Yahoo geek-queen: conflicting results of the first year and a half
As one of Google’s top-ranking employees, Marissa Mayer became the superstar of Silicon Valley. However, inside the search giant, she sometimes didn’t shine so brightly, but all because of her colleagues revolting against her authoritarian management style. The author of the article, Bethany McLean, wonders if Marissa will be Yahoo's savior or just another problem. A year and a half after being appointed to the position of CEO, the results of her work are perhaps inconsistent.
Marissa Mayer on the background of the LED-installation, built in her penthouse at the Hotel Four Seasons, in San Francisco. According to the former colleague, she is a real geek.
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In the fall of 2011, New York Finance Daniel Loeb, managing $ 14 billion hedge fund Third Point Capital, led the campaign to overthrow the current and selection of a new CEO for Yahoo, which did not go very well. His choice fell on Google's top manager, Marissa Meyer, who was then often called the “Google face” or the “Google Glamor Geek”. Last summer, the same day that Yahoo announced the appointment of Mayer to the position of CEO, who became the youngest woman in her 37 years to head the Fortune 500 company, Mayer announced her pregnancy. Thereby, she completed her journey from Zauchka from a provincial town in Wisconsin, an engineer with a degree from Stanford, to a business superstar and a cultural idol.
By the time Myer joined Yahoo, the company was a widely recognized brand, and despite a lot of management mistakes and missed opportunities, about 700 million users still logged in at least once a month to check their email, read the news, see stock market quotes, do a search request and so on. However, the company has not launched new sought-after products for many years, and has become something of a joke in Silicon Valley. The value of the stock fell from $ 118.75 in the early 2000s, and ranged between $ 14 and $ 19 in the months preceding Mayer's arrival.
Most people in the Valley would like to see Yahoo successful, if only out of respect for its heritage. And they generally believe that if anyone can fix Yahoo, this is Meyer. She is an engineer, and engineers are honored in the Valley. She is also a “product-oriented person,” in the sense that she has several created Internet products that people want to use. “Product people,” such as Mark Zuckerberg, including the ruling kings and queens of today's Valley, because — it is assumed — all other aspects of company management can be delegated, but the ability to innovate is not. At first glance, in the first year of the management of the company, Meyer pursued an incredible success. Yahoo’s stock almost doubled, making about $ 31 apiece, and she topped the Fortune 40 to 40 list, becoming the first woman to receive this honor.
In order to celebrate her anniversary, her team sent out a message to employees calling for the thanks of Mayer “for everything she did for Yahoo” by clicking on the link with the text “yo / thxmarissa”. The messages (ranging from “Thank you for impersonating Yahoo superstars” to “Marissa, you rock” and “Best CEO I've ever worked with”) were put together in a book with photos of Mayer in a red shirt (shading purple engineers shirts, mostly men); interviewing Inu Garten, food guru from Barefoot Contessa; and many others. "Yahoo! Thanks you, Marissa! ”Written on the back of the book. After that, Mayer also made and sent copies of the book.
However, a bright first impression often distracts attention from a less attractive reality, and this is true in the case of Meyer with Yahoo. No one wants to sound like it doesn’t support Yahoo or Meier, and since Meyer did not agree to cooperate for this article, even her friends often did not want to talk about it under the recording. It’s pretty easy to give a characterization that can sound both interesting and potentially dangerous for Yahoo and its future. “She is confusing,” says one of those people who worked closely with her, “it would be a mistake to describe her unequivocally, as an angel or a devil.” Another top manager who worked with her agrees that she is a difficult person to understand. “Some parts of Marissa’s World are inexplicably strange,” he says, “and it doesn’t help much.”
There are two things about Marissa Meier, for which everyone agrees. One is that Marissa belongs to the most intelligent people whom they have ever met. The second is that she has a super ability to work. Mayer says that she only needs 4 hours a day to sleep, and that she worked 250 round-the-clock shifts in her first 5 years of work at Google. “I don’t really believe in burnout,” she said last year during her speech, “Many people have worked really hard for decades, such as Winston Churchill and Einstein.”
This incredible energy, it seems, was inherent in her from an early age, while she was still living in the small town of Wausau. She told Vogue magazine that she always had at least one club a day after school: ballet or figure skating, piano, swimming or debate (her team won the state championship), cheerleader training, the president of the Spanish club, and the treasurer of the Key Club. "; Yes, she studied ballet 35 hours a week to high school.
During a speech at Stanford, when Mayer was asked about what made her successful, her answer was simple: "I love working." She repeated it and on the speech at Google, where her father came. People surrounded him and began to ask about Marissa. When asked the question: “Have you ever seen Marissa's performance?”, His answer was simple: “No. I am Marissa's father. I like to work".
“I lived in a bubble,” Meyer says, “I was good at chemistry, math, biology, physics in high school, and my teachers actively supported me.” If Marissa was unsure of herself, she did not demonstrate this.
