Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer on Selling a Company While Trying to Turn It Around
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I bet if you tell me only these three things, I'll have a more accurate prediction of which startups will succeed:
* Founder's parents' income
* Founder's parents' education level
* Number of people with over $1M liquid assets that founder knows or has "social access" to
I really need to get myself a mentor like Marissa Mayer so I can learn about work ethics.
She gets away with it because she's a woman. Any other man would have been steamrolled into oblivion by now.
If she thinks the odds are tough in her husband's incubator, wait till she sees how tough it is OUTSIDE of it. I mean it's tough for me not living in SF but I imagine it would be even tougher in places like China - People there probably drive themselves to insanity in the pursuit of success.
If she divorced her husband, the whole incubator (and all startups within) would probably go bankrupt within one year.
I find this to be one of the biggest indicators. I have friends whose parents are extremely wealthy and they tried all sorts of random careers before finally settling on something. For them there was zero real risk since they always had their parents to fall back on. One's dad even told him to come up with a business idea and he would fund it and help him make it happen. Instead he goofed around for awhile, before simply going back to school.
Personally, I'm more irked at potential wasted than jealous. I have no one to fall back on, and that has made me fiercely independent, but also very risk conscious. The good thing is that it is easier than every to bootstrap ideas with minimal time.
I suspect that lowering the risk of entrepreneurship could unlock enormous innovation potential for society.
When Silicon Valley talks about "diversity" it is often ethnicity or gender, but diversity of economic background is also important.
Really? I always thought that pulling all-nighters hurts more than it helps. Optimizing your bathroom breaks seems really silly to me.
Mayer is someone who proclaims to believe in the power of data. I'm curious then what data she has to back her views on crunch==maximization of value creation. Most of the data I've seen says the opposite. It seems Mayer may be letting her anecdotal experience in the early days of Google trump data here. (A it's also possible that anyone, including Mayer, can have misperceived or misattributed the importance of sustained crunch in those days or its causative effect on success.)
Managers who were acutely aware of how little they understood about what went on underneath them tended to be the ones who spent the most time in the office and who cared most about what time people came/left.
They also tend to be the ones who are the most against remote working.
Competent people don't require those metrics.
But life is unfair, and there probably are some people legitimately can put in 130 hours of net-positive work for extended periods of time. And presumably, these people will be disproportionately represented among the "successful".
Another issue is it seems like it'd be hard to tell while you're pulling those ridiculous hours whether or not you're part of the "lucky" subset that actually continues to be productive.
The hours she is working immediately says to me that she is not capable of hiring good people and delegating responsibilities. Now, I don't expect a CEO of a large company to work a 40 hour work week, but 130 hours is ridiculous. Out of that 130 hours of work, none of that could have been delegated? Is she really that special that only she can handle it?
My husband [the venture capital investor Zachary Bogue] runs a co-working office in San Francisco. He runs his company out of there and other startups cycle through. And if you go in on a Saturday afternoon, I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success, mostly because these companies just don’t happen. They happen because of really hard work.
This was actually the part I found most surprising and interesting. One the one hand, it's scary that you have to put in insanely long hours like that to succeed. But on the other hand, it's liberating knowing that one of the keys to success, is something everyone has access to.
If some random person had made the above comments, I would have laughed them off as an insane workaholic. But knowing that this advice is coming from someone's who's seen it first hand at early-stage-Google, and many other startups... it's hard to ignore it, no matter how much I may want to.
Also, people tend to think they work harder than they actually do. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's almost no chance they were working 130 hour weeks, certainly not consistently. There are only 168 hours in a week. I also don't believe the one all-nighter a week line. Working like this would completely destroy your productivity.
There seems to be a lot of "showing off" of and around your work.
I know of early days operational people (SREs were not a thing yet) need to stay in campus to resolve production issues. They need to stay all-night or come to office in midnight regularly every week.
not to mention all the people who worked even harder, and failed anyway. or worse.
i think when you make your money $100M at a time, you just tend to think you're right about everything. can't say i blame her, i probably would too.
maybe i should look into marrying a VC also.
