google’s business. All consider him sharp and
effective. But he speaks with a heavy accent, is considered deeply
pompous, and likes to speak in aphorisms. His nickname is “the most
interesting man in the world,” after the Dos Equis spokesman.
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All Things D (http://allthingsd.com/video/?catname=d10)
Henrique De Castro's nickname is “the most interesting
man in the world,” a5er the Dos Equis spokesman.
Steven Henry, Getty Images
Jackie Reses is Mayer's executive bagman.
Mayer’s next
most important
and
controversial
hire was a
long-time
private equity
investor named
Jacqueline
Reses.
Though Reses had no experience in human resources,
Mayer put her in charge of it at Yahoo. Mayer hired
Reses because Mayer’s plan to improve the talent level
at Yahoo was to buy lots of failed startups for small
amounts of money.
Mayer believed that Reses would be expert at nailing
down those kinds of transactions. She has been. In
Mayer’s first year, Yahoo bought more than 20
startups.
Reses, a “gruff” and
“matter-of-fact,”
executive also served
another purpose for
Mayer: executioner.
In December 2012,
she called up Michael
Katz, a Yahoo
executive based in
New York, and asked
him out for a drink at
a Mexican restaurant
called Dos Caminos.
It was a Sunday and
Katz was celebrating the second night of Hanukkah, but he figured
Reses would only ask him out at such an inconvenient time for
something important. One drink in, she fired him — just weeks before a
multi-million-dollar bonus was due. (He sued.)
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Mayer replaced Levinsohn’s chief marketing officer,
Mollie Spillman, in August — while Spillman was on
vacation. The new CMO was Kathy Savitt, a “bubbly”
and “charismatic” executive who’d founded a startup
in 2009 after running marketing for teen retail giant
American Eagle Outfitters.
After completing the sale of some Alibaba stock back
to Alibaba and netting Yahoo almost $8 billion in
cash, CFO Tim Morse left the company at the end of
September 2012. Mayer hired the plain-spoken Ken
Goldman to replace him.
Mayer kept some of Levinsohn’s people in place
during her first year. Media boss Mickie Rosen would
last until July 2013.
In the middle of all this, a baby
On Sept. 30, 2012
Mayer gave birth
to a baby boy. For
weeks, Mayer and
Bogue called their
child only “BBBB”
for “Big Baby Boy
Bogue.” They
would eventually name him Macallister.
Mayer’s pregnancy had been a fascination of the
media, women around the world, and plenty of her
Yahoo coworkers. Everyone wondered how she would
handle having a newborn while trying to turn around
a multi-billion-dollar public company.
Mayer made the baby-raising part look easy.
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She took just a two-week maternity leave. Then, two
months after giving birth, Mayer told the audience at
a conference on women in business: “The baby’s been
way easier than everyone made it out to be.”
What Mayer didn’t say was that, thanks to her
incredible wealth and power at Yahoo, she had a lot of
help with Macallister. At home, she had a full-time
staff. At Yahoo, she knocked down a wall in her office
and set up a nursery so that Macallister — and his
nanny — could come to the office with her every day.
The comments upset a lot of women. Lisa Belkin of
The Huffington Post wrote an open letter to Mayer, in
which she said, “Dear Marissa Mayer … Putting ‘baby’
and ‘easy’ in the same sentence turns you into one of
those mothers we don’t like very much.”
Many of the same women would also take issue with
Mayer in the spring of 2013, when she banned
employees from working from home. Working from
home was a convenient way for many of them to
continue their careers after giving birth. Why was
Mayer taking such a stance against it?
Mayer hadn’t intended to make a statement. She’d
only wanted more people in the office at Yahoo. As for
fighting for the working conditions of women, Mayer
says that she is not a “feminist.” She says she is “blind
to gender.”
Mayer goes missing
By the middle of the fall of 2012, a camaraderie
developed between all of Mayer’s direct reports, and
enthusiasm in the Yahoo workforce was swelling.
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REUTERS/Stephen Lam
This was in part due to a series of cultural reforms
Mayer brought to Yahoo almost immediately upon her
arrival.
She wanted to recreate
the high-energy,
high-productivity culture
of Google’s early days,
when she had been
happy working 100-hour
weeks as a programmer.
She made the food
free and started
taking her own
lunches in the
employee
cafeteria. She took
down cubicle
walls. She joined
in on email chains
with lower-level
employees. She banned BlackBerrys and gave top-of-
the-line company smartphones to every employee.
She created a forum where employees could complain
about issues and suggest solutions. Parking lots that
had been empty until 10 a.m. and again after 4 p.m.
were suddenly full from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
On Fridays, Mayer would host a weekly meeting she
called “FYI.” All Yahoo employees were invited. She’d
go over her plans for the company, that week’s “wins”
for Yahoo, and answer questions from the crowd.
Mayer dazzled. She was in her element. It was like she
was back at Stanford, teaching fellow undergraduates
the material she’d just learned the year before.
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“If you go to the Friday meetings, it’s like a Berkshire
Hathaway annual meeting,” says one executive who
attended them.
“We would take the stage after she would open, so we
were standing off the stage, watching the audience.
You should have sees the rapture in their eyes. They
were like smitten teenagers. It is unbelievable.
“She is deified. The first 50 rows are packed with the
engineering team and they’re cheering her on. There
is no question that there’s a palpable level of energy
and renewed enthusiasm and renewed pride.”
