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Comment by mason55 | Hacker News Reader

> objectively Yahoo failed and she bears a large share of the responsibility

Curious to hear more on this. Yahoo! was a disaster before she came in, she tried some things to turn it around, it didn't work.

One of the arguments for this kind of compensation in this situation is that you want the CEO to take a risk to try to turn around the company. A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that.

The problem is that we don't know what the alternate universe holds, where a different CEO was brought in. It might be that that most likely scenario was that Yahoo! drops to $0 and Marissa actually made $5B for investors that an average CEO would not have made (in baseball terms her VORC [value over replacement CEO] was $5B).

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  A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that.

Ok, but when is that compensation enough? At 10x your lifetime spending needs, or 20x? She just got paid enough for generations of her descendants to be on easy street for life. It's absurd.

Edit: I'm not angry at Mayer at all, I just don't understand why companies agree to golden parachute deals like this for failure. She took a career-ending risk, that's worth some compensation, but the scale seems disproportionate.

>I'm not angry at Mayer at all, I just don't understand why companies agree to golden parachute deals like this for failure.

Because "the company" that decides is the board -- and these people rub each other's backs...

I wish this was researched more. The same group of interconnected people serve on board or C-levels of companies. They happily give raises and generous offers to others, because they know that when their turn comes, the others will do the same to them. Meanwhile, small-time shareholders are powerless, because a large chunk of the shares are held by institutions who don't want to rock the boat, and are just happy that things are fine the way they are.

Sociology of elites looks at this kind of thing. One fairly easy thing to do is to do a network analysis of board membership. The ones I've seen tend to describe what you already know anecdotally, a small group of elites controlling a large number of central companies.

That, and also probably because otherwise CEOs would take ZERO risks. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

In the cases where the golden parachutes are absurdly large, I don't really see how they're really incentivized to take risks either. Perform or don't perform, the difference is the CEO's yacht size, or how many mansions they own around the globe?

If a CEO doesn't have any negative sequences from their decisions, then any "risky" decisions they take for the company are not actual risks for them either.

I'm constantly amazed by how many people either don't understand this or simply refuse to acknowledge it.

>A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that.

$180 million for "not being able to get a job for a while"?

at least she won't run out of ramen while she's applying for jobs

> A high profile "failure" like this also means she won't be able to get a job for awhile so you're compensating her for that.

Pure speculation, but I highly doubt that someone as highly touted as Marissa Mayer will be out of job offers for quite some time. A lot of people will attribute the failure to turnaround Yahoo on Yahoo itself rather than on any of the reported shortcomings of the CEO.

Certainly, I think the odds were stacked against her, but if the stories from various reports from inside sources and journalists over the last few years are true, I'd be cautious about absolving her responsibility from the eventual outcome.

I am a very mediocre programmer and certainly not qualified to run a public company, but I think Yahoo could've been saved. Simply because it had a lot of capital (relative to startups) and with her there, the ability to attract and retain talent for a while. She had a couple years of runway. I would've tried:

- making a personalized/customizable search engine.

- making a browser, in hindsight maybe they could've worked with Brendan Eich on brave.

- structure like Google with subsidiaries (even if not formally) and have technology and entertainment as 2 businesses.

- really tighten up security on the tech side; damn.

Then see what works and iterate. Selling Alibaba and Yahoo Japan at the end of this; Yahoo basically had negative value.

IDK, selling to Verizon and then having your value slashd-- Twice, when multi hundred million accounts are breached and getting raked over the coals on valuation was a sad finish. To her credit; I like to believe the sale was poor because she wanted to keep going and didnt expect to have to firesale the firm, but I don't know. Obv. Yahoo wasn't "just her" but they were in a poor state so she probably had a lot of operational latitude. It's super rare; if it even ever has happened; that a company is so desperate but still so powerful-- that they give up that much control. Being a total outsider and having those resources and a canvas not blank, but so f*Ed that you can really try anything; that's once a decade maybe.

I honestly think that Yahoo! could have left the search engine alone. That market's moved on. Bing users only use Bing for some kickback rewards/when they're forced to. Everybody else migrates to Google. Maaayyybe if they offered something drastically different (kind of the way that Duck Duck Go did with privacy) to make themselves stand out, but I feel like the search engine ship had already sailed at Yahoo! Honestly, I would have simplified and slimmed down the homepage. The Yahoo! homepage was a fucking design disaster. Just have it focus on the things that really mattered - some news elements, fantasy sports, and maybe email. Everything else can go.

A browser like Brave would have been a good move, particularly in junction with tightening up security on the tech side. It would be like doing community service to try and right the wrongs of the past, or something, ha!

The problem I saw with Yahoo! was that it was a business with no focus. They acquired Tumblr... and then did nothing with it, which was perplexing. Tumblr has a youth market, and if Yahoo! had actually done stuff to improve the Tumblr experience, they really could have put that $1 billion they wasted in acquisition to use via marketing/ads. Hell, maybe they could have somehow capitalized on Vine folding and turning Tumblr into a bigger video platform (the layout loans itself well to it.)

Interesting. I agree with almost everything. Still think search is huge. A highly customizable, secure private search engine. Your own pagerank.

I also think we agree that there was a lot of verticals to explore and strategies to employ but hers turned out to not be a good one. I think it was possible

The biggest problem was she bought too many new startups trying to gain the mobile market, specifically to make Yahoo a place for your daily digest and entertainment. The Summly acquisition was a big noise, but I don't know what happened to Summly. Did it ever integrate into Yahoo? I know they did something to do. Think of it, Yahoo's new direction focusing on mobile was correct and was critical. Many of the Yahoo users go there for news and sport game like the Fantasy sports. Recently I have been taking FourSquare's data-selling focus very seriously. Perhaps Yahoo also could sell some of their data to developers and companies. As I mentioned on another post, Yahoo could build a end-to-end photography service business around Flickr, and even sell NLP and image recognition to various companies. They have Tumblr, they have photos, they could do something with that.

Tumblr acquisition was great theoretically, but the social interaction has changed to more rapid social platform like Instagram and Snapchat by the time the acquisition went through (I used to use Tumblr daily with my ex-girlfriend and it was our preferred social platform).

>The Summly acquisition was a big noise, but I don't know what happened to Summly. Did it ever integrate into Yahoo? I know they did something to do.

I believe those series of acquisitions were made just to bring on multiple mobile-experienced teams into Yahoo. The product didn't matter, but hiring teams of proven Mobile-UI/UX/Devs did.

It would be great to see some data behind this assertion if it exists. I suspect that failing for business reasons as opposed to being caught in some illegal scheme isn't as bad when it comes to finding another job.

>Curious to hear more on this. Yahoo! was a disaster before she came in, she tried some things to turn it around, it didn't work.

What exactly did she try? Because I haven't seen any effort but BS from Yahoo all this period.

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