“In high school, Marissa was damn smart and she knew that (not indulgent, but simply self-confident),” her former classmate Lif Larson describes Marissa in her blog. “She was always 100% business, all the time. She was not “popular”, but she was always actively involved and diligent. Whatever she did, she tried to do it perfectly. ”
She applied for 10 colleges, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford. After she was accepted by everyone, she made a table and ranked universities according to, for example, the criterion as a median score of accepted applicants (SAT). Stanford went ahead, where she initially planned to get a degree in biology or chemistry, to become a neurosurgeon's pediatrician in the future (they take a medical school only after receiving a bachelor's degree). However, when she realized that her curriculum was no different from the program and quite secondary universities, she decided to get a diploma in the area in which Stanford was unique - and changed her profile to “character systems”, a program that includes cognitive philosophy psychology, linguistics and programming.
Employee No. 20
Mayer stayed at Stanford for a master’s degree in Computer Science. She had 14 offers at the time of the release, but she chose Google, joining the company in 1999, the twentieth employee. She was also the first female engineer in the company.
At that time, work at Google was very diverse and intense: “Marissa worked on a par with everyone, but no more than others,” says one of the early employees. As the company grew, the press began to actively knock on Google’s doors, but its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were not particularly interested in communicating with the press and Google’s position was such that the company should not have an individual person; talk technology. (Although Meyer and Page have met for a while, most people insist that their relationship never affected their work).
Mayer is a true geek, according to one of Google’s former employees: “This part of the mythology about her is true,” and as a confirmation is given by a panel of LEDs inside the tennis balls installed at her home. But unlike most geeks, she speaks surprisingly well. Reporters who visited Google in its early period and met Marissa, were fascinated by its knowledge of technology, pragmatism, and ability to hold on. “It combines the qualities of a programmer and a humanist,” says reporter David Kirkpatrick.
Maier's 2006 speech can still be found at Stanford, where she discussed nine innovation theorems. She spoke very quickly, and she is now known for her quick speech, and she was wearing a blue T-shirt with black jeans. Her hair was not yet perfectly smoothed hairstyle blonde, which she has become now. She had a nervous tic, she made a “nnnhh” sound during pauses, which made her almost a parody of the classic “nerd”. Delivered also her laugh, which is even presented as a separate compilation on YouTube .
A former Google employee said that Meier understood the importance of working with the press, and such a brilliant student like her could not help but become perfect in this. “It was a strategic unification of its interests and needs of the company,” says another former googler. “Larry and Sergey wanted to spit. And the culture of the company did not welcome the promotion of its individual representatives. But the press demanded ... She (Marissa) wanted it, but did not force it. ”
By the way, she spoke so well with the press that by the end of the 2000s the articles were not so much about Google or its business, as about Mayer herself. Her American and rather attractive appearance, love for fashion and decor, carefully thought-out parties, obviously fell into the sphere of interests of magazines like Glamor and Vogue.
At this point, Marissa was among the top managers of Google. Her position was called “Vice President of Search Products and User Interfaces” (“vice president of search products and user experience”). In an interview, Meyer reported that her task was “to coordinate everything related to Google search: what users saw on the main page, and all the code hidden behind it.” Glamor called her a "visionary", San Francisco magazine wrote: "Almost everything that happens in a company in Mountain View ... falls under the microscope of Marissa."
Such statements are somewhere in the gray zone between truth and artistic exaggeration. No one denies that Marissa played a key role in shaping how users interact with Google. She seems to have a rare ability, in particular for an engineer, to understand what users want. But its area was the side interacting with users, where it gave the go-ahead to products before they entered the market. Mayer was not among the three-person squad that created Gmail. It had nothing to do with the business side that created products for advertisers (and where a significant part of Google’s revenue comes from). She did not lead the development of search as such, algorithms that give us the desired results. A separate team worked for this.
Even the look of Google is not Meer’s sole merit. Sergey Brin came up with a minimalistic look of Google and the original logo; designer Ruth Kedar brought it to today's style. (Although Mayer did not come up with Google doodles alternating on the main page - they first appeared in 1999 when Bryn and Page placed a stick figure on the page symbolizing that they left for Burning Man - she supervised them).
One of the fans, Meyer, says that even though she did not make all the decisions about what the main page would look like, “she accepted this point of view, defended and supervised her.” She seems to have been doing this on a completely extraordinary level, known for testing 41 shades of blue to create coherence between various Google products.
Exaggerating the role of Mayer is not necessarily her fault - the myth of superwoman extremely attractive to journalists - but, nevertheless, he created hostility inside Google, the feeling that she is credited with achievements that are not entirely or not completely hers. “In the early period, the press was completely devoted to Google, and it was great,” says a former employee. “Later it turned into“ We created a monster! ”Another former employee tells me that Mayer can be described very differently. “Is she a great product manager and engineer? Of course. Does she feel insecure and in need of attention? Of course. Is she narcissistic? Of course. All these descriptions have a grain of truth. ”
In some areas, the problem was more than aversion to Meyer’s growing fame. Among those who worked closely with her, there is a significant degree of skepticism about her managerial skills. "Despite the fact that she did a lot of good and useful things, she pushed people away because she made hasty conclusions about products, and she was not always right, but she always thought she was right," says Google's top manager. The product manager who worked with her feels that she eventually became more of a hindrance, a micro-manager, rather than an assistant. “All she did was swap pixels. The team grew tremendous discontent. She was becoming more and more authoritarian, and she could just say no if she was in a bad mood or didn’t like the color. I hated working for her and you won’t find any of my colleagues who would like to work with her again. ”
When I answer that this is certainly an exaggeration, he says: "Tell me at least one writing code engineer from Google (who worked with her), who went to Yahoo for her."