Nobody's ever failed because they pee too often.
In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. This is an experiment that Harvard Business School’s Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter repeated over a century later with knowledge workers. It still held true. Predictable, required time off (like nights and weekends) actually made teams of consultants more productive. [1]
[0] http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
[1] https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-bac...
But I don't think this is true for the small minority of people who are so passionate about the project, that they are intrinsically motivated to put in insanely long hours. I've experienced such intrinsic motivation during various parts of my own life, and the resulting 80 hour work-weeks that I imposed on myself didn't feel like a productivity drain at all. I think this is what Marissa Meyer and other startup founders are referring to, when they talk about the insanely long hours they worked during the early stages of their company.
It would be really interesting to study this specifically among start-ups, academics, or game developers where some people put in very long hours.
But maybe this is just one of those legendary questions people ask to weed out those who would immediately balk because they want to have a life outside of work.
I'm sure she has a whole staff of weekend workers that spend quite a lot of time making sure you know just how much they're working.
Meanwhile Yahoo's office are still empty from people that work from home and most people on cruise control. I've never met a workaholic from Yahoo. Any person worth their salt was gone long ago. The rest are there because why quit a plum cruise control gig.
Start ups fail for all kinds of reasons, sure sometimes it's because people didn't work hard enough. But not remotely always. Sometimes an idea just doesn't pan out. Sometimes people get screwed by a bad choice, sometimes that bad choice was made because they were working so hard they weren't thinking straight.
Any kind of statement like saying that you can tell which start ups will succeed or fail based on a single criteria is just hubris and obviously wrong.
> If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan
> when I was 18, I would have missed every
> great thing that ever happened to me.
Which sounds out of place in the context of the other advice <sic> provided - such as 'work Saturdays to guarantee success', 'make a choice and stick to it and make it great', 'it's safer to keep working than walk to your car', and the Alibaba question dodge.
Clearly we live in different worlds.
Interesting quote from the boss that banned working from home!
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-who-just-banned...
It should have been a policy to do it for everyone...
There is no actual conflict in her statements unless a mother both needs to work and needs to stay at home, and consider that to be possible.
Banning it is contrary to the ideals she sets out above.
Cutting off the ability to work remotely, which is how most people who cannot afford child care manage small children, sends the message that she is uniquely allowed to work and be a mom, while everyone else can pound sand.
I haven't seen anyone who can look after a small child and work at the same time. Either you're working or looking after the child.
On the other hand if your argument is that Yahoo should have offered discounted childcare on onsite that Marissa received, then your argument makes perfect sense.
You could add to that "and care not a jot about the quality of the decisions you're making."
_____
As someone who just created the general outline of a five-year plan (my first one), I'm wondering what other HNers have to say about the subject.
That is, you need to do the planning to look around and see e.g. what your strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats are, what your objectives are, and what direction to set out in. Otherwise you run the risk of paralysis or being permanently behind events.
On the other hand, reality deviates from the plan immediately, for better or for worse. But at least you have the information gathered from the planning phase to re-plan from.
A plan isn't a bad thing but being overly committed to it can be fatal. One of the things about publishing a five year plan for a company is that you are usually judged in the markets by how closely you stuck to and succeeded in that plan. In tech, and probably most other industries as well, that can be fatal. Publishing a goal is a little less fatal since it doesn't outline a series of steps toward reaching that goal and allows you flexibility to pivot. Assuming of course that you didn't phrase your goal in the form of a plan or get too specific or detailed.
When I look back to 2011 I'd never have guessed that I would be where I am, doing what I do, today. I'm confident I'll be able to say the same in 2021.
My parents grew up with the "one-company-for-life" mentality, but I'm a firm believer that it's good to mix things up every few years to keep yourself fresh and motivated. That's not to say you should abandon something that you're truly passionate about if you continue to derive long-term enjoyment from it, but rather be open and flexible to new opportunities as they may take you places you'd never imagine.
That similar trend has shown up in my personal life too, although not as often.
A general outline is useful to have. A useful four-year plan is kind of like "graduate from college". Lots of room for improvisation along the way, but the ability to measure if life is headed in the direction you want to be headed.
