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> I personally viewed her job as managing the divestiture of the valuable part of the company (Alibaba) in such a way that it delivered maximum value to the shareholders of Yahoo.

If that was the case she never would have been given the job. That's something any old bean counter could do and they wouldn't require hundreds of millions of dollars for the babysitting job.

She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?).

Some examples:

* Tumblr - $1.1b with the majority of that later written off because they have only figured out how to keep losing money

* Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google

* Summly - $30m to a teenager for a news app that was shut down and never heard of again

To be fair Summly became Yahoo news digest so it wasn't a complete write off.

So here is what Yahoo did: It "aqui-hired" a team of people, led by a 17-year-old living in London, that cannot claim to have invented a cool technology OR to have built a cool app. Yahoo does own the technology SRI invented for Summly, but it doesn't own SRI, so it hasn't acquired the team that can scale the technology for Yahoo.

> She spent Yahoo's money like a drunken sailor, an odd thing to do if her job was managing Alibaba (how exactly do you manage a passive stake in anything?).

Well, it's no small thing to divest a big chunk of equity like that without crushing the value. There are a few ways you can do it, but you need someone empowered to actually execute on it for the board. That's the CEO's job. She did a good job in that.

And yeah, she made some bad acquisitions. But most of these types of acquisitions fail (it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history) and the losses on those acquisitions were more than made up for by the additional amount she was able to get for the combined Alibaba + Yahoo. She basically ended up spinning off the entire value of the Alibaba stake plus $4.5 billion -- which is about $5 billion ahead of where the company was at when she started (remember the articles basically saying Yahoo's operations were worth negative money?)

>it's not like great companies put themselves up for sale -- just look at Microsoft's or HP's acquisition history

I wouldn't think of HP or post-Gates Microsoft as very good examples of how to run a publicly-traded tech firm.

I think OP's point was that Microsoft and HP have purchased a bunch of not-so-great companies.

i think the point was that is an EASY hurdle to get over

>... She basically ended up spinning off the entire value of the Alibaba stake plus $4.5 billion -- which is about $5 billion ahead of where the company was at when she started

The market value of the company almost always is not equal to what the company could sell itself for to another company. In this case, the board would have likely gotten much more for the shareholders by spinning off Alibaba and selling the rest rather than hire Mayer.

For example:

- She did some very bad hires such as Henrique de Castro who in 15 months got over 100 million in salary, stock and severance.

- She wasted billions on acquisitions that did not add value.

- Most of the comments from Yahoo employees since she was hired were never very good, and her behavior with employees was said to sometimes be somewhat bizarre (such as reading a children's book at a comm meeting) or essentially throwing a company party where she is the guest of honor.

I don't know the numbers for sure, but with the security breaches, web site redesigns and inability to get ahead of technology trends, I think user engagement with the site is likely less than when she started.

>* Polyvore - $230m A fashion search engine run by people she used to mentor at Google

Your anti-female bias is showing here. Polyvore has been profitable for years. I have a friend who works there and loves it.

I think the OP is just skeptical. Where is the anti-female bias?

>Where is the anti-female bias?

In specifically marginalizing a profitable business acquisition just because he'd assumed it was frivolous by its' nature.

How is that in any way related to gender? I also "marginalized" Tumblr and Summly, was that me throwing shade towards men?

They didn't make money.

He asked how is that related to gender?

Yahoo doesn't break out the numbers so we don't know how much revenue any of the companies they acquired are bringing in (profit would be even more difficult because of shared resources). Regardless, none of this has anything to do with gender. I chose a large, medium and small example from a list of Yahoo's acquisitions.

So, if someone posits that a business venture is frivolous, actual profitability aside, that is anti-female (or anti-male) statement/view?

I still don't understand. Can you please elaborate?

If someone posits that a profitable business venture is frivolous, it's not about whether it's good business or not. Also, you do understand.

Back to the point: what does any of that have to do with sex or gender? Maybe you will elaborate, if OP won't.

I don't know what gender made the most money on Polyvore, it doesn't matter. The point was she enriched her friends. The price made waves at the time:

https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/why-polyvores-jess-lee-sol...

> "Yahoo bought Polyvore in what we’ve heard could be anywhere from a $25 million* to $60 million"

Quickly followed up by an update revealing it was actually ~10x more!

This comment only shows that those who talk most online about how people are mistreated based on gender are the ones who are the most sexist.

Step back for a minute and think about how this relates to sexism at all. It is you who associated these two concepts together. You are the one who's being sexist. Once you take off your sexist glasses and see things clearly, you'll realize you are making as huge logical fallacy as the one you're criticizing.

Sexism needs to stop but comments like this are what makes it hard.