Meyer’s problems were mostly with people at her level. “She’s a dictator, another Google employee said, but it’s not suitable for working with people who feel equal to her.”
However, younger employees often loved Meier. She founded the Associate Product Manager program, a two-year course at Google, designed to shape future technology leaders, and its graduates now occupy significant positions throughout the Valley. “If you are on her team, she protects and helps you,” says Meyer's fan, “if not, she may not be so pleasant.”
People who know Meyer in her personal life say that she is both sincere and generous. “She has a sense of responsibility and a share of generosity that is not characteristic of the geeks among whom she is,” says journalist Kirkpatrick. “She has a fairy godmother complex,” says a former colleague, “she sincerely likes to bring joy to other people. Her parties are about this - the upheaval of other worlds. " (Meyer organizes an annual Halloween party, in which she demonstrates fantastic things, such as, for example, a 100-pound pumpkin with carefully carved mathematical formulas, a chocolate tree, a backyard cinema and a pastry bar. ” Willy Wonka ", as described by one of the guests).
However, her working manners can shock people who are used to seeing her on stage or reading about her in official biographies. She does not demonstrate much (if ever) warmth (at least to those who are not part of her inner circle) and often avoids looking into the eyes of other people. In the Valley, where the presence of Asperger's Syndrome has become almost a sign of honor, aren't all the super-smart people a bit socially awkward? - it should not have much value. The rules, however, have always been slightly different for women, and Meyer’s features go beyond the usual coldness. She became unpleasantly known for lining up at her door for hours of staff waiting to meet with her. "She has absolutely no respect for someone else's time," says a top manager from the industry who knows well how things are going at Google. “She forced 30 or 40 people to wait for hours. She demanded her approval for each of her decisions, and they had to wait. She caused a huge amount of hostility. ”
“Marissa insisted on control from the beginning to the end, which caused annoyance to a large number of colleagues,” said a top Google manager and added: “Such people usually do not work very well”. A former Google employee commented: “It was very effective in its early years, but over time it became more and more narcissistic.”
You can, of course, try to look at the complaints from another point of view. Meyer was responsible for revising the products before they went out of the door of the company, and this clearly contributed to making it unpopular. She frantically protected the look of Google from overload. “I am the gatekeeper,” she said in an interview with Fast Company, “I say no to a large number of people.” Not without envy, according to others. Many believe that Meyer’s appearance in a show like Today or the like, where she spoke directly about Google, has always been to the benefit of the company. And between engineers and product managers there is a natural friction, because engineers focus on logic, while product managers want the best solution for users. I even heard a speech in defense of Meyer’s work schedule from Jesse Lee, who once took part in the Associate Product Manager program, and now is the CEO of Polyvore. She said she considers the queue under the office the highest manifestation of democracy. "There was no priority order, there was just a queue."
By the end of 2009, everything looked as if Meyer was at the top. Her elaborate wedding with an entrepreneur, a pretty Harvard graduate, whom she met in 2007, was illuminated by Vogue, who called her "a dazzling gugler, who makes the world" iskomee "to our joy."
However, inside Google, her career stalled. At the end of 2010, she was removed from search oversight and appointed to lead Google's geolocation services — maps and restaurant recommendations. It could sound good to the outside world, but within the company, the search was the center of the universe, and everything else was distant planets. In April 2011, Larry Page became CEO again, replacing Eric Schmidt. He dismissed the operational committee, in which Mayer had a seat, and created a high-level committee called "Team L". Mayer was not invited there. Her colleagues, Susan Wojczyk and Salar Kamangar, became vice presidents. Mayer - no. At about the same time, another top manager was appointed as head of geolocation services. Mayer became his subordinate.
According to journalist Nicholas Carlson, writing for Business Insider, the engineers rebelled when they came to Peijd and essentially said, "Either we or she." Three people from Google confirmed to me that this is exactly what happened. "According to many people, she was not a team player, rather hindered than helped, and the main thing that mattered was how it would be better for Marissa Mayer," one of them said. She also had a reputation for not making too much of a strategic discussion. "She just walked through, just to intercept the thread of the conversation," says one of those who dealt with her, "she definitely needed to be the smartest person in the room."
However, the permutations were not just out of a desire to remove Meier. According to the Googlers, "Team L" personified the conviction that it is better that one person manage the service in order to reduce the heat between product managers and engineers. There were other people who lost their previous power.