In practice, I've found it impossible to follow a plan beyond two years due to external factors (friends and co-workers move, industries change, laws change, deaths, etc.). Those external factors seem to speed up with age. However, having a "general outline" (like waypoints on a journey) helps to correct course or select an alternate path when those inevitable changes happen.
"What’s the worst advice you ever got? Listen to what your boss tells you. My boss never liked the idea of Spider-Man. He didn’t want to do it. I had to sneak Spider-Man into another book, over my boss’s head. Experts really know nothing."
I have nothing against Marissa Mayer and some respects really appreciate having a prominent female CEO but did anyone else find that shocking that she would say that? I mean she is a CEO. Wouldn't she want to avoid talking about US political figures. Also I'm not really sure if it is a dig or a compliment. It could be a compliment. Lots of busy people can have the facade of looking like they have relaxing lives which takes even more work.
There is also an intensity factor of work. Some work is insanely intense both physically and mentally and you just can't do 130 hours. I did consulting for 40 hours a month for a brief period. Those 40 hours felt like 40 hours a week. Meanwhile I worked on my own startup and early in its fledgling years my wife complained about how many hours I worked (she claims more than 90 hours) but to me it felt like 40 hour work week.
Anyone want to take that bet?
Actually stay? I have trouble seeing it. Only if she's got some guaranteed line of sight on the VZW ceo gig, but Armstrong and many others will contend there.
Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
I think the real key is recognizing when working more will help.
There are several common themes to why all those companies had to put in crazy hours but one theme that sticks out is the "oh shit, the user count is growing like crazy and we've got to scale out our servers to handle the exponential workload like YESTERDAY or we're going to DIE!"
It happened to the Youtube engineers, Google, Napster, Etsy, etc. It's a stressful combination of fighting fires and adding capacity at the same time.
For horizontal scaling re-architecting & re-engineering, there is no commercial off-the-shelf or open-source software that let's you install it in one afternoon such that all programmers can just work 40 hours a week without a hiccup. Today, you can't just install a distributed database like Cassandra and fire up more AWS instances and assume those newer technologies that the previous Founders at Work didn't have will prevent your employees from putting in 80 hour weeks for months.
Going from a single instance database to handle 10k to 100k users to a sharded distributed db to handle 100 million is not going to be a 40-hour a week job for startup employees. If any companies have done it with zero overtime, please write a blog highlighting your user traffic growth, database sizes, and migration strategy. That would be a very impressive achievement.
There is a place for hard work. And it is certainly a factor in success, but working nights and weekends only gets you so far and there is a significant diminishing return. Go through a code base and look at commits made past midnight, or 8+ hours into a shift. They are going to lead to more regression issues and technical debt nine times out of ten.
Considering all the tone-deaf ham-fisted nonsense that's come out about Mayer's management style while she was at yahoo, I'm surprised people will still listen to this nonsense. It's just a bunch of people following their selection bias into a cult of personality.
There are people who can be productive (and happy) working more than 40 hours a week.
I very very much doubt you can when it comes to programming. I've been doing this for almost two decades and in this time have only known ONE person who might fit the bill.
20, 40, 80 hours...doesn't matter, getting a group of programmers excited and passionate about getting a taxi from point A to point B is probably unlikely.
But get a group of people who grew up playing D&D and tell them to make it real...
How would you expect that person to have less physical issues?
Marriage/Family: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12320/abstra...
Mental Health: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22995130
Physical Health: http://oem.bmj.com/content/58/1/68.full
At least in my experience, no amount of pride or grit can prevent you from crumbling if you do this for more than a few weeks. The physical aspects are somewhat noticeable but can be mitigated with a little exercise, good posture, alternating work positions, and so on. I found the real price is paid mentally. You lose control of your emotions and work becomes the center of your world to an unhealthy degree. A frustration that impedes your work becomes a mental disaster. You lose a sense of who you are, drowned in the work. You start to take pride in being this code machine. I sleep very little as it is, and can only imagine the havoc this would wreak one somebody who needs their 6-8 hours.