You may think it was MM's primary job to sell Yahoo for parts, but I don't think she did. Look at the initiatives into media, big-bet acquisitions, reinvestment in search. I think it's clear she was trying to reinvent Yahoo, and that's the story she told the board. She even did a rebrand right away, a rather dubious logo designed by her and some associates over a weekend.

I was optimistic when she came on board, because Yahoo really needed a strong product vision and someone who had a touch of ruthlessness. But maybe it was unsalvageable.

Yahoo did need a visionary but if you look at her bio on wikipedia it tells a different story. It mentions she is known for her attention to detail and she is a usability leader. She joined google as employee #20 after school. She was involved in many important google projects over the span of her career at google overseeing core key project in many cases. Very well rounded person.

To me that sounds like the wrong person to bet my money on. The employee who plays it safe is not right person to transform a dying company that needed radical change. You need a bolder person. Someone with a burning passion or an act to grind.

If you are google employee 20 and you haven't cashed out to build something you always wanted to but didn't have the resources yet I don't think I want you leading the transformation process. I would rather have employee 21 who quit and tried something else and failed.

This may be the purest distillation of Hacker News brogrammerism I've ever read.

By her own words, she thought Google had a 2% chance of success. Is that not enough risk for one life?

http://fortune.com/2011/10/03/marissa-mayer-i-thought-google...

Also, her experience running hundreds of projects and experiments at another billion dollar tech company is exactly what they wanted. Not whether she does all-nighters and knows Rails. I'm not going to argue that the Yahoo board made the right choice, but you would definitely have made the wrong choice.

>Is that not enough risk for one life?

Who said it wasn't?

"An act to grind" sounds so playful! But normally it's "an axe to grind"...a little more sinister twist to it.

I am of the opinion that Ms. Mayer was hired partly as a way for Yahoo's investors to hedge their bets [1]. Its a bit of a dark view on silicon valley culture, perhaps, but I think a valid one.

Anyways, I agree with your point that Yahoo had already suffered most of its damage. In many ways, its latest CEO did the best that could be expected of anyone in that position.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

>IMO it's because she's a female CEO who, when viewed through the lens of consumer products, failed miserably but was still paid a sum of money that sounds absolutely ludicrous to most Americans. She's an easy target for people who want to claim that she only got the job for being an attractive female.

Who said that? The non-existent, hypothetical people?

The funny part about your pushback is that Mayer is pretty much identical in behavior to any number of other male CEOs who have received golden parachutes without comment. There's literally nothing she's receiving that others haven't before.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-golden-parachutes/

Exactly. Trot out the old argument "If we didn't pay that, we couldn't find qualified candidates!" Yahoo had to hire her away from a senior leadership position at Google. She was young, sure, but she was definitely qualified.

Yahoo hired her after she got demoted from senior leadership at Google. They got her on her way down, and vice versa.

Even more interesting:

http://fortune.com/2017/03/13/yahoo-new-ceo-marissa-mayer-ne...

"Marissa Mayer's replacement as CEO of Yahoo, Thomas McInerney, will get paid twice as much as she did—for a job basically doing nothing."

"After all, the company that McInerney will run will not be an operating business like the one Yahoo is today, but rather an investment company not all that different from a mutual fund."

"In short, McInerney is getting paid a huge amount to sit atop a fund that basically runs itself. The way Yahoo describes McInerney's responsibilities in a filing Monday makes it sound like he will be little more than a glorified trustee, the way a retiree might occasionally check in on the status of the family nest egg."

The comment above is false, it if ignores the value of equity. Fortune was pushing a bullshit sexism narrative. Mayer made 10x in equity what McInerney made in salary

These are potential golden parachutes. As in they have not received this compensation... because the majority of them are still running their companies.

Your comment reads a little disingenuously, or maybe you didn't understand the article.

The pushback is due to the perception that the incentives are misaligned. Right or wrong, people feel she ran the company into the ground. In that light, they feel the compensation is undue.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with her gender and everything to do with the perception that she is a charlatan.

When she was hired, I thought, "she's qualified." And then I watched and listened during her press tour on the morning news shows and conference interviews... she spoke like a visionary -- someone with all the ideas to turn Yahoo around. And I thought, "that's awesome, let's see how she does." And now, here we are.

I've seen the same pushback against Shai Agassi -- a male -- for being a visionary charlatan... for somehow falling into great fortunes with little to show.

The difference between her and others is that she runs a silicon valley tech company - so of course you're going to see her name on HN and not the CEO of McKesson. Yahoo is a recurring, popular topic on this forum. So what is your point exactly?

> she only got the job for being an attractive female.

I've followed her role as CEO closely, and I don't think I've read that in a single article, out of the 40+ that I've read over the last few years.