Just a few weeks in, Yahoo employee morale and
productivity hit a high not seen in a decade.
There was only one serious complaint from Mayer’s
top executives: She never seemed to be around when
they needed her. What was she working on all the
time?
Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join
the call, so executives from New York, where it was 6
p.m., and Europe, where it was as late as midnight
would dial-in too.
Inevitably, Mayer herself would show up at least 45
minutes late. Some calls started so late that Yahoo’s
executives in Europe didn’t hang up till 3 a.m. their
time.
One of Mayer’s former Google colleagues says the
lateness habit is something Mayer picked up during
her 13 years at Google.
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Lockerz
Even executives hired by Mayer, like CMO Kathy Savitt,
felt ignored by her early on.
“Eric, Larry,
and Sergey were
always late and
causing
everybody in the
organization to
be late. They
would hold you
over, and then
you would be
late. And then the next meeting would start late and
then run late. And then all of the staff in that meeting
would be late. It would just trickle down through the
organization. Is Marissa Mayer always late? Well,
yeah. But it was endemic to the organization.”
Mayer’s lateness was a pain, sure. But by the early fall
of 2012, Mayer’s staff had grown used to it. In fact,
they were actually glad when she’d show up late to a
meeting, because that meant at least she hadn’t blown
it off entirely.
Mayer had approximately 25 people reporting directly
to her during her first year at Yahoo. In theory, she
was keeping up with each of them in a regularly
scheduled weekly meeting. In practice, she would go
weeks without talking to people because she was so
busy.
For a while, each of those 25 people thought that
Mayer was just picking on them, individually. The
people who had been at Yahoo before Mayer joined
assumed that this meant she was going to fire them
soon. The people Mayer had just hired into the
company, including Reses and Savitt, were even more
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puzzled. Why had they been hired only to be ignored?
But then, during one of those long waiting periods
after 3 p.m. on a Monday, a conversation unfurled
that revealed all.
Making small talk, one executive said to another: “Did
she cancel one of your one-on-ones again?”
A third jumped in: “Oh my god, she does that to you
too?”
It turned out that everyone in the room and on the call
had been canceled on by Mayer, frequently.
“Everyone assumed that they were the only one being
canceled on. But then they realized that they weren’t,”
says one person who was in those meetings.
The problem with Mayer canceling her scheduled
meetings with everyone is that it was otherwise
impossible to see her.
“That was your only point of contact with her. There
wasn’t a lot of serendipity of bumping into her or
having her pop her head into a meeting. Getting onto
her calendar was nothing short of impossible.”
One person who kept getting blown off by Mayer
remembers thinking: “I may not be you, but I'm
running a huge part of your business. I've got
thousands of people reporting to me. The chance that
I would miss a meeting with my directs without an
explanation is none.
“First of all, I don’t miss those meetings. Maybe it
happens once in a year because of something. But
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then I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to
call them and I'm going to apologize and I'm going to
say I'm sorry, I'll make it up to you, let’s schedule
some other time. I'm not going to make them wait for
more than five minutes because I know they have
incredibly important things to do. And they are
human beings.”
During those staff meetings, Mayer made little time
for certain topics early on — especially those having to
do with revenue, advertising technology, or
distribution.
Mayer would only entertain three deals per week, and
it was quickly obvious the ones she would always
prefer to talk about: anything to do with product. If
Reses wanted to talk about an aqui-hire that would
bring a talented product manager into Yahoo, Mayer
would prioritize the conversation. If there was talk of
a partnership with Apple on a new Weather app, that
would definitely be discussed.
There was a reason for Mayer’s lateness, for the
skipped meetings, and for the priority of product
discussions during those meetings, though.
Prior to joining Yahoo, Mayer had decided the
company’s many problems boiled down to one:
everything going out the front door from PR to
marketing to products was flawed. In her first months
at the company, Mayer’s plan was to immediately stop
that from happening ever again.
It would take an incredible amount of time and effort.
Picture a dam sprouting leaks, and Mayer trying to
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plug them with all her fingers and toes.
“Who is this woman and what is she actually saying?”
A week after Mayer joined Yahoo, a Yahoo employee
took a photo of one of the purple-on-purple Marissa
Mayer HOPE posters taped to the walls of Yahoo and
sent it to a Google employee named Hunter Walk.
Walk tweeted it, and soon the poster was a news story.
One of Mayer’s former subordinates from Google,
Katie Jacobs Stanton, by then a vice president at
Twitter, saw the tweet, and replied to Walk in her own
public tweet. She wrote: “I hope that went through UI
review :)”
The joke is a reference to the user-interface reviews
that Mayer famously insisted on conducting for every
consumer-facing Web product Google launched from
2005 to 2010 before she was removed from the top of
the search products organization.
Stanton was suggesting that the Mayer she knew, the
one she once reported to, would soon have strict
control over all of Yahoo, and especially anything
Yahoo made for the public’s consumption.
Stanton was spot on.
Upon taking control of
Yahoo, Mayer’s first
instinct was to survey
and quantify everything
that Yahoo was doing
that the public could see,
and then start
controlling it.
This applied to all
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Fortune Live Media (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fortunelivemedia
/5957948631/)areas of Yahoo,
including public
relations. Throughout the fall, every week, all the
Yahoo PR people had to complete a big spreadsheet
with the names of every reporter they wanted to talk
to and what the business objective was. This
spreadsheet was then submitted to the head of Yahoo
PR, Anne Espiritu. Espiritu would then submit the
form to Mayer. Mayer, in turn, would approve or
reject every call or email and then pass the form back
down the line.