Friends say that Mayer was hurt. However, in public, she did not blink. She answered questions, saying that her new role involves managing a large number of people. She speaks at conferences. She gets rewards. She is everywhere. And someone who knows her thinks that Meier “grew up” because of this experience. “She was much tougher and much more stubborn when she worked in the search,” says one of Google’s former employees, “People change and grow up. She made a big step forward. ”
Others also saw the lesson learned in this situation. “The reaction inside the company was approximately:“ OMG, wow, Marissa has no more power! - says another former Google employee, - Outwardly, she was just gorgeous. She suffered it with incredible dignity. She contracted her PR team and said, “Oh, now I manage a large number of people.” And it worked: most of the notes about Meyer almost did not touch on the topic of its decline.
“She is perfectly able to position herself, and she is unsinkable,” said a top manager from the Valley, “she had a lot of enemies in Google. They neutralized her, but they did not kill her. ”
“She was a genius,” another top manager said, “She played political games better than anyone. She swallowed it, did not quit, took up what she had been instructed, and did not allow her to get rid of her. And when she had the opportunity to make the transition, she did it. ”
Where startups go to die.
If the star Mayer at Google was in decline, then the star of Yahoo has already rolled. A shocking result for a company that, along with Netscape, is considered to have engendered what was later called the Silicon Valley phenomenon. Yahoo was founded in 1994 when two Stanford students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, created the “Jerry and Dave Guide to the World Wide Web,” which in essence was a directory of websites. At that time, before the emergence of search services, Yahoo became the main way of searching the Internet, and everyone came to Yahoo. Since the classics of the start-up genre were buying traffic until the end of the boom of the 90s, they all paid Yahoo for advertising. At the height of its fame, in early 2000, Yahoo was worth $ 128 billion, twice as much as Walt Disney. It was right before the bubble burst and the bankruptcy of numerous startups affected Yahoo's earnings. Already by 2001, it cost about $ 4.7 billion.
The board of directors hired Terry Semel, the legendary veteran of Warner Bros., to reform the company, and he did it: by 2008, Yahoo’s stock price had risen to $ 28 apiece, and the company’s revenue rose from $ 1 billion in 2001 to almost $ 7 billion in 2007 However, Semel was not too technically savvy, he barely coped with his email, and the company failed to make its way to the future. In the Valley, Yahoo is notorious for its deals that it has not committed. One of the worst is Facebook. In the summer of 2006, Yahoo had the opportunity to buy a company for $ 1 billion. Semel decided to bargain and offered $ 850 million, and Mark Zuckerberg, who was not too keen on selling, - according to the former top manager, - used this as an excuse to exit the deal.
Yahoo spent billions on a host of other deals, many of which were supposed to give the company a leading role in everything that matters today: from social networks to sharing photos, but everything was lost inside the conglomerate that Yahoo has become. The company began to be called "a place where startups come to die."
Perhaps most importantly, according to the former top manager, Yahoo technologies have never been adapted for application development. “If you wanted to make an application, you had to use Yahoo technologies that no one in your mind would use to develop applications,” the source said, “Actually, nobody used them. It was too hard. ” In support of this thought, he cites as an example the last interesting product launched inside the company - Fantasy Sports, which was released in 1998.
Semel left the company, and in 2007, Young became CEO. Despite the fact that in the Valley they love him, he is not a fan of making difficult decisions.For example, he is known for rejecting Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo at a price of $ 31 per share (cash and Microsoft shares). Ultimately, Yahoo made a "search" deal with Microsoft, which by this time had already thought about buying a company. Search engine Bing, which Yahoo rented as part of a deal, was not very good. “Yahoo lost its soul by abandoning its own search engine,” commented Danny Sullivan, the publisher of Search Engine Land.
At this point, Yahoo was headed by Carol Bartz, former CEO of Autodesk. In 2011, the board of directors fired her over the phone. Yahoo has been crippled. “We had a lot of“ burnt out ”people,” says a former top manager. A lot of former and current Yahoo employees talked about internal friction, the lack of clear decisions, bureaucracy, and clerical work that is exhausting people to the extent that they refuse to do anything at all. In the age of smartphones, Yahoo employees still had BlackBerry.
And then Dan Loeb appears. On Wall Street, he is known for his sharp attacks on the company's top managers, and at the time Bartz was fired, he bought 5% of the shares and demanded that the people he had chosen personally join the board of directors.
Loeb needed not so much Yahoo. Despite the mistakes of Semel, his team made at least two transactions that more than compensated for lost opportunities. One of them is Yahoo Japan, in which Yahoo owned 35%. Another, much more important, as a result of which Yahoo received 40% of the Chinese company Alibaba in 2005. Alibaba became the Chinese equivalent of eBay and Amazon combined, and by the fall of 2011 it was clear to smart people on Wall Street: whenever Alibaba is going to sell its shares, they will be extremely valuable. People familiar with Loeb say that he valued Yahoo shares at only a few dollars apiece, and Alibaba was the main target for his purchase.
