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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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