If Yahoo’s public relations staff had any complaints
about these tactics, they could bring them to Espiritu
during her weekly office hours.
No group had a shorter leash than Yahoo’s largest,
most important team: the hundreds of people in
charge of creating, developing, designing, and
updating Yahoo products.
On Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012, Marissa Mayer wrote a
blog post announcing a new version of Yahoo Mail for
the Web, Windows 8, the iPhone, and Android.
It was a huge moment for the new Yahoo. No Yahoo
product, perhaps other than the Yahoo homepage, is
as important to Yahoo as Yahoo Mail. It’s the biggest
reason any of Yahoo’s 700 million users ever bother
to go to Yahoo.com in the first place. And over the
previous few years, it had slowly been losing users.
“Email is the ultimate daily habit,” Mayer says in the
post. “It’s often the first thing we check in the
morning and the last thing before going to bed.”
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Three months before those words hit the Web, Mayer
and 30 designers, product managers, and engineers
sat around a huge table in one of Yahoo’s large,
traditional conference rooms.
Mayer was talking. Fast. As she spoke, two of the
people seated near her typed away like crazy, trying to
take verbatim notes in Google Docs. They were
struggling to keep up.
This group of people had been meeting three times a
week for a month, and they’d turned the conference
room into a space that now looked more like a design
studio. Windows ran down one side of the room. On
the other side, projectors hung from the ceiling,
rendering screens on the wall. Between the
projections stood 20 or 30 huge pieces of foam core
pinned up with a collection of ideas about what a new
Yahoo homepage and a new Yahoo email could look
like.
For the 30 people sitting around the table, their first
meetings with Mayer over the past month had been
terrifying.
For years, Yahoo had been a place where the CEO was
a distant figure who would meet with various
members of his or her executive leadership team to
lay out broad strategies for each function: design,
technology, product, etc.
Mayer skipped all that.
“She was like ‘yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get to that. Let’s
first get some stuff out the door that actually works,’”
says a witness to those early days.
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It was a level of energized scrutiny none of them were
used to.
Mayer came at them with “a voracious flood of
possibilities” about what the new products could look
like. Her ideas were both big and small — minute
even. Mayer displayed such a “profound capacity for
detail,” that the leadership in the room finally set up
the two transcribers so that later they could “share
and dissect” all of Mayer’s ideas and decisions.
One of them remembers thinking: “Who is this
woman and what is she actually saying?”
But soon, as the weeks wore on, the 30 people in that
room began to learn how to respond to what Mayer
was saying.
Some of the people in the room were growing
frustrated with the pace, but others began
contributing. Among those who contributed, Mayer
learned who to trust. Those trusted people began to
grow in confidence and they started to contribute
even more.
Soon, these once-terrifying meetings became friendly,
fun. Jokes started to fly around.
“It warmed up,” says someone who was in those
meetings. “Once we learned how to operate on that
level of intensity with her, she softened and it became
more of an interaction.”
“You’d look at her and she’s smiling!”
This was Mayer in her ultimate element.
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She was pushing the pace as she had those late nights
working on problems for Philosophy 160A. She was
teaching, as she had 3,000 Stanford undergraduates.
She was creating, as she had those pompom routines
25 years before. She was using data to empathize with
hundreds of millions of people all at once, as she had
learned to do at Google.
“I've never seen anybody like [her],” says someone
from those meetings. Mayer, he says, was “somebody
who could see a whole collection of possibilities and
could just talk about her experiences and principles.”
“In that way she would start to not only share how she
was thinking, but also help us learn a lens to look
through to be able to connect where she was coming
from and what we were about.”
Mayer’s intensity
was contagious. By
November, the
Yahoo Mail team
was working
nights and
weekends, racing to finish by an insane early
December deadline. This was a credit to Mayer and
the leader of the Mail team, Shashi Seth, a product
leader Mayer inherited.
Finally, the Mail team finished their work at the end
of November. They were proud of their work, and
they deserved to be. Never had Yahoo built and
launched a version of Mail so quickly. The last time
Yahoo had done it, it took 18 months to build the
product and another six months to roll it out.
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But then Yahoo learned another lesson about what
making products would be like with Marissa Mayer as
CEO.
One day before the new Yahoo Mail was set to launch,
Mayer called a meeting with CMO Kathy Savitt,
Shashi Seth, and the entire product and engineering
leadership team — about 10 people in total. They met
in Phish Food, the conference room where months
before, Ross Levinsohn had pitched an alternate
reality for Yahoo to a board that wasn’t really
listening.
Everyone settled in; Mayer dropped a bombshell. For
months, it had been decided that the new Yahoo
Mail’s colors would be blue and gray. The thought was
that users were going to be looking at Yahoo Mail on
their phones all day long, and so it was best to choose
the most subtly contrasting colors possible.
Mayer wanted to change the colors entirely — from
blue and gray to purple and yellow.
Seth’s body language shifted immediately. He looked
deflated. He was going to have to tell his people the
news.
Changing the color of a product like Yahoo Mail
sounds easy, but it’s not. Mayer’s decision meant that
some unlucky group of people were going to have to
manually go and change the color in literally
thousands of places — all while working under a
deadline.