The board of directors, instead of taking seriously Loeb, did not answer his phone calls and hired a new CEO, Scott Thompson, the former eBay top manager. He almost instantly announced plans to cut 2,000 employees (out of 14,000). Robert Chapman, hedge fund manager, says he advised Thompson to act differently. “I told him: give Loeb seats on the board of directors. Once he is inside, he will not fool your head. Don't let your ego get in your way. ” However, he did not heed my advice. And Dan is one of those people who will take revenge. ”
That is what he did. Another former Yahoo top manager recalls a meeting that was attended by about 16 people from among the top management, and led by Thompson in the spring of 2012. Suddenly, Thompson rose and left, followed by his PR manager and general adviser to Yahoo. He was not about half an hour, and when he returned, he did not give any comments on his absence. One of those present in the room soon discovered the hot news on AllThingsD: Loeb sent a letter to the Yahoo board of directors stating that although Thompson indicated in his official biography that he had an engineering degree, this is not true. “We all said:“ Your mother! ”
Thompson "left" 130 days after his appointment to the post of CEO and Loeb received the seats in the council that he wanted so much - as many as three. He also insisted that the director he led, former MTV executive Michael Wolfe, enter the search committee of the new CEO. At that time, Yahoo appointed Ross Levinson, the former head of global media, as interim CEO. Wolf soon said, according to people closely watching the events: “I think we can get Marissa Meyer. She had difficulties, and I suppose she was searching. ”
The rest of the committee was not imbued with instant enthusiasm for Meyer’s candidacy. One of the directors, Fred Amoroso, noted that he would like to see Levinson as a CEO. There were other candidates: Jason Kilar, a respected CEO of Hulu, and Brian McAndrews, who created aQuantive and sold it to Microsoft. Another former member of the board of directors said that Tom McInerney, the former top manager of Barry Diller's InterActive Corp, initially opposed Meyer’s candidacy the most because her experience was too narrow. From the point of view of the board, she never managed the very essence of the company, for example, did not manage the accounting of profits and losses and did not carry out staff reductions.
And she only worked at Google, where you never had to worry about how much money you spent, and whether advertisers love you. Despite the fact that members of the council did not conduct active conversations with people from Google, fearing leaks of information, they nevertheless discussed the known shortcomings of Meier - her need for attention and the need to learn to recognize the contribution of other people to the common cause. “She was a puzzle. She had excellent strengths, but the question was whether she could overcome her shortcomings. ”
Then Kilar dropped. The Board interviewed the remaining three candidates on 10 and 11 July 2012. Levinson, who believed that he had received the position, presented his plan, in which Yahoo was leaving the technology sector in the content area, with a much smaller number of employees.
And then there was Meier, who presented an incredibly detailed, carefully scrutinized plan covering all areas of the company's business. “Those present were pleasantly taken aback,” says one of the former members of the board of directors, “I hired many CEOs, and this was one of the best interviews I have ever seen.” Meyer also passed the test, conducted by Spencer Stewart's headhunter company, and aimed at measuring managerial skills and leadership abilities. Her results were beyond praise. She said exactly what the board of directors wanted to hear in response to concerns about its weaknesses. For example, the fact that she plans to surround herself with strong people and is counting on the help of the council in this task. (Meyer first informed the council that she was pregnant at the end of June, and no one considered this a problem).
When the news that Mayer was to become Yahoo's fifth CEO in the last 5 years was announced on July 16, the reaction was enthusiastic. “Everyone gasped in amazement: was Yahoo able to smuggle it out of Google?” Inside the company, someone posted posters with a portrait of Mayer and the title: “Hope”, as on Obama's famous election posters.
Meyer organized a meeting with Levinson at the insistence of the council, since he hoped that despite the current situation, Levinson could be kept in the company. According to one employee familiar with the situation, Levinson came at the appointed time to the Mayer office. He waited, waited and waited. Then he told her assistant: “I plan to continue waiting in my office,” which was two steps away from Meyer’s office. The assistant replied: "No, no, you need to sit and wait right here." Levinson flew out of the waiting room bullet, and left Yahoo shortly after this episode.
Meyer's negotiations about her compensation package were also somewhat strange. The board of directors offered her a solid offer: an annual salary of one million dollars, a bonus of two million, plus $ 56 million in stocks and options. Maier did not want to increase Yahoo’s share of salaries and bonuses, although this would have a very positive effect on its image (and potentially reduces income tax). One of the commentators said that she was worried not so much by the amount of compensation as by the numbers that would appear in the press - they had to demonstrate that she began to earn more than at Google. “Money is important to some CEOs, statistics are important to others, toys are important to someone. And it was important for her what the public thought. ”
The inscribed Lady *
* Hint at Sheryl Sandberg's book “Lean In”.
