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Comment by jbyers | Hacker News Reader

Wow. I am speechless. There is probably no better person on earth to light a user- and product-focused fire under Yahoo. But the risk, the risk for her is just stunning. Huge props to her for making the leap from what must be a very comfortable Google and for the board for finding a stunning candidate to lead the revival of Yahoo.

(Edit: my definition of risk is lost time and missed opportunity. She's not going to suffer in compensation or reputation.)

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Actually, there is no risk at all (if you know what's behind the covers).

She is stagnating at Google. She had high ranking high influence positions at Google but over the years has been relegated to a position that has little visibility and control, mostly due to her non execution. This is a great opportunity for her to make some serious cash and be the "top dog" in a kennel of average dogs, rather than the opposite at Google.

Also, even if she crashes and burns at Yahoo, she will get many more opportunities simply due to the brand recognition she has due to her tenure at Google.

Could you explain more what you mean by non-execution? I don't travel in circles where I have context for something like that and it sounds interesting.

I had a CEO once who used to say "execute" a lot. I didn't really know what it meant either but it felt exciting when he said it. Sometimes I say it myself in the shower, when there's no-one within earshot.

What, like "work harder or we'll execute the lot of you"?

It's typically used as a buzzword to describe "getting s$%t done that matters".

Matt Cutts seems to disagree about her work -- https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/224963111222910976

Matt Cutts is a public face for Google.

To be fair, Matt Cutts is incapable of ever not being nice.

True but you know Matt is anothger posibly trophy hire at soem stage he is acting way above his pay grade if my company asked me to represnt them to congress etc I would say "cool" but I want a board seat first :-)

Realy you think that head hunting Matt Cutts is not many internet companies wet dream?

He commented only on her intelligence and work ethic, not her work.

> mostly due to her non execution.

I remember long ago hearing her push the notion that all design and interface decisions must be tested. I remember thinking that is just a recipe for non-execution with the goal of never being "wrong".

And if she crashes and burns, she gets what, 50million in an exit package? Why not take that.

Marissa was an early employee at Google, she was employee 20 there and Google's first female hire - she's worth ~$300 Million, I doubt she's doing this for the money.

well, it's more like, she has $300 Million now, but her compensation going forward now, win or lose, will probably dwarf that of staying put at Google and personal portfolio growth for the next few years. She's not doing it for the money, but her personal wealth only stands a huge boost.

That doesn't mean anything other than she was Larry Page's girlfriend at the time.

I'm sorry but I find it so hilarious. I worked at Yahoo and Google both. I know both their cultures (and especially the culture at Yahoo after all the good engineers left). IMHO, she is status quo - no different than the horrible string of CEOs being hired by Yahoo. In fact, I will put a stake in the ground that she will not move the needle further than what Scott/Bartz did.

I just can't get over how hilarious this situation is.

Would you care to elaborate more on the different cultures both as individual entities and in direct comparison to each other?

Curious; care to elaborate from an insider's perspective?

What about their cultures make this situation hilarious, and how come you're convinced that Mayer won't make a difference?

Not knowing much about Mayer and reading some comments here i have the opposite question, why Mayer should be able to make a difference?

The biggest factor is not Mayer herself, but again the "wrestling with a pig" factor mentioned in an excellent observation above. Yahoo! is not a sexy company.

Yes, I too am curious about your perspective. There are far too many posts claiming "Hey, I worked at X and Y!" without providing any sort of perspective whatsoever.

I agree w/ backspace.

Backspace, you sound negative. Can you at least provide some information which makes you feel like she is not going to perform? Like her previous performance, because that would be an ok indicator in this case.

"the risk for her is just stunning"

What risk? She's already achieved complete financial security from here time at Google. At Yahoo! she'll be taking the reins of a company that still attracts a massive userbase but is aching for someone with a fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company. Nothing buy potential IMO.