Seth’s team got the changes done, but there was
fallout from Mayer’s decision. The lead Yahoo Mail
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designer quit and went to Google. The Yahoo Mail
product manager went to Disney. The lead engineer
left and founded a startup. Seth himself left Yahoo in
January 2013, a month after Mail launched.
One person, frustrated by the incident, says he’d
hoped the Yahoo Mail launch would make people
“incredibly proud of what they've accomplished” and
that they would be inspired to “stick around for years
to come.”
“It was the exact opposite,” he says.
But others have a different perspective.
Their view is that Mayer refused to launch a product
that she didn’t think was finished. A product’s color
may seem superficial, but Mayer is obsessed with data
that shows it is not. At Yahoo’s scale, if you can
change a color a little bit and affect the performance
by some factor of .01 percent, that translates into
millions of dollars.
In this view, when Mayer forced already burnt-out
people to work even harder at the very last minute to
make sure a product went out as good as it could be,
she set a marker for the new era of Yahoo.
“The precedent made the next project easier to deal
with,” says one person who helped launch Yahoo
Mail. “We’d gotten comfortable with what Yahoo-ness
was about.”
Yahoo's mobile problem
When Mayer came to Yahoo in 2012, Yahoo’s mobile
traffic was still tiny compared to other big tech
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Mayer put Adam Cahan in charge of a new group called “Mobile and
Emerging Products.”
companies like Google and Facebook. Yahoo’s mobile
apps weren’t very popular either.
So when Mayer joined Yahoo, she knew that a top
priority had to be developing mobile apps that
consumers would make a part of their daily lives.
To try to figure out what those apps should be, Mayer
conducted a survey.
The results made her laugh.
She learned that after activities like calling people,
texting, and maps, the main things people do on their
phones everyday are: check email, check weather, get
news, get stock quotes, check sports scores, get
entertainment news, share photos, communicate with
groups, and ask questions.
What made Mayer laugh was that those are all things
people go to Yahoo for on the Web. Yahoo’s biggest
products are Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo
Finance, Yahoo Sports, and so on.
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At a speech in New York in May 2013, Mayer said:
“Yahoo has had the functionality and content people
want on their phones. Now we need to get it into apps
and the mobile web in a way people can really
consume it on their phones.”
In her first year at Yahoo, Mayer made two big moves
to expand mobile reach and usage.
The first move was to put a Yahoo executive named
Adam Cahan in charge of a new group called “Mobile
and Emerging Products.” Cahan came to Yahoo when
it acquired his mobile startup, IntoNow, for $20
million in 2011.
Yahoo lacked the mobile talent to staff such a group,
so Mayer spent $200 million at the end of 2012 and
through August of 2013 acquiring more than 20
mobile startups. In almost every case, Yahoo would
shut down the startup’s product, sign its engineering
and product development people to two- and
four-year contracts, and integrate them into Cahan’s
team.
Mayer’s second big move to improve Yahoo’s standing
in mobile would turn out to be the biggest transaction
of her entire career. It would cost Yahoo $1.1 billion.
Could Mayer close the deal?
On the evening of Thursday, May 16, 2013,
26-year-old David Karp looked at his iPhone and saw
he had a voicemail from the chief operating officer of
Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg.
He listened to her message. All Sandberg said was
that she’d like Karp to call her back.
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Screenshot/Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01
/02/tumblr-david-karps-800-million-art-project/)
David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr.
But she had said
enough.
Karp, the founder
of a blog network
called Tumblr, told
his investment
banker Jonathan
Turner at Qatalyst
Partners about the voicemail.
They decided they had to call Yahoo and let them
know Sandberg had called.
That day, All Things D reporter Kara Swisher and her
colleague Peter Kafka had reported that Yahoo was in
serious talks to buy Tumblr.
Karp, his board, and his bankers believed Sandberg
was calling to see if the report was true, and if
Facebook could possibly join the bidding for Tumblr.
On the one hand, a bidding war between Facebook
and Yahoo would be great news for Tumblr, its
bankers, and its investors.
On the other, Turner was terrified that the leak would
spoil their deal. Mayer was from Google, and Google
was infamous for pulling the plug on deals if it felt like
the other side was trying to gin up interest in the
press. Throughout every stage of the slow courtship
between the companies, Turner had been paranoid
about the press.
After originally offering only $800 million to buy Tumblr, Yahoo had
finally upped its bid to $1.1 billion and was going through the final
stages of due diligence. The deal was basically done, and the Tumblr
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World Economic Forum (http://www.flickr.com/photos
/worldeconomicforum/6772171435/)
When Sheryl Sandberg le5 a voicemail on David
Karp's phone, it threatened to blow up the deal.
board didn’t think it was
time to get greedy.
Still, Yahoo had to
be told about the
voicemail. The
companies had
signed an
“exclusivity”
agreement, which
meant that Tumblr
had to notify
Yahoo of any other approaches.
Turner had nothing to worry about.
When Mayer found out about Sandberg’s voicemail,
she only became more eager to get the deal done.
She went to her M&A team, led by “gruff” New Yorker
Jackie Reses, and told them to hurry up and wrap
things up; she didn’t want to lose out on Tumblr — not
after all those months of work and so many meetings
with Karp.
Talks between the two companies had begun in
November 2012, when Karp went to Sunnyvale and
met with Mayer.
By then, Tumblr, founded in 2007, had grown to an
astounding 200 million worldwide users a month, but
Karp still hadn’t figured out how the blog network
could make a lot of money off all those users.