In his first year, Meyer turned some skeptics into followers. She broke into Yahoo with a hurricane. Or you can say that she “Googleed” Yahoo. She got rid of Blackberry, replacing them with iPhones and Androids. She started feeding employees for free, like any self-respecting Valley company. She implemented a process that allows employees to complain about the bureaucracy within the company. She started leading meetings on Fridays called FYI's, where employees could ask any questions to her and other top management representatives. She removed stock quotes from Yahoo’s internal portal, saying she didn’t want employees to focus on short-term results. Her first hired employee was her PR man from Google, and press reviews were mostly benevolent.“She practically single-handedly transformed the company's culture and made people proud again that they work here,” Eric Jackson shared. “I didn’t always admire her at Google,” said the former googler, “I don’t think it was effective. But what she did at Yahoo is phenomenal. ”
Another CEO from the Valley tells me that Meyer regularly appears at the monthly dinner for the CEO of the main companies in the Valley, and despite her reputation at Google, she is thoughtful, attentive and interested in other people's experiences. In an interview with TechCrunch, Michael Arlington asked Mayer what her super powers were, what she was really good in her opinion. “I think I have empathy,” she replied, “The last year for Yahoo was tense, including because of my arrival and numerous changes ... If I have a superpower, this is probably empathy.”
Proof that Meier is able to take other people's views was the acquisition of Tumblr, a popular social network and microblogging platform, in the spring of 2013. In the Valley, they consider that to offer $ 1.1 billion to a company that has practically no income and, all the more, profits, and persuade them to condescend before accepting your offer - and truly an achievement. Meyer personally promised David Karp, the 27-year-old founder of Tubmlr, that his company would continue to be managed independently. “I believe that they have established a good understanding,” comments one of the venture investors who participated in the transaction, “She demonstrated that Tumblr understands and David trusts her ... If it were not for this relationship, it’s completely unclear whether deal".
Last fall, at the insistence of Loeb Meier, she sold part of Yahoo's share in Alibaba back to a Chinese company for $ 7.1 billion (Yahoo still owns a 24% share of Alibaba); to date, she has spent $ 4 billion of them on buying back Yahoo shares, a move that investors usually like. She closed many of the acquired companies, since it was the so-called “acquisition-hiring”, which is now necessary, because it is so hard to find talented engineers that it is sometimes easier to buy their company. Despite the fact that the purchase of companies that do not generate income, for big money, reminds of the “old” Yahoo, in the Valley they believe that it has made reasonable deals.
With the advent of Mayer, Yahoo's new self-determination is “a global technology company whose mission is to bring inspiration and entertainment to the daily tasks of humanity.” She updated Yahoo's existing products, including the home page, news portal, and Flickr (although the latest design update was already in full swing before it came). Last spring, Yahoo launched a weather forecast app that “shot” so well that Apple's design guru, Johnny Ive, sent Mayer a congratulatory note; The app is in the top 10 products on the App Store. Updating the Fantasy Football app has sparked rave reviews. It also helps Yahoo become more mobile. At the moment, according to Mayer, 800 million users visit Yahoo every month, which is 20% more than at the time of its entry into the company,and 390 million of them go through mobile devices. (Not all, however, consider these figures to be convincing. Analyst Ben Miner, who covers Yahoo for Macquarie Securities, notes that Yahoo does not provide enough information for analysts to be sure that these are meaningful, high-quality page views).
Meyer entered into content deals, starting with the purchase of rights to the old editions of Saturday Night Live, to create an archive of video content, to negotiate an interview with Katie Couric, and hiring New York Times star columnist David Pogh to write for Yahoo. Mayer was also not at all afraid to take bold and controversial steps. In particular, in early 2013, she sent a notice to the employees about the ban on remote work from home.
And, again, an incredible rise in the value of Yahoo shares. Its market value has grown by $ 14 billion since Mayer joined the company, and the value of the share even slightly exceeded Microsoft’s 2008 offer. Maier, who promised to perform the yodel when it happened, apologized to the staff for not having enough time to take singing lessons.
However, this does not mean that investors finally believe in Yahoo. This growth is provided in a small part by the growth of the cost of Yahoo Japan, and in large part by the huge interest in Alibaba, which announced plans to enter the IPO. According to rumors, its capitalization is estimated between $ 70 and $ 200 billion. “The media is interesting for Yahoo as a whole,” says Miner, “But the main part of Yahoo’s Wall Street investors is indifferent.” Mayer understands this. When asked by TechCrunch about the stock price increase, she said: "I think we had a very reasonable investment, for which I owe my predecessors."
The biggest question is whether Meyer’s initial success ensures her future bright future. Some doubt. "She is fearless in making decisions, not because she is fearless, but because she doesn’t admit that she can be wrong," said a former top Yahoo manager. “I say this in a positive way. One of Yahoo’s mistakes was that the company did not make decisions for years because it had no convictions. Marissa makes a decision for a decision, and unlike her public image, without data and without much knowledge. However, this affected her initial success. ”
There is also a polar opinion regarding the story of the great change of Marissa Mayer, suggesting that she really hasn’t changed a bit: “By the time someone becomes the CEO of a large company, they already have established habits and a system of work, and they do not change, ”says a top manager from the industry,“ The most dangerous thing is to assume that they can change. ”
Indeed, some of the stories about what's happening at Yahoo are strikingly reminiscent of what's happening at Google. She can still be cold with top managers accountable to her. One of the former top managers recalled how he had warned members of his team before meeting with Marissa so that they would not expect to get what they were hoping for. "Despite the warning, people, very experienced people with dozens of years of experience, came out and said:" It was the worst meeting in my career. " She can bring a box of blueberries to the meeting and just look at you, sending berries in her mouth. People feel so ignored! ”
Mayer still makes people wait. She is never late for the Friday FYI meeting with all Yahoo employees, but she is regularly late for meetings with other top managers. “It’s already been ten times, probably,” says the former top manager, “You gather a team, you wait [Marissa] for 10 minutes, 20, 30, two hours ... and she never appears.”