When you surface, the return to reality can be jarring and embarrassing. It happens when the project fails, or is hugely delayed for causes outside of your control, or the business is acquired, or what have you: The reality sets in that you were burning the candle at both ends and getting upset for absolutely no reason. You realize that your pride, your perceived grit, not only was futile with regard to the project, but was really a protective mechanism. Vanity carried the day. That is just plain crushing for your self-esteem, and I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
Also, and Carmack nails it, people are different. You might think it's unhealthy, or unnatural, but some people are obsessive, perfectionist, focused or just really passionate about something. Also, some people are just better organized. Again, Carmack's right, you probably can't be at your peak for extended periods of time, but there's plenty of things you can get done that don't require your peak.
When this issue is raised from concern of people being taken advantage of, fine, I agree. But just because some people can't do it, doesn't mean no one can (just look at the extreme range of physical and creative abilities that people have). And, like all other life style choices, what's the point of judging other people?
Keep in mind that I'm the sort of person you are indicating already. I sleep little and don't care much about work/life balance. When I've worked on teams that are burning the candle at both ends, I am able to hold out longer than others and usually end up carrying things over the finish line.
That's the point of my comment: Even for those who ought to thrive, things start to break down, and no amount of energy or toughness changes that. We are human. I want to warn/remind other engineers that these practices are unsustainable. Hell, I want to remind myself of that after repeating this work to the bone/burnout cycle so many times.
When you are in a startup that has found a market, and all you have to do is ship the next MVP and you can start printing money, you're pretty motivated to work weekends to make that happen faster, even if it's a bad idea.
I would guess that these successful startups could stop working weekends, change their culture to focus on measuring value and deliverables, and still be successful.
That's good weekend work; they happened because of success so they don't have the same mental load and they tend to be sporadic so you get recovery time.
Bad weekend work is caused by relentless internal pressure. That's counter-productive.
They are there for 3 reasons.
1) They are passionate about their product. 2) They have an 'oh shit' deadline due soon. 3) They had nothing else better to do and enjoy their coworkers.
I've been in the all 3 situations before. To believe being there on a weekend for one reason, and one reason only, shows her myopia. If her indicator of success is the # of hours you put in, it explains why her turnaround failed...
Now, if everyone would make ideal strategic choices and the whole thing would be a zero-sum game, then I'd agree with you, the ones that put in more time would reap more benefit. But looking around me (admittedly, far away from SV, in a backwater Eastern European country), that doesn't look to be the case.
Quick count, how many of you (us) are reading HN and counting that in work time?
What really creates value is smart, prophetic strategy and effective management. Hours are a resource guided by strategy and management, not an end in themselves.
If your strategy is clueless and your management is intrusive, all you're doing is wasting everyone's time - and 80 hour weeks won't help you.
I do agree that you can't code for 80 hours straight for weeks on end, but "80 hours of work" isn't necessarily that. I also agree that it's still stressful even so, and I wouldn't recommend living that way for years on end, but younger folk can afford it for a while.
In other words, success for one startup doesn't mean success for another (let alone personal success). Working weekends doesn't mean you'll succeed, and vice versa. And working crazy hours doesn't mean that's why you succeeded.
> Do people still think you can get away with 40-50 hours when the next guy is just as good as you and putting in 80?
The 80-hour guy's personal ROI is half that of the 40-hour guy. Meaning the return has to be twice as good to justify his additional time investment. This is great for the company, but terrible for the individual.
In a startup, your competitive advantage is rarely going to be how many hours you work - how can it be, when you're playing against large well-capitalized companies that can assign entire teams at the drop of a hat and thereby outwork you tenfold? Rather, you rely on some combination of:
- underdoing the competition (you can't do everything as 1-10 people, so you have to fail and iterate quickly with minimal effort and learn as much as you can from each iteration); - personal / professional connections (OK, so you can spend more time here, but it's often not going to be behind a computer or at the office, and it will be very hard to measure productivity-wise); - blind luck (which isn't in your control anyways, so don't waste your time trying); - the innovator's dilemma (which isn't really in your control either, but gives you a several-year headstart while larger companies slowly figure out that your market is lucrative enough for them to bother with).