He was taking meetings on the West Coast to see if
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo wanted to
make a strategic investment. He thought one of those
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companies might want to sell ads on Tumblr.com and
split the revenues.
That first meeting between Karp and Mayer left both
parties cold. Mayer mostly talked about what she was
trying to do at Yahoo, and a potential deal between
the two companies didn’t really come up.
After the meeting, Karp told his board and his
bankers that the new CEO of Yahoo was very nice, but
that he didn’t see a deal happening.
At investment bank Qatalyst, Turner passed the news
onto his boss, legendary tech banker Frank
Quattrone.
Quattrone had gotten rich and powerful during the
dot com bubble. He also got in some hot water with
the law, though he eventually extricated himself. He’s
brash. He’s got a mustache. He looks like the cartoon
version of a deal-making, back-slapping, investment
banker. And yet, he’s probably the best deal-maker in
the business.
Quattrone thought he would be able to get Mayer
more interested in Tumblr. So, in early 2013, he met
with her, and pointed out that one of Tumblr’s great
strengths was how popular it was on mobile devices.
He accurately noted the incredible amount of time
young people were spending on Tumblr.
Quattrone had said the magic word: “mobile.”
Mayer said she’d take a second look.
When Marissa Mayer studies a topic, she doesn’t do it
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Mario Tama, Getty Images
“She really took ownership of this, really persuaded
David that she would let Tumblr stay independent.”
superficially. After her meeting with Quattrone, she
spent an entire weekend using Tumblr, poking
around the site, and studying metrics.
Mayer decided to get back in touch with Karp. Only,
she didn’t want to do an advertising deal or make a
strategic investment. She wanted to buy his company.
If that was going to happen, it was going to take some
doing. Karp didn’t want to sell his company. Facebook
and Google had started trying to talk him into it, but
he refused, even though a sale would net him more
than $100 million after taxes. He wanted to keep
control over his company.
Mayer realized she
needed to put on a
full-court press.
Mayer flew to New
York in February
and had dinner
with Karp and
Jackie Reses on a
Saturday night.
Mayer was able to
win Karp over that night. She said that Tumblr was an
excellent product — an amazing tool for
self-expression. She noted that it was beating
Facebook with younger consumers.
That Saturday night, Mayer told Karp that she had a
board meeting coming up soon, and that she’d like to
bring up the possibility of buying Tumblr.
Would he be able to meet again that Sunday?
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Karp agreed to meet again. That Sunday night over
dinner, Mayer talked about how the new paradigm for
tech acquisitions was for the acquiring company to
allow the acquired company to continue operating
independently, as a subsidiary with its own brand.
She said that’s what Google had done with YouTube,
what Facebook had done with Instagram, and it’s
what Yahoo would do with Tumblr.
They stayed out till 2 a.m. Karp told Mayer to bring up
the idea at her board meeting.
During her first-quarter board meeting, Mayer said
she’d like to buy Tumblr. She said Tumblr would, in a
snap, improve Yahoo’s position in mobile and make
its overall audience much younger. The board gave
her full support to pursue the deal.
Everything went fine from there. The All Things D
report and Sandberg’s voicemail only hurried the
process along.
Finally, over the next weekend, Karp and his board
accepted Yahoo’s offer.
It was a triumph for Mayer and Yahoo.
For years, Yahoo had tried to acquire hot startups that
would help it become more popular with users, and
eventually begin growing its revenues again. But time
and again, the entrepreneurial ambitious types
running hot startups would refuse to sell to Yahoo,
preferring to sell to Google or Facebook.
For Mayer, the deal showed how far she’d come as an
executive. Her penchant for teacherly mentoring
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allowed her to cultivate a relationship with Karp and
close a deal that had seemed impossible.
One source close to Tumblr’s now defunct board said
he was blown away by how much effort Mayer put
into the deal.
“Where I give her high marks is that you don’t
typically get CEOs that engaged.”
“She really took ownership of this, really persuaded
David that she would let Tumblr stay independent.
“She turned David around. He was very reluctant.
He’s not motivated by money in the same way as the
rest of us. He’s really passionate about the product.
His concern about selling to Yahoo was that it would
get subsumed.
“Marissa convinced David that this wasn’t the old
Yahoo and that she’s going to run it differently.”
Illustration by Mike Nudelman
Now into her second year as Yahoo CEO, Marissa
Mayer from Wausau, Wisc., says “I’m having the time
of my life.”
A natural teacher, she has, in her 20s and 30s, turned
that skill into the ability to inspire thousands of
people to make technology products that millions of
people use.
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The challenge she’ll face in her 40s is: Can she
become the rare, complete technology CEO who can
create magical products and deliver financial results?
By one measure, Mayer did incredibly well during her
first year. Since David Filo unrolled the purple carpet
for Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s stock has gone from
$15.74 per share to hovering around $28 in August
2013.
But, while investor confidence in Mayer’s vision and
performance so far certainly plays some role in the
stock’s magnificent surge, a much greater factor has
been Alibaba, the Chinese Internet company in which
Yahoo is a part-owner.
Yahoo has benefitted from Alibaba in two ways.
In the months before Mayer joined Yahoo, CEO Scott
Thompson and CFO Tim Morse hammered out a deal
in which Alibaba bought back a small portion of
Yahoo’s stake for $7.6 billion. When he was still CEO,
Thompson signaled that he would use that money to
buy back Yahoo shares, driving up their price. When
she took over, Mayer went along with this plan.