Last winter, Mayer had scheduled a meeting with top managers of the company for the whole day to discuss the budget for 2013. The meeting was supposed to start in the morning. “Minutes went, Marissa was not there,” said one of those who were present there. - Time goes on and on, she is still gone, and here we learn that she is interviewing Inu Garten. By this time, two or three hours had passed. Finally, her assistant appears and says: "There will be no discussion today." As this person says: "A little respect never hurts." Another former top manager agrees with the complaint, but notes that once he ran into the doorway with Meyer and she gave a good assessment of the work of his team.
Last December, Mayer announced in a corporate blog about plans to completely change Yahoo Mail. “Mail is almost the basic daily habit,” she wrote. This is true, however, Yahoo Mail is of great importance for another reason. According to rough estimates, although no one knows the exact numbers, about 275 million users, accounting for more than half of Yahoo's traffic, use mail. In other words, if Yahoo loses these people, there may be a domino effect.
The re-design team worked for days to catch up to the deadline for launch, according to Business Insider. The day before the launch, Meier called a team meeting and insisted on changing the color scheme from blue and gray to yellow and purple. At least four people who were involved in the project quit. “They are not against hard work,” says one of those who worked with this team, “But they are against a sword brought over their heads: Either you do it, or not at all.” It was the most unpleasant experience in the life of everyone. ”
Only recently, Yahoo released another update of its mail (the main color is purple), and tens of thousands of complaints followed. One of the people involved in the first restart says that the explanation is quite simple: on the first attempt Mayer lost people she could not afford to lose.
Exit Loeb .
And from the very beginning went friction with Daniel Loeb. According to numerous sources, Meier indicated in her business plan that the 14,000-strong Yahoo staff should be reduced to a level of 7-9 thousand. However, in the autumn she changed her mind to make reductions, arguing that the company's culture is already fragile enough to survive the layoffs. What bothered some members of the board of directors, including Loeb, was that she refused to do any analysis. “This was her original plan! - says one of the people familiar with these events, - it would be perfectly normal in her case to simply say: "I was wrong, here are the results of the analysis." But she did not offer any data. Many people say that in their opinion the problem is that Mayer wants to look like a savior and, as one of them put it: “Saviors do not shorten.” (Mayer, however,introduced a new and rather controversial staff ranking system, and seems to be planning to get rid of people in this way. The system causes extreme dissatisfaction among employees who pour out their complaints, including the Internet).
Yahoo's core business is struggling hard: increasing traffic has no effect on financial results. Mayer assured since the days of Google that "money follows users ... If you manage to attract a significant number of users, and they will use your product every day, money will follow them." This was true for Google, and this is a common truth in the Valley.
However, there is a small snag: not all traffic is quoted. Yahoo's banner advertising revenues continued to fall each of the last three quarters, when Meyer was at the helm. Yahoo's share in the global digital advertising market continues to shrink, while Google and Facebook share grow. And it's not just the numbers going down. Over the past three quarters, Yahoo's business results have disappointed analysts; the company does not achieve results even according to its own forecasts, which it provided to Wall Street. Goldman Sachs just lowered its forecasts for the growth of revenue and profits of Yahoo.
Poor results on advertising revenue created some friction on the board of directors. Mayer, according to one of the participants of the events, assures that this is only a short-term hitch, but refused to dig deeper. “She thinks like a debater, but not like an analyst,” says this person. "She makes hasty conclusions, and then begins to defend her position, even if there are contradictory facts."
But Loeb sold the bulk of his share not for this reason. His plan, according to several people, was that if everything worked, the shares would rise to $ 25- $ 30 apiece, and they reached $ 29 last spring. Therefore, he went to Meyer and announced his desire to sell 20 million shares, one third of his stake. On Friday, July 19, Meier returned with a counter offer. She said that Yahoo itself would like to buy back these shares, which means that Loeb would be guaranteed a price that he probably could not have received on the free market, but only if 40 million shares were sold. This reduced Loeb’s share to 2%, which meant that he and his people lost their seats on the board of directors. Loeb was shocked that she wanted to get rid of him and his team, according to two faces, but it was too good a deal to miss.July 22, Yahoo announced the repurchase of 40 million shares from Loeb, the whole story of Yahoo brought to his hedge fund about 1 billion dollars.
