Yahoo SEC Filing: Name change to Altaba Inc and director resignations

Because all big C-level positions work this way? Doesn't make it a good idea, or even rational. But humans are of the rationalizing type, not actual rational beings.

We can only see in retrospect that it was doomed to failure.

Because the people making executive compensation decisions are from a narrow elite class and are the people benefiting from executive compensation decisions.

As bulk of her compensation is locked in stock (negotiated at 2012 prices), it's increasingly hard for her to get compensated less while the stock has tripled in value.

jokes aside, they rewrote their yahoo finance site in some JavaScript framework, so it became plain unusable. they moved ticker box to the right side (congratulation, Marissa, deeply strategic decision! how many millions did you get for this one?) and hooked it up to shitload of JS, so entering ticker and pressing enter just don't work - I have to slowly press keys and patiently wait for some unwanted intellisense magic to wake up and help me to understand that when I type JNK I really mean JNK.

What are you talking about? She managed to make enough backroom deals to oust a standing Prime Minister. That's pretty strong evidence that she is Machiavellian enough to play the game of politics.

She became PM by playing that game. Her public persona was ruined because she played it too publicly and she should be held responsible for starting a decade long period of political instability.

You need to watch this three-part documentary to better understand how she came to power: http://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/killing-season/

Remember when she was confirmed as a hire, the feeling around the Valley was less of "wow, a new CEO" and more of "how did someone like Yahoo get someone like Marissa". The previous CEOs include alumni from PayPal and AutoDesk, so getting someone as successful was a win for Yahoo at the time.

The stock price was largely driven by Alibaba - hence why attributing stock growth to Mayer's appointment was misplaced.

The idea was that you sell off the BABA holding, distribute that to investors and then you end up with Yahoo on it's own which is then pivoted to being a tech company (higher PE's) rather than a boring media company.

Mayer ended up becoming far from the ideal hedge fund CEO. She kept more of the BABA sales for acquisitions than the activists wanted, she spent hundreds of millions on silly recruiting like Henrique De Castro and then spent $2.5B+ on 50+ acquisitions - all of which didn't move the needle and ended up being written down to near-zero.

That's a lot to spend for a company that had a negative value - and Mayer hastened / worsened the situation (hence why Loeb got the hell out of there when offered $29 by Mayer)

Still however, comparing it to a company like IAC is quite insulting. Yahoo was something more, it was a chance for a media company to rule the internet once again. It was how tech did media.

Yahoo tried to be a media company for years. They called themselves "the premier media company". They had two different CEOs pulled from the media world, Terry Semel and Ross Levinsohn. Levinsohn didn't really have much time, but Semel did. If Yahoo was a media company, they were unsuccessful at it.

I always wanted Yahoo to rebound. I worked there for a few years and my team seemed quite good. But there was always the problem that the company didn't quite seem to know what it was trying to do. It didn't have a real plan for winning back search nor for winning in media, and it didn't have deep enough pockets to dig indefinitely. What it had were initiatives like Livestand that failed to compete with apps like Flipboard and an ad network that never competed with AdSense despite Yahoo actually buying Overture.

If I were Yahoo CEO, and the company had chosen the media empire route, I would have explored a Yahoo Finance 2.0 as a social network. Step one, acquire or clone OpenFolio and Robinhood and maybe buy something like SumZero for its social graph slash userbase. Create a Free and Pro tier. Other companies I have mentioned before as a good fit in this idea are Forcerank and Sparkfin. Motif is another company trying to make stock picking more social. Having a unified messaging layer across the bottom of ALL its properties (like Facebook) would have benefited here too.

Yahoo should have made a push to be THE fantasy company, instead of covering its product in daily fantasy ads, trying to squeeze out the last of the value. Sports is a huge vertical other tech giants like Google and Microsoft and Apple dont play much in. Being cash rich, they could have bought one of the major Daily Fantasy empires, which basically print money. I cant think of many better easy ways to return shareholder value. Again, a messenger bar at the bottom of the screen would have really tied the place together.

Now if I want to talk with my group of friends about my fantasy picks or my stock picks (or my fantasy stock picks in the case of Forcerank) my group conversations carry over between properties. The thing about Finance and Fantasy is they both involve an element of competitive "I know more than you and can make better predictive decisions." Stock Picking and Fantasy Drafting slash Lineup Setting are more closely related mental tasks than they are given credit for. Both are pleasurable when you are right.

I think its odd to say Yahoo went the tech route, because outside her acquisitions, it does seem they doubled down on the editorial media vertical side (tv shows, news anchors, major tech journalists) without creating any sort of modern cms, without actually introducing ANY tech innovation in house.

They also scrapped Yahoo Voices, right as Medium and Kinja and Chorus and Wordpress forged a new era of blogging. Ive said before, Atavist would have been a great fit in their tech/media empire niche. After buying the tech, they should have acquired some really popular high quality independent blogs/bloggers.

What are Yahoo's core strengths? Near as I can tell, its core strength is possession of heaps of Alibaba stock. What core pieces of Yahoo, aside from its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stock, could be focused on in a way that would make it meaningful as a multi-billion dollar company?