Because of Alibaba, Yahoo has been able to spend
billions of dollars buying its own stock. With the
supply of shares shrinking, and a few billion
dollars-worth of demand in the market, the shares
have naturally risen.
The other way Alibaba has helped Yahoo shares grow
in value is by growing in value itself.
Alibaba has yet to go public. Because Yahoo still owns
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a large stake in Alibaba, it is actually one of the few
ways investors are able to place bets on it. Those bets
even have a pay-off date. As a part of the deal
Thompson and Morse negotiated, Yahoo will sell even
more stock when Alibaba does finally IPO. Some
analysts think Yahoo will get another $7 billion in
cash out of that deal.
Another reason to be skeptical of Mayer’s
performance is that the person more responsible than
anyone else for her being the CEO of Yahoo, Third
Point’s Dan Loeb, sold off most of his holdings in the
company in July 2013. That month, he, Michael Wolf,
and Harry Wilson resigned from Yahoo’s board, as
their settlement with the board required them to do if
Third Point’s stake in Yahoo ever fell below 2 percent.
Third Point remains a major Yahoo shareholder, but
Loeb’s liquidation is still a strong signal that he thinks
the upside from where Yahoo is now is more limited
than it was in 2012.
All that said, there is no question that Mayer has
drastically improved Yahoo in her short time there so
far.
You can see it in the metrics. Yahoo claims that after
Mayer’s redesigns, traffic to apps for Yahoo Mail is up
120 percent; Yahoo Weather, 150 percent; and Yahoo
News, 55 percent. In her first year, Mayer was able to
keep traffic to Yahoo Mail on the Web flat, and even
slightly grow Yahoo.com. In an age where big websites
usually shrink because people check their email and
news on their phones, that’s remarkable. In the
middle of August 2013, ComScore reported that
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Yahoo Web properties had passed Google properties
as the most popular in the United States.
Beyond the metrics though, Mayer has revolutionized
the culture at Yahoo.
One Yahoo executive told me that before Mayer
arrived, “what was missing was leadership from the
very top, which was able to cut to the chase and get
some tough decisions made, get focused in the right
places, get the sense of urgency, and also somebody
who could really be the chief quality control leader of
the company.”
And indeed, the quality of Yahoo products has gone
up since Mayer arrived. The Yahoo Weather app that
launched for iPhone in 2013 is stunning. Mayer’s
redesign of Flickr is a delight.
Yes, some people don’t get along with her because of
her direct, all-business style.
Sometimes her brusque manner comes off as rude,
“demeaning,” or “stuck up.” It can insult people.
But even some of those people say Yahoo has become
a far more vibrant place under her leadership.
One person Mayer frequently clashed with at Yahoo
told me, “You have to give Marissa a lot of credit. Just
because I don’t like what she’s done to me and I don’t
like what she’s done to many other people, doesn’t
mean I'm going to shy away from giving her credit.
She brought life back to Yahoo. There’s no question
about it.
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“The Friday before she came on, the parking lots
would be empty till 10 a.m. and would be empty again
after 4 p.m. That happened day after day after day for
seven months in a row. Marissa comes, the next week,
the parking lots are full at 8 a.m. and people are still
there at 6:30.
“The changes that she brought — making food free,
focusing on quality, shutting some things down, being
open and honest during the Friday FYI meetings — all
brought belief back for a lot of people.”
“If she hadn’t come in, all the smart people would
have left.
“And that would have been the end of Yahoo.”
═══
A note on sources
═══
This story is based primarily on first-hand reporting
consisting of dozens of interviews.
This story would not exist if not for the cooperation of
many people who did speak with me, including those
who grew up with Mayer, taught her, or worked with
her at Google and Yahoo. Some of these people are or
were employed at Yahoo and spoke to me at the risk of
their careers. Many of these people spoke on a
not-for-attribution basis. Some spoke on the record. I
have not identified many on-the-record sources
because I did not want to allow for the process of
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elimination to identify others.
This story, being told in a narrative fashion, does not
identify the sources of information for particular
facts, including thoughts. I would caution readers
against assuming that because I have reported a
person’s thoughts, that person is a direct source. A
person will often share thoughts about pivotal
moments in their lives with a large group of people.
As a part of the narrative, my story includes dialogue.
I am grateful to James B. Stewart’s “note on sources”
at the end of his book, “DisneyWar
(http://www.amazon.com/DisneyWar-James-
B-Stewart/dp/0743267095/).” That note helped me
think about how to describe my own sourcing. In his
note, Stewart describes how he sources dialogue. It’s a
perfect explanation, and I’d like to quote it and use it
as my own explanation.
“As part of the narrative, I have included passages of
dialogue. Dialogue— what words were said— is a fact
like any other. It is not necessarily a quotation from
an interview with me and I would discourage readers
from inferring that one or both of the speakers is a
direct source. Especially in today’s world of instant
communication, it is sometimes amazing how many
people turn out to be privy to what others may assume
is a private conversation. Many of the conversations
reported in this book either took place before an
audience or became known to a wide circle of people,
often within minutes of their taking place. … In a few
cases other people were listening in on
speakerphones, extensions, or overheard
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conversations without one or both of the speakers’
knowledge. Readers should bear in mind that, given
the vagaries of human memory, remembered dialogue
is rarely the same as actual recordings and
transcripts. At the same time, it is no more nor less
accurate than many other recollections.”