This situation can be viewed from two different sides, and each will be truthful to a certain extent. One is that Mayer did not want to have opposition, and Loeb is one of those investors who constantly opposes. The other is that it belongs to a small number of people who managed to outplay Loeb. “She dodged a bullet,” said a top executive from the industry, “I thought he and Dan would separate. That he will achieve her dismissal. They are both very strong personalities. Dan would have made his move at some point. She made him first and achieved his departure. ”
Immediately after Loeb’s departure, Vogue published a flattering article about Meier entitled “Glorify the Chef,” with a photograph of Mayer reclining in a chair and holding her own photo open on the iPad. In this article, Mayer told Vogue that “she didn’t plan to lead technology companies,” continuing: “I’m just a geek and shy, and I love code.” She also reported that Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, remarked to her that “when you want to have more influence than you can achieve by yourself, you move to the manager’s position ... And I’m saying:“ Oh, it’s really nice to have have more influence than I could have done alone. " Not that I had a grand plan, in which I weighed all the pros and cons about what I would like to do - it just happened. ”
The most interesting reaction to this statement is observed in those people from the Valley, who believe that its history is not about how the reward itself pursues a talented hero, but about how an ambitious person persistently and wisely follows his goal. What is not so bad, just do not deny it. The only reasonable reason Mayer does this, the woman’s top manager believes, is because she’s afraid of the criticism that women often openly admit to their strength. Another top manager looks at the situation from a slightly different angle. This man believes that Mayer realized quite early that being a female engineer is a rarity in a culture that glorifies engineers, gave her the advantage that other women did not have, without this line in the resume. In the end, her failings, such as the habit of being late,can be easily corrected if she wanted to do it. “The idea that she’s shy and a modest engineer in general is complete nonsense!” Says this top manager. “She just knows that this creates a“ Teflon coating ”for her.
Well, at least for the time being, Marissa has a Teflon coating, thanks to her celebrity status and Yahoo's share in Alibaba. In the Valley there is a belief that the ability to create innovative products compensates for other shortcomings. And if this is the case, if Meier's superpower is not in empathy, but in the ability to create products that users need, if she really possesses this rare magic, then she will remain on top.
Marissa Mayer on the background of the LED-installation, built in her penthouse at the Hotel Four Seasons, in San Francisco. According to the former colleague, she is a real geek.
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In the fall of 2011, New York Finance Daniel Loeb, managing $ 14 billion hedge fund Third Point Capital, led the campaign to overthrow the current and selection of a new CEO for Yahoo, which did not go very well. His choice fell on Google's top manager, Marissa Meyer, who was then often called the “Google face” or the “Google Glamor Geek”. Last summer, the same day that Yahoo announced the appointment of Mayer to the position of CEO, who became the youngest woman in her 37 years to head the Fortune 500 company, Mayer announced her pregnancy. Thereby, she completed her journey from Zauchka from a provincial town in Wisconsin, an engineer with a degree from Stanford, to a business superstar and a cultural idol.
By the time Myer joined Yahoo, the company was a widely recognized brand, and despite a lot of management mistakes and missed opportunities, about 700 million users still logged in at least once a month to check their email, read the news, see stock market quotes, do a search request and so on. However, the company has not launched new sought-after products for many years, and has become something of a joke in Silicon Valley. The value of the stock fell from $ 118.75 in the early 2000s, and ranged between $ 14 and $ 19 in the months preceding Mayer's arrival.
Most people in the Valley would like to see Yahoo successful, if only out of respect for its heritage. And they generally believe that if anyone can fix Yahoo, this is Meyer. She is an engineer, and engineers are honored in the Valley. She is also a “product-oriented person,” in the sense that she has several created Internet products that people want to use. “Product people,” such as Mark Zuckerberg, including the ruling kings and queens of today's Valley, because — it is assumed — all other aspects of company management can be delegated, but the ability to innovate is not. At first glance, in the first year of the management of the company, Meyer pursued an incredible success. Yahoo’s stock almost doubled, making about $ 31 apiece, and she topped the Fortune 40 to 40 list, becoming the first woman to receive this honor.In order to celebrate her anniversary, her team sent out a message to employees calling for the thanks of Mayer “for everything she did for Yahoo” by clicking on the link with the text “yo / thxmarissa”. The messages (ranging from “Thank you for impersonating Yahoo superstars” to “Marissa, you rock” and “Best CEO I've ever worked with”) were put together in a book with photos of Mayer in a red shirt (shading purple engineers shirts, mostly men); interviewing Inu Garten, food guru from Barefoot Contessa; and many others. "Yahoo! Thanks you, Marissa! ”Written on the back of the book. After that, Mayer also made and sent copies of the book.
However, a bright first impression often distracts attention from a less attractive reality, and this is true in the case of Meyer with Yahoo. No one wants to sound like it doesn’t support Yahoo or Meier, and since Meyer did not agree to cooperate for this article, even her friends often did not want to talk about it under the recording. It’s pretty easy to give a characterization that can sound both interesting and potentially dangerous for Yahoo and its future. “She is confusing,” says one of those people who worked closely with her, “it would be a mistake to describe her unequivocally, as an angel or a devil.” Another top manager who worked with her agrees that she is a difficult person to understand. “Some parts of Marissa’s World are inexplicably strange,” he says, “and it doesn’t help much.”
There are two things about Marissa Meier, for which everyone agrees. One is that Marissa belongs to the most intelligent people whom they have ever met. The second is that she has a super ability to work. Mayer says that she only needs