Finally: from personal experience, the productivity gains of working 80 hour weeks are illusory. I make more mistakes, incur more technical debt, work on fewer of the right problems and more of the wrong ones, take on stress that impacts my decision-making and communication skills...
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/12/working-... [2] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/crunc... [3] http://ftp.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
Dieing of a stress-induced heart attack at 35 isn't winning at life.
> When reporters write about Google, they write about it as if it was inevitable. The actual experience was more like, “Could you work 130 hours in a week?” The answer is yes, if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom
This is fine in spurts but doing it on a sustained basis is actually suboptimal. Crunch time for extended periods is bad for problem-solving and for productivity. There are critical periods where it can be productive... when the team is all obsessed in tackling a crisis or timely opportunity. But sustaining this for more than several weeks a year at most in total is actually detrimental.
> I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do. Being there on the weekend is a huge indicator of success
No. This is not true. At best, this is a gross oversimplification.
And it's disheartening to see Mayer hammering this single point over and over. It almost seems like a point of pride for her... which leads to:
> There was a moment when someone said to me, “Wow, you might be the busiest person on the planet.” In the Midwest, where I grew up, you shrug off a compliment like that and think a lot of people in the world are really busy, like President Obama. And then President Obama started posting YouTube videos for fun.
Alright, douchey-ness of this humble brag (let alone humble-brag in even glancing comparing yourself to the POTUS) aside, this underscores again the obsession with hours worked. I just vehemently disagree with this. Valuable output and quality matter most, not hours worked. It's highly questionable to claim that more hours worked leads to greater overall value of output. Beyond some threshold (which I believe varies person by person), there is an asymptotic incremental contribution to total valuable output. And at some point, total value of output declines, where the incremental contribution of more time worked in a given period is negative.
This is an unhealthy and unhelpful view.
Moving onto totally different topics...
> > Does it bother you that your parenting choices were criticized?
> In my view, there’s just entirely too much judgment over motherhood...
Here, here! Totally agree.
> I would never have a five-year plan. If I’d stuck to my original five-year plan when I was 18, I would have missed every great thing that ever happened to me.
Agree very much again. I think you can have high-level achievement goals, but not a specific destination or path laid out for getting there. Having fungible plans is usually wisest because every day you have more information than you did before and every day you have a chance of encountering a previously unknown opportunity. Need to be open to leveraging that information and those opportunities when it's called for, as opposed to sticking to a rigid plan.
> We had shareholders with two different priorities. We have some people who owned Yahoo stock because they really cared about digital advertising and the internet and a possible turnaround there. And we had another set of stakeholders who owned it because they saw a lot of positive transactions that could happen with these very large, lucrative Asian assets. And we had duties to both as the executive team of the company.
That is totally fair. I think Mayer's biggest failing was not recognizing this early enough and not being proactive enough about resolving it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. She and the company seemed very focused on the turnaround early on, and overly committed to holding the assets together. Recognizing from the get go that Yahoo had different shareholder groups -- and in particular that Yahoo was or easily could become the target of activist investors -- it is surprising that this wasn't addressed boldly, head-on, quickly.
It seems the company (and Mayer) could have landed in a much better spot if they'd been proactive in selling off or restructuring assets. If they ended up in a spot where they're splitting up assets amyway, it might have been better to do that from the get go and use it as a way to clean up the shareholder base at the same time. Plenty of PE and IB firms would have been interested in helping to do a structured deal around Yahoo's investment assets and this might have positioned Yahoo much, much better to execute the turnaround Mayer seems to have clearly wanted to focus on (stronger balance sheet, less ammo for activist investors, opportunity to clear out unhelpful shareholders, perhaps even an opportunity to go private, if that would have been helpful).
Shame this didn't happen.
to me Mayer is saying Yahoo did not get over the hump cause they dont have enough determination, while failed to acknowledge that she drove them the wrong direction past few years.
Seems like she a walking business cliche. Can anyone counter this with evidence of her creativity?