═══
Bibliography
═══
Guthrie, Julian. "The Adventures of Marissa." San
Francisco. Feb. 8, 2008.
(http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story
/the-adventures-of-marissa)
Guynn, Jessica. "How I Made It: Marissa Mayer,
Google's champion of innovation and design." Los
Angeles Times. Jan. 2, 2011.
(http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/02/business
/la-fi-himi-mayer-20110102)
Holson, Laura M. "Putting a Bolder Face on Google."
The New York Times. February 28, 2009.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business
/01marissa.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&)
Marissa Mayer's IIT commencement address.
YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=jaKoMCujc2k)
Weisberg, Jacob. "Yahoo's Marissa Mayer: Hail to the
Chief." Vogue. September 2013.
(http://www.vogue.com/magazine/print/hail-to-the-
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chief-yahoos-marissa-mayer/)
Sellers, Patricia. "New Yahoo CEO Mayer is
pregnant." Fortune. July 16, 2012.
(http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07
/16/mayer-yahoo-ceo-pregnant/)
Sellers, Patricia. "Marissa Mayer: Ready to rumble at
Yahoo." Fortune. October 11, 2012
(http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/10
/11/40-under-40-marissa-mayer/).
Stone, Brad. "Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?"
BloombergBusinessWeek. August 1, 2013.
(http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles
/139562-can-marissa-mayer-save-yahoo)
Swisher, Kara. "The King Is Dead, Long Live the …
Whatever: Levinsohn’s Management Moves at Yahoo
(Internal Memo)." All Things D. May 17, 2012.
(http://allthingsd.com/20120517/levinsohns-
management-musical-chairs-at-yahoo-internal-
memo/)
Swisher, Kara. "Ross Still Not the Boss (Yet): Yahoo
CEO Selection Now Likely to Take Longer Than Many
Expect)." All Things D. July 12, 2012.
(http://allthingsd.com/20120712/ross-still-not-the-
boss-yet-yahoo-ceo-selection-now-likely-to-take-
longer-than-many-expect/)
Warner, Fara. "How Google Searches Itself." Fast
Company. June 30, 2002.
(http://www.fastcompany.com/45129/how-google-
searches-itself)
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(http://www.businessinsider.com
/this-small-
patch-could-
make-you-
invisible-
to-mosquitoes-
2013-7)
This Small Patch
Could Make You
Invisible To
Mosquitoes
(http://www.businessinsider.com
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(http://www.businessinsider.com
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operating-
systems-
2013-8)
11 Extinct
Operating Systems
That Time Forgot
(http://www.businessinsider.com
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(http://www.businessinsider.com
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blog-mini-
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todays-ballmer-
news-2013-8)
Infamous Microso=
Employee Blog
Mini-Microso= Is
Recommended For You
Unbylined. "From the Archives: Google’s Marissa
Mayer in Vogue." Vogue. 2009.
(http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/from-
the-archives-marissa-mayer-machine-dreams/#1)
═══
Acknowledgments
═══
I'm grateful to Jay Yarow and Alyson Shontell for
reading this story and suggesting edits. Jill Klausen
and Liz Wilke saved me with wonderful copy edits.
Mike Nudelman contributed excellent illustrations
that bring the story to life. I'm grateful to people in
California, Wisconsin, and around the world who took
my calls and agreed to talk.
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Join The Discussion
Editors' Picks
The Board Room
Ari on Aug 24, 8:19 AM (http://www.businessinsider.com
/c/5218a4e6ecad045a5000002d) said:
Awesome article Nick. My 2c on the demotion, not sure if it is
accurate: When Bing launched it was a bit of a wake up call to
Google since objectively it was better at search across a number
of dimensions, specifically image search and vertical search in
health and travel. At Google search had been stagnating at that
time, and vertical search in particular was considered an
unexciting area for investment. I've got to believe that these
factors played a role in tarnishing her image at the company
since it put the core into jeopardy.
Reply
Blake Bath on Aug 24, 12:24 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com
/c/5218de416bb3f7eb3c00004c) said:
One of the better articles I have read about technology
executives, and i have read thousands. Beautifully develops the
foundational components of her personality, and then
objectively assesses the arc of her career, with appropriate
highlighting. My high school senior is devouring the article,
and hopefully she draws inspiration from a talented and driven
Marissa.
Reply
on Aug
24, 4:45 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com
/c/52191b6d69bedd6302000034) said:
Great writing Nicholas! This is BusinessInsider at its best. I
read EVERY word, didn't skip ahead. That is great writing.
Marissa is a special person. I am a huge fan. She always had
time for me as a low level Googler, and even when I worked for
Microsoft. I was surprised at the "robot" characterization by
people who have worked with her, but perhaps that was a
Don Dodge
(/commenter?id=4c4d9beb7f8b9a1358680700)
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110 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM
reaction to the way she juggles hundreds of balls at a time. That
has not been my experience.
Yahoo is lucky to have Marissa as CEO. She has done what
none of the previous CEOs could do. She has inspired Yahoo
employees, given them confidence, and convinced the stock
market she has a winning plan. More than anything Yahoo had
a crisis of confidence. Marissa has fixed that. No one else could.
Henry, give Nicholas a raise, and give him the time to write
more stories like this. This is quality journalism that will
attract readers and advertisers.
