The cult of personality around Marissa is just confusing to me.
I wasn't there. I don't know the inside story. I'm not going to take sides. But neither am I going to assume that she has poor business skills just because she headed up a shutdown effort.
A captain that demands changing colors of the sinking ship on a whim may not be the cause of the sinking but certainly isn't addressing the sinking.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-wh...
For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.
According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.
Excecutives change their minds on a whim, you are much better off anticipating that.
In contrast to my hypothesis: If you like her, feel free to share your thoughts or prove me wrong. What is special about her?
Of course she chose the rocketship in 1999 while the rest of us fumbled around in the dot com bust. She always had the knack of picking the right place to be at the right time, and the talent (or ability to bs) that she could get noticed when she needed to.
The yahoo thing was the worst misstep I've seen her take, but she got paid $200 million to take the risk, and I'm working for peanuts. So who is the smart one?
Edited to add: There is exactly zero chance she remembers me. But everyone I hung around remembers her. She has a very strange ability to be remembered.
Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.
That doesn't mean I'm lying, and I don't think you are either.
I have no idea what your experience is, and I have absolutely no reason to lie. I doubt Marissa could pick me out of a police lineup if her life depended on it.
But I watched her kick ass at Stanford--both socially and intellectually--and it takes more than a pretty face to do that.
And then got a job at Google. Of all the dot-com companies hiring on campus at the time throwing million dollar opportunities at new graduates, she picks the unicorn.
At some point it isn't luck anymore.
Anyway, I'll agree to disagree here. The post I originally responded to was a question about what is so special about her.
I only know what I saw when I could observe her. That my observations differ from yours is OK with me.
Even Gary Kasparov, Genoa Auriemma, and the Golden State Warriors fall off their perch eventually. It doesn’t mean they aren’t damn good at what they do.
I've had people I've casually (sometimes in a business context) interacted with on several occasions & gotten a very positive impression, only to late be told a lot of negatives from people who knew them better.
One guy in particular was praised by my boss (also his ex-boss at the time), confirming my positive impression & years later a coworker of mine who worked under that person had a very negative view of them...
There are several possibilities but I think the most likely is a combination of 1. people act differently in different contexts 2. the same person can be good at one position/time and bad at another 3. people are not always honest with you & especially if they're good at it can come across the way they wish.
I know several people who worked with her at Google, and she was fairly disliked there. She got frozen out and would have been eventually run out of the company had Yahoo not foolishly come calling. I WAS at Yahoo with her and I can verify that she did a terrible job there. Random decision making, company-wide initiatives that whipsawed from quarter to quarter, billion-dollar impulse acquisitions that almost immediately got written down. And let's not forget Polyvore - the 200m indulgence that she paid to her former assistant against the recommendations of the M&A team; that was just straight cronyism and corporate malfeasance.
True, Yahoo would have been a challenge for any CEO. But there were rational strategies that could have yielded some success. Marissa, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction and recklessly destroyed billions in shareholder value while pocketing hundreds of millions herself. Read the Kara Swisher articles on her at Recode. They were spot on. I heard a Business School professor on MSNBC argue that Marissa Mayer was the single most overpaid CEO in history. As a Yahoo employee who got to observe her tenure up close, I can't disagree. She's a terrible example for women in tech.
Also don't lump Marissa in with Elizabeth Holmes, Holmes could never be iconic with that hair.
Even if you look for women role model in tech, is it possible there aren't any more successful ones?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fowler
https://www.ft.com/content/b4bc2a68-dc4f-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b...
Lest we forget Elizabeth Holmes, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and for those old enough to remember Bill Gates in the 90s.
If you're lucky you die before you start making terrible decisions. A quote from Napoleon that he supposedly said while in exile "Had I been hit by a canon ball on my entry into Moscow I would have been remembered as the greatest statesman and general the world had ever seen".
But it would be the opposite for Bill Gates wouldn't it?
Running companies and being featured in Vogue? Iconic.
Marissa is a fake computer scientist. There are real female computer scientists out there, and very good ones at that.
I don't know what your problem is with her but holy shit I'm pretty sure she can code.
If she wore the typical tech uniform it wouldn't detract anything for me, but she wouldn't be iconic to me.