CEO compensation increased dramatically at around the same time that the finance sector started capturing a bigger chunk of the GDP, which is around the same time that many large companies created mini hedge funds internally. Maybe it's more to do with that, but the country club networking opportunities can't hurt.

I believe the financial compensation angle is that because she was particularly well compensated, she is perceived to not have much skin in the game. As an aside, I don't think this is especially productive because it is incredibly rare to find someone running a company who isn't deeply emotionally invested in that enterprise, but the perception remains.

Obviously, though the crowd wants to excoriate Mayer I think if folks have a problem with her compensation they should look to the board.

It silences discussion by subtly and indirectly labeling any critics as bad guys.

Not all tone policing is bad, HN is the king of good tone policing, I don't think this makes it.

For example, I like your non-tone related points, and I'm glad they were able to come out!

The payment and bashing might be slightly related, but I tend to think it's a minor factor. People focus on financials so much because that's what the western culture is built upon. The American Dream, if you will. However bashing, complimenting, or mentioning someone at all comes with fame. I'm fairly certain people would talk a lot about Marissa Mayer regardless of whether she got paid anything. The ratio of criticism-to-compliments tends to go hand-in-hand with the person's perceived success-to-failure ratio. Marissa Mayer wasn't that successful, and thus she'll mostly get criticism.

To me it's because she wasn't taking a risk, she was getting paid massive amounts regardless of what she did. Why celebrate someone who enriched herself as the company imploded and had to lay off thousands of people? There are so many other people worth accolades.

Because it reveals the tenuous relationship between executive pay and company results, and people prefer to take it out on the obvious cases rather than accept that there's little evidence they correlate very well.

It's simply the issue of gratuitous executive pay. If her pay hadn't been >>100x what a typical SV worker makes I think she'd get significantly less flak. The idea of someone being granted enough money so their great-grandchildren never have to work a day when that person did a poor job after only 4 years on the job just makes people sick. Don't forget some bad stuff happened on Mayer's watch; like 1B user accounts being compromised.

I think that it's unjust when people are paid crazy money for doing poor job. As well as when people are paid little money for good job.

I don't know if you share my vision, but for me in that moment it felt like the house was on fire, the firetruck was on fire and the fire was on fire.

I don't know if a better job could be made, but at least some public face was saved, and the shareholders bought it until the last day.

EDIT:

>somewhat indirectly

No, he directly called her a cunt.

> and I'm hesitant to use it myself for fear of being banned).

Literally no-one on HN has ever been banned for using the word cunt. It's only a problem if you call other people cunts. Here's the relevant mod post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016665#10019003

That's the only way you can have real change, instead of the moral hazard situation we have now.

Neither needed the money at all. Jobs knew that and didn't take any. Mayer for some reason took as much as possible.

Fraud isn't a function of magnitude. A $2 fraud and $2 billion fraud are both fraud.

What matters is intent, the concealment of material facts and the victim's harm resulting from the foregoing.

Sorry to drag in politics, but I could not resist this cheap-shot.

But I'd hardly call my comment a "rabid defense" of Marissa. I was attempting to set a balanced tone for this discussion. I readily agree that she failed to prevent Yahoo from failing.

The reality that you yourself need to confront is that there are way more people who will shrilly call her "an abysmal CEO" without really weighing the facts.

Trying to tie this to her gender would require a lot of evidence to be remotly meaningful. Yahoo has been failing for a decade and a half, largely punctuated by a couple of lucky investments (Google and Alibaba).

I also see little evidence of rabid defenses of her. I see some that don't believe she deserves to be crucified for failing to save a company that's been failing for a long time before she joined, and a lot of rabid attacks on her with little substantive.

I wonder: how many appointed CEOs, as opposed to founders, succeed? And how many of them them are appointed to floundering companies, versus say the transition that happened at Microsoft and/or Google? Heck, even Ballmer was a disaster.

How much of the history of failed female CEOs is likely because they get much, much less of the Bezos/Brin/Page/Gates initial growth, I am unsure, but I'd be interested to know.

At the time you wrote this, there where zero nasty comments. Not even substantiated ones.

> Attempting to save a company that appeared at the time to be completely unsaveable.

Why do make that claim? This and similar is repeated here often: "A sinking ship", "Could not be saved even by Jesus", ... This is completely wrong! Either a company is beyond repair, then no respectable CEO would play the hero here. Or it shows potential for some kind of transformation process, where the company can find a new and successful purpose. In both cases the company is in a fragile state, because it is very hard to measure its true value. It's in a situation that is opposite to a very promising company: there is a chance that this company is underhyped. Yahoo was underhyped and underestimated, probably also by Marissa Meyer.

> Why not? What's different about that league compared to the one you and I play in?

Let me use an analogy here: When you and I are football players, then Marissa would have been our trainer. The problem is that the compensation plan made her also some kind of a Ronaldo.

Hell, give me $20 million and I'll take that risk.

That last point is the most significant here: sure, you might not be able to beat Google at Google-like search, but you can try to start building the thing that will become more important than Google-like search in the next 5-10 years.

similarly, google's near-monopoly in search, is not really threatened by other pure-play search engines, but rather out of left field: facebook and amazon. google may very well be the dominant search engine in a decade or two, but search may not matter as much as it did in the last decade because other platforms rise in prominence.