Hacker News Reader

Comment by speaktruth | Hacker News Reader

What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment?

Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing? Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO? This CEO had a very self-confident attitude but in the end got nothing right. There were no signs progress and development with her and the company. She showed no intrinsic focus and absolutely no creativity.

And what are this big risks you are talking about? "we usually celebrate taking on big projects and big risks ..."

All I know is that she got a compensation plan in 2012 for about 120 mio. dollars. If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith". Why gets someone who failed such a high compensation and why should it be wrong to criticize and even bash such a person?

View on HN

I can answer that: because she's a woman. That's the ugly truth behind the rabid defense of Marissa. Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs and the mere recognition of this fact sends certain people into a frenzy, so just deny, deny, deny.

I fully expect to be repudiated as a misogynist by a tidal wave of people drunk off this cognitive dissonance, but I simply speak the truth. Marissa was an abysmal CEO, and for years people will try to whitewash that to avoid its ugly stain on female professionals.

I think there should be more female CEOs. But if they are overbearing and underdelivering we should be allowed to talk about that with no restrictions.

I'm not going to repudiate you as a misogynist because I think some of what you're saying has merit. And I don't believe you're saying it because you think females make bad CEOs.

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.

She also joins a line of failed CEOs at Yahoo.

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.

Here's the thing: If Yahoo was in such dire shape that it couldn't be saved (that seems to be the consensus), it should have been scrapped and sold for parts to maximize shareholder value.

Instead Marissa squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on random acquisitions and Katie Couric. In my mind there is nothing noble or defensible about coming into a dire situation, throwing a Hail Mary and then shrugging when it doesn't work.

> it should have been scrapped and sold for parts to maximize shareholder value.

This is arguably true, but the board decided otherwise, and the board represents the shareholders.

The board hired her presumably believing that there was some non-zero chance that she would manage to turn Yahoo around, just as it has done with a string of past CEO's. Presumably they also surmised that even if she didn't, shareholders would come out of it ok.

And lo and behold: When she joined the share price was below $16. It's now above $42. A lot of that (maybe all?) is the Alibaba holding, but the point is that whether not Mayer did a good job or not, Yahoo! as a whole is still worth a lot more today.

But presumably this is part of the reason they took the risk: Yahoo!'s core businesses were valued extremely low - the total value of the business is tied up in the Alibaba holding. As such spending hundreds of millions to try to turn things around meant betting with a miniscule proportion of the value of the company with a potential for huge payoff if it succeeded, and very little downside.

In retrospect its easy to say she didn't achieve what they hoped. But it's not so easy to say the alternatives would've been better.

I'm sure she did stupid acquisitions. I'm also sure most of Yahoo's CEO's have done plenty of stupid acquisitions. I'm equally sure Yahoo's board signed of on all of them.

The point isn't that she has no blame. The point is that she is par for the course for Yahoo, and there's little indication someone else would have achieved better results.

> Because she joins a long line of failed female CEOs

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.

Rabid defense of Marissa? You and I must have different Internets.

> What exactly do you want to accomplish with this comment?

Reduction in unsubstantiated nasty comments. A better conversation.

> Are you really suggesting that we shouldn't analyze and criticize Marissa for failing?

No, I'm not suggesting that.

> Why is it important to you to create a safe space for this CEO?

I'm not.

> And what are this big risks you are talking about?

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

> If you play in this league you dont get points for "good-faith".

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

> Reduction in unsubstantiated nasty comments. A better conversation.

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.

You would be right about what to do with a struggling company if you had perfect information. However most of the time a board is not working with perfect information and must make a judgement call. Pretending after the fact that they could have known how this would play out is ignoring that. It's an easy decision to criticize in hindsight after the fact. Much harder to get right in the moment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com