I'm not talking about money or reputation. The risk I see is time and opportunity. She could spend a maddening four years not moving the needle at Yahoo rather than another company or a startup of her own. Four years of punishing travel, endless meetings, unending Wall Street scrutiny. That risk.

Did you seriously just compare the CEO position at Yahoo to a _start-up_? To think the two are even in the same zip code, much less the same ballpark, is just, well it reflects a rather isolated viewpoint, put it that way. Yahoo is a $19B corporation.

Corrected. Poor phrasing on my part. I was suggesting a likely alternative for her would be starting a company, not that Yahoo is anything like a startup.

No, that's exactly how I took it.

Oblig car metaphor: That's like saying hey, as an alternative to a free Lamborghini Aventador, you can have an old Pontiac Fiero chassis, and a Chevy 350 with a blown head gasket. If you're really lucky and amazing you might make something worth 1/10th what the Lamborghini is.

No one I've talked to who works at Yahoo would compare it favorably to a Lamborghini.

Except as CEO she would probably make enough to buy a new Lamborghini every week. People rarely talk about opportunity costs but if you can make more than 10 million a year spending 5 years building a company from scratch to see a 30 million exit is a Failure. And doing better than that is ridiculously rare.

Well in this case it's an original Lamborghini, but it was in a horrible wreck and has been sitting at the bottom of the sea for about ten years...

So you can dredge it up, and perhaps restore it to it's original glory...or you can go out and build your own, new dream car from scratch.

Either way it's going to be a TON of work to get to a truly valuable (and fun to drive) vehicle...

Also even if you restore the Lamborghini you will own way less than 30% of it.

I'm not sure the analogy stretches quite that far. Do you really care how many percent you own if you can drive it whenever you like and modify it however you please?

Car metaphors are tempting, but Yahoo vs. a startup is more like the difference between fixing up a rusty EOL aircraft carrier and building a sailboat.

The appropriate analogy would not be a free Lamborghini, but the chance to drive one (with 2 bad tires) for a while. Or, go buy/build your own car and own it.

I think it's a great move, and Google is probably in favor of it.

The flaw with this analogy isn't likening Yahoo! to a Lamborghini. It's saying that startups are all the same, regardless of who's starting them.

If Elon Musk and a new Stanford grad started brand new companies on the same day, would both companies be old busted cars with blown head gaskets?

Also, the metaphor is a bit flawed by likening the 17-year-old floundering company to a new sports car and a hypothetical new company as something that's already worthless because of wear and tear.

Not really a good metaphor. Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and many more entrepreneurs chose to start a second company rather than take a C level job somewhere else. A better analogy is whether to adapt an off the shelf piece of code to scratch your itch (often a reasonable choice) or to write your own from scratch, clean slate. The latter is much more risky, but that fits a certain personality.

Exactly. With her connections, knowledge and wealth she might be able to build an amazing company from scratch.

Not exactly,

Building a successful company is not a joke even if you have knowledge and connections. Users don't value what and whom you know.

At her level and for all she has done, getting to be the CEO of a billion dollar firm is actually a great deal.

Looking at it from other way around, Her career at Google might have probably come to a halt given the fact that Larry and Sergey are going to be there around for a long time to come. On the other hand, she could not be the CEO of a successful firm- Because such stints demand prior experience.

In short the change she got now is because, the company is currently a underdog. No big CEO who is already on a wave of success will take up that kind of a job. She needs the company because she gets to be the CEO and nobody else would offer her the same position.

In many ways this is a no brainer.

> Oblig

Please spare us the silly abbreviations.

You would think that at Hacker News, car analogies would not be necessary, since I imagine there is a large proportion of users like myself who have no interest in cars, and have never owned nor intend to own one.

I have no idea how a Pontiac Fiero or a Chevy 350 compares to a Lamborghini Aventator without looking it up. All I know is that all three are probably luxury automobiles. I have even less of clue about what a head gasket might be.