Reply
on Aug
24, 3:15 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com
/c/5219063b6bb3f7de10000010) said:
Thank you for a well-written, balanced article. There is so much
lionizing and vilifying of this woman in the press that it's hard
to separate fact from fiction. What I enjoyed, particularly,
about this narrative is how it provides coherence and causality
rather than the jigsawing together a bunch of provocative
cliches and soundbites.
I don't want to reduce this story to a gender thing - no one's life
is just about their gender, of course. But, I know many women
in the tech world like the Mayer described here, especially in
her earlier days - focused, driven, very smart, uncompromising,
with a greater cognitive capacity than most around her and a
visionary who can see both the big picture and the little details.
This isn't to say that some men are not all of these things as
well. Nor does it mean that these women are perfect in every
way. But, somehow, it seems that we are not evolved enough
yet in the world of business / tech, to give these women the
same amount of leeway that we give to similar men. For
example, I wonder if Scott Thompson or Ross Levinsohn, who
were likely not perfect when leading Yahoo, got as much press
or critiquing about their leadership / management styles. I
don't recall much at all.
Reply
jennybhatt
(/commenter?id=52190079ecad04ee77000021)
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111 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM
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Comments (http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-
biography-2013-8/comments.rss)
�
7 182
� 9 19 �Ari on Aug 24, 8:19 AM
(http://www.businessinsider.com
/c/5218a4e6ecad045a5000002d) said:
Awesome article Nick. My 2c on the demotion, not sure if it is
accurate: When Bing launched it was a bit of a wake up call to
Google since objectively it was better at search across a number of
dimensions, specifically image search and vertical search in health
and travel. At Google search had been stagnating at that time, and
vertical search in particular was considered an unexciting area for
investment. I've got to believe that these factors played a role in
tarnishing her image at the company since it put the core into
jeopardy.
Reply
� 4 9 �
(URL) (http://t.co
/o7HpRb8vjI) on Aug 24, 2:35 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com
/c/5218fce7eab8ea1561000007) said:
Levinsohn would have misdirected the company and subdued to
Google. I wonder what is he doing now.
Reply
panalit
(/commenter?id=4ef3fbf569bedd800600003c)
� 3 9 �
on Aug 24, 3:15
PM (http://www.businessinsider.com/c/5219063b6bb3f7de10000010)
said:
Thank you for a well-written, balanced article. There is so much
lionizing and vilifying of this woman in the press that it's hard to
separate fact from fiction. What I enjoyed, particularly, about this
narrative is how it provides coherence and causality rather than the
jigsawing together a bunch of provocative cliches and soundbites.
jennybhatt
(/commenter?id=52190079ecad04ee77000021)
� (//PLUS.GOOGLE.COM/+BUSINESSINSIDER/POSTS) � (//WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/TODAY/BUSINESSINSIDER.COM)
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112 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM
I don't want to reduce this story to a gender thing - no one's life is
just about their gender, of course. But, I know many women in the
tech world like the Mayer described here, especially in her earlier
days - focused, driven, very smart, uncompromising, with a greater
cognitive capacity than most around her and a visionary who can
see both the big picture and the little details. This isn't to say that
some men are not all of these things as well. Nor does it mean that
these women are perfect in every way. But, somehow, it seems that
we are not evolved enough yet in the world of business / tech, to give
these women the same amount of leeway that we give to similar
men. For example, I wonder if Scott Thompson or Ross Levinsohn,
who were likely not perfect when leading Yahoo, got as much press
or critiquing about their leadership / management styles. I don't
recall much at all.
Reply
� 49 6 �
on Aug 24, 4:45
PM (http://www.businessinsider.com/c/52191b6d69bedd6302000034)
said:
Great writing Nicholas! This is BusinessInsider at its best. I read
EVERY word, didn't skip ahead. That is great writing.
Marissa is a special person. I am a huge fan. She always had time
for me as a low level Googler, and even when I worked for Microsoft.
I was surprised at the "robot" characterization by people who have
worked with her, but perhaps that was a reaction to the way she
juggles hundreds of balls at a time. That has not been my
experience.
Yahoo is lucky to have Marissa as CEO. She has done what none of
the previous CEOs could do. She has inspired Yahoo employees,
given them confidence, and convinced the stock market she has a
winning plan. More than anything Yahoo had a crisis of confidence.
Marissa has fixed that. No one else could.
Henry, give Nicholas a raise, and give him the time to write more
stories like this. This is quality journalism that will attract readers
and advertisers.
Reply
Don Dodge
(/commenter?id=4c4d9beb7f8b9a1358680700)
� 4 3 �Guest101 on Aug 24, 7:05 PM
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Marissa Mayer Biography - Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8?op=1
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(http://www.businessinsider.com/c/52193c25ecad04936500001d) said:
This reads like a Jeffery Archer/Fredrick Forsyth thriller novel.
Great reading.
Reply
� 12 4 �
on Aug 25, 2:26 AM
(http://www.businessinsider.com/c/5219a37aecad042622000063) said:
This article should be transformed in a book.
Reply
André Kenji De Sousa
(/commenter?id=50034af86bb3f71236000015)
� 2 2 �
on Aug 25, 12:12
PM (http://www.businessinsider.com/c/521a2ce969beddb41600001f)
said:
She reminds me of the character in the movie, "ELECTION" with
Director: Alexander Payne
Writers: Tom Perrotta (novel), Alexander Payne (screenplay), 1
more credit »
Stars: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein | See full
cast and crew
Reply
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