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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

She was given $30M in restricted stock to get her to walk away from being owed that much at Google. Then they gave her some incentives in stock options (valued at $22M if yahoo stock increased by something like 8% a year for a decade), because otherwise why would she take the job? Instead Yahoo stock tripled and that created her $260M.

Now she may not have had a lot to do with the stock increase, but she certainly didn't screw it up. Her compensation was mostly incentive based, which is what you want for a CEO.

CEOs aren't going to be paid like an engineer. They probably are overpaid. But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't.

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> offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly.

A $2500 bonus ($250 million divided by 10k employees) is also a small amount to pay.

$250,000,000 divided by 10,000 people is $25,000 per person, not $2,500 per person.

Right you are!

Point is that I've been reluctant to take certain kinds of jobs because the company seems unserious in different ways (building a good product, providing career opportunities, etc.). Paying more, in bonuses or salary, alleviates these concerns for me.

There's a lot of talk about recruiting good CEOs through better pay. At least in some organizations, the ability to recruit engineering talent (or at least engineering leadership) is just as paramount.

> she may not have had to do with it

Yahoo was; iirc a negative asset on the balance sheet and Japan and Alibaba were only drivers of actual value. Given how much Yahoo had to pay to entice her, in hindsight paying $1.00 for a carrot at stop and shop to be CEO of Yahoo would've had the same result until they went into sales negotiations

The thing is: she actually did help create some of that value.

Before she got there, Carol Bartz was the chief. She had royally FUCKED UP the relationship with Alibaba. As a result, BABA refused to go public until it got back the shares from Yahoo; and, in fact, Jack Ma took Alipay out of the consortium in a fit of anger, without even consulting Bartz.

In short: the relationship was in dire straits.

Mayer comes in, smoothes things over, strokes Ma's ego and next thing you know, Yahoo gets to keep most of the shares, BABA goes public and Yahoo's value skyrockets. Mayer had absolutely everything to do with this.

Edit: for more reading: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/12/bartz-in-a-china-shop-has-...

You don't know that a carrot couldn't have accomplished the same thing

Yes I do, because carrots can't talk.

That would have been a bold choice. I remember the guy who played Trapper John on MASH was talking on one of those stock pick shows back in the tech bubble days. He was mocking the idea that the CEO of GM should expect compensation to put him on par with the CEO of a company like Oracle or Microsoft. His point lacked the carrot but he essentially said anyone could be CEO of GM. The company runs itself.

> But for shareholders, offering a tiny part of the upside from a stock increase is a small amount to pay when it the stock appreciates strongly. The bigger problem is when it doesn't.

This is how most organised religions work.

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