On the other hand, if you tried to explain something to me by using a job at Google, Yahoo, and a start-up as analogies, it would definitely help make things more understandable.

Well, only the Lamborghini is a luxury car(unless you consider all cars a luxury but that would be a different discussion).

Otherwise, I fully agree with your point. I like cars and had no clue what, exactly, the Pontiac Fiero or the Chevy 350 were as I'm not American and those are American cars. Around here German(Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW) and Japanese(Mazda, Subary, Toyota, ...) cars are much much more common.

Fiero: Pontiac's great experiment at making a European style sports car. A real _proper_ sports car: Mid-engined, rear wheel drive. Except, because most most of the parts were from other GM vehicles, it was mostly shite. Still - very popular with kit car/replicar builders because they made quite a few of them (~350,000) and they're cheap as donor cars.

Chevy 350: Basically a commodity engine. 5.7L pushrod V-8. Used in lots of GM vehicles from the late 60s through the early 90s. Camaros, Corvettes, Cadiallacs etc. Built tough, cheap, and there are a gazillion aftermarket parts available.

I've always found it weird how different engine sizes are in American cars as opposed to everything else.

Unless you were going for a race car or something it's quite uncommon to have a 5.7L engine in anything but an American car.

It's fairly unusual these days. Only thing you'll find with an engine that big is either a full-size SUV, a large truck, or a Corvette.

Plus, if you weren't here, you might not appreciate just how horrible the "EPA era" engines were. Much stricter emission controls + not having the technology to really meet it led to some really de-tuned engines. Wouldn't be unusual for a 5-6L engine in those days to only make 140-160HP stock.

I thought HN had a large preponderence of "engineers" (or at least they claim to be) I would have expected almost 100% of us sould have enough knowledge to understand the analogy.

Pontiac's and Chevy's are very American cars. Speaking as a European I can guess they're not as good as a Lamborghini but not with enough detail to make it a particularly useful comparison.

Yahoo = Major Leagues , Starting your own start up = Minors

Wow, has HN been taken over by business types already?

Don't you think Mayer has enough capital, connections, reputation, experience, etc. that if she started a company to do what she wanted, how she wanted, it would be completely different from your average college-grad startup?

I mean, come on now. There's no comparing the two.

Agreed. I understand there's a hacker mentality here, but who would really pass up the CEO at an established behemoth like Yahoo to take the reigns of an unproven (or found) startup?

Me. I'm not qualified to be the CEO of Yahoo, so I would only be setting myself up for failure if I took the job. But running a smaller company limits the amount of harm I can do to myself and others while I learn the ropes.

The only reason to expect Mayer to do well as the CEO of Yahoo would be if her work at Google were similar to that job in some respect. I'm not sure it is.

True, but Yahoo! has made so many mistakes that she would have to really to screw up (like lie on your resume) for it to hurt her reputation. So that time and opportunity cost is unlikely to ever be a waste. If she fails, well Yahoo! was already a failure, if she succeeds, she's a perceived as savior. Either way, she's a contenter for ceo of any other major internet company going forward.

I see it as the wrestling with a pig problem.

If you wrestle with a pig, both of you get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.

Meyer's a superstar right now. Yahoo's had an anti-Midas touch on several people who've attempted to steer it right.

Actually, your metaphor and the pattern of ruining hopefuls fits a pattern from Greek Mythology. (Other tough guys try to capture/defeat/kill a fearsome monster, but Hercules shows he's an uber-stud by finally doing it)

So Yahoo's now the Erymanthian boar?

I see it more as an Augean stables.

Time to divert Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River. But I think the stench is stronger than them.

I really don't understand why people are saying she won't get a reputation hit from this if she fails. Every other CEO trying to steer Yahoo right so far in recent history has a black eye and had to leave in relative disgrace. None of them had the superstar status that she has right now, but the fact is, none of them were allowed the conclusion "well, Yahoo was just too screwed up anyway". I'm not convinced that she'll be able to escape getting a black eye if she also fails. People are harsh on Yahoo CEOs. The deck is stacked against them in so many ways.

I think because people believe at this point it is taken that failing at Yahoo would hardly be surprising. For 2 reasons: 1) the company is in much worse shape (especially in reputation) than it was when previous CEOs failed to turned things around and 2) after a bunch of people try and fail the stigma of failing is likely to be reduced. Also here reputation is so positive that failing at a task many think is going to be hard not to fail at, won't likely turn those thinking well of her around.

Now she could fail in ways that are so bad that it does harm her reputation, certainly. I tend to agree with those that think as long as she doesn't fail for reasons that make her look really bad, her reputation won't suffer too much.

Also if Yahoo is marginally successful she may get an outsized boost - due to others failing to do even that.

Yahoo is one of those companies who has so many great properties that it will be easier than it seems to resurrect that company. They just needed a competent CEO.

I think Mayer is the right choice.

The law of statistics and its regression to the mean tell me she will likely succeed, but should not be credited for this success.

The risk of her reputation. Once you have money, reputation is of the things that keeps you going every day. Right now her reputation is golden.

And if she had stayed at Google, what would be the next step for her career-wise? She went from vice president of search products to overseeing location and local services. Now she's CEO. You don't think that'll motivate her?

I think it not surprising that she left Google to be a CEO somewhere, it was just surprising that she picked Yahoo. Another one of those VP -> CEO jumps that was interesting to watch was Ed Zander (Sun Micro -> Motorola).

What I was expecting was that she would leave and start some sort cross between 'solve a world issue' with 'easy accessibility' kinds of UI. At Google her strength was having a clear idea of how to speak to users through UX, The Yahoo gig can use that, certainly, but watching the succession of failures and missteps at Yahoo the issues aren't primarily UX or users, it seems like Yahoo is in a major identity crisis about what exactly it actually is.

When one of their recruiters was trying to convince me to join the pitch was this:

"Yahoo is the premier digital media company

Yahoo! delivers amazing personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences. We provide engaging and innovative canvases for advertisers to connect with their target audiences using our unique blend of Science + Art + Scale."

To which my response was "Really?", if someone were to ask me what the "Premier digital media company" was I don't think I'd respond "Yahoo!"

Hence my surprise.

I'd say the "premier digital media company" at the moment is Netflix. They have their problems and troubles, but they have enough brand recognition and enough good content (albeit produced by other people) to quality for that moniker.

Agreed. I would think you could make an argument for NetFlix (streaming/rentals), Apple (iTunes + players), or Amazon (streaming/rental/sales/player (book)) as being 'digital media' companies.

It may be that I think 'education/entertainment' more than I think 'discovery' when I think digital media. If Yahoo claimed to be the digital media discovery company that might be the starting point for a bigger vision.

What about YouTube? Or Zynga? Or Facebook for its photos?

I think when people hear the phrase "digital media", they think of it has traditional-media-delivered-digitally. But I think the internet enables entirely new variations of traditional media, tailor-made for our hypersocial, crowdsourced, and attentionless internet society.

That's always been my problem with Yahoo.

They are a company filled with brilliant engineers (who give us things like Hadoop), yet they only want to be a media company.

And there's no problem with that, if they took their engineers and had them create new media distribution platforms or new efficient encodings or any other of the huge amount of highly technical things that can improve media distribution and consumption.

If she fails it will not hurt her reputation. Yahoo has already gone through so many CEOs. I think that if she can't turn around Yahoo, no one else will. After all, she is better qualified than the previous executives.

You overestimate the downside of a reputation hit. The business world loves failures, and in fact it promotes them as people experienced with problems.

One of the biggest things she's going to probably have to do is lay off thousands of people. The business world might love that, but the folks losing their jobs probably won't. Turnaround CEOs take a lot of flak.

Folks losing their jobs don't hire the CEOs. :/

Look at the previous CEOs of Yahoo. Even excluding Scott Thompson (who lied on his resume) NONE of them have even held executive positions, or done anything significant in the business world. It doesn't seem like people forgave them just because Yahoo is a horrible mess.

You mean, since leaving Yahoo? In that case you're probably right. Carol Bartz did great things for Autodesk.

Yeah, since leaving. My point is that Yahoo is a career destroyer for its CEOs-none of them have held a significant position afterwards. Bartz even had a great track record before (and during!) her tenure at Yahoo, but that doesn't seem to have helped.

They haven't really had that many CEOs, and Mayer is young enough to weather anything that might happen. I can't imagine she isn't going into this without an upper hand, It's not like she was looking to jump ship (maybe she was) and Yahoo was the only company who would hire her.

She has a great reputation--and she certainly has a lot of work ahead of her. Wish her the best of luck.

Reputation is only a part of it. At her level there several other motivators at work -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs

"fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company"

And possibly who to poach from google.

"someone with a fresh viewpoint on how to transform the company"

Prior to joining google in 1999 as employee number 20 "Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California" (wikipedia) for what appears to be only a few years. (She graduated high school in 1993, received a B.S. and and M.S. which must have taken at least 4 or 5 years afaik).

My guess is that she has a great deal of confidence, confidence built on the fact that she was an early google employee and she was able to ride the success of that opportunity. But her entire working career is basically google and I'm not sure she brings the depth of experience necessary to take on turning around the fortunes of Yahoo.

You may be right, but the "experienced" CEOs that preceded her have been a disaster. It is non-trivial to find someone with executive experience at this level; there just aren't that many companies that are this big in this industry (and hiring from outside the industry seems to have been a massive mistake in most of the instances where it has happened; somehow business people always think the business skills are the most important, and so they think a PepsiCo chief can run a tech company, but that never seems to pan out very well).

At the very least, Mayer has been part of a real leading tech organization that grew from nothing to everything in record time. That's experience that is also very difficult to replicate. And, the skills she's known for within Google are all product oriented, and that's where Yahoo has failed so miserably and Google has succeeded so fantastically.

and so they think a PepsiCo chief can run a tech company, but that never seems to pan out very well

For IBM, the decision to hire a non-technical and experienced CEO turned out OK. IBM turned around. But I'd agree that this is probably an exception to the rule.

I think the key here is fresh thinking and ability to get the political/operational/strategic stars aligned inside the organization to /cough/ execute. An experienced person may bring this to the table, and a lesser experienced person may bring this to the table. The key is whether it's brought to the table.

The other thing that I would be concerned about is her PR appeal. I have no idea who Google employee 19 or 21 is, and I have no idea what she actually did at Google, except that it sounded important. Yet I've heard of her, would probably recognize her in a news picture, and remember her name.

I've had the opportunity to work with people who were very good at personal public relations, and based on that experience, I'm skeptical. Constantly selling your public image means that you can't be wrong, which always results in revisionist history and oddball situations.

Hopefully I'm wrong -- Yahoo needs help, and she does have a good story.

Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg were mentioned in this thread as examples of CEOs who can't be wrong and have revisionist memories.

And later in Oct, She will go on maternity leave. So no Yahoo head ache for some time. http://www.firstpost.com/tech/yahoo-marissa-mayer-is-first-p...

"My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I'll work throughout it."

http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/16/mayer-yaho...

I hope she doesn't regret it. I just read this article by Anne-Marie Slaughter, titled "Why Women can't have it all" and describing her experience mixing a high-power job with raising children (even with a supportive husband):

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-wome...

Definitely unexpected that she would show up at Yahoo but not unexpected that she would leave Google. The re-org was kind of a slap in the face and everyone pretty much knew it. But taking this role was not what I would have expected. If Microsoft really is trying to sell its Bing unit she might be able to make a search company out of it again. Or at least a company with a native search product to power its other properties.

I don't think there's a lot of reputation risk for her, here... I'm pretty sure that if Yahoo continues it's current course, the majority reaction will be "Well, Yahoo was a sinking ship anyway, there's not a lot she could have done" but if Yahoo makes a comeback she'll be hailed as a miracle worker.

For proof of this, see Marc Andreessen's comments in TechCrunch[1]:

Andreessen also said he's "super-happy" for Mayer, because she's ready to step into a CEO role at a major tech company.

But can she actually turn Yahoo around? Andressen declined to offer any suggestions for areas that the company should pursue, and he also cautioned that it's hard to think of many Web companies that succeeded in turning themselves around.

"On the other hand, it's hard to overestimate how screwed Apple was in 1997," Andreessen said. "Tech comapnies can in fact be turned around. The problem is, there aren't a lot of Steve Jobs characters running around."

Basically, if she makes it, she's "a Steve Jobs character" and if not, well, it's hard to turn tech companies around.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/marc-andreessen-marissa-may...

Don't be so sure. Nokia was a sinking ship before Elop joined and now he's wearing most of the blame. Sure, he could have hitched Nokia's wagon to Android instead. But given that Google own competitor Motorola and are selling the killer Nexus 7 at no margin, they aren't exactly an ideal partner either.

Nokia was stagnating before Elop, not sinking.

All you need to do is look at how the tech press/community is ALREADY talking about this. See the quote from Andreessen[1] that I already talked about or, alternatively, another TechCrunch article that just got published:

What a time for Marissa Mayer to take control at Yahoo. She'll need all the smarts she can lay her hands on to revive an ailing Yahoo.[2]

It's already being set up so that the expectation is "she'll probably fail, because ANYONE will fail" but if she succeeds she's a miracle worker or "a Steve Jobs character".

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4252945

[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/yahoos-neglected-global-lab...

Elop scrapped everything Nokia had dumped years of R&D into and turned the company into Microsoft's (Elop's former employer) puppet. Nokia could have made an instant comeback if they had just built a few semi-decent Android phones, but they are now locked in to Windows. Elop's case is atypical.

They had their own competent looking OS in the pipeline (which was available on a couple of the earlier Lumias).

I agree, I think Elop made bad decisions which were massively swayed by Elop's attachment to Microsoft.

> She's not going to suffer in compensation or reputation.

Are you serious? Have you seen what's happened to Yahoo's CEOs since ... ever?

I think it's a risk too. She's shown that she can excel in a small company undergoing hyper growth.

In this case she's presenting herself as a turnaround expert. I'm surprised she didn't sign on with a pre-IPO darling like Twitter or Facebook long ago.

Respectfully what risk does she have? She has a tremendous history with Google, even if Yahoo tanks with her at the helm, she could probably continue in at least a Senior Vice President position with almost any other company of her choosing.

Not to mention she is more-then-likely financially taken-care of. At that point, 'risk' is almost negligible. It's all just 'more possibilities' for Mrs. Mayer.

I mentioned this out loud at the office and that was the exact same reaction.

I don't think anyone in my office had a reaction other than "...What the fuck?!"

haha, I actually meant the "what the fuck" part

Actually I don't think the risk is all that high. If the sinking ship still sinks, then oh well. But, however small the chance, she manages to turn things around...

As someone who has been underwhelmed by Ms. Mayer since her early days at Google, I think this is just another desperate attempt to save the ailing Yahoo. It will fail, and she'll be out in less than a year.

curious to learn why you say this?

She's a showboat, IMHO. This is based on personal observation and insider info. She's quick to yell about how great she is, but you don't see a lot of unbiased people talking about her contributions to technology or to Google. She has her own publicist; not from Google, mind you, this is the Marissa Mayer publicist. She apparently enjoyed keeping people lined up waiting for an appointment with her for hours. To summarize, there are a lot of signs of weak character, no signs of great leadership, and no signs of greatness at all. Yahoo's board wanted her, obviously, for the name Google. They will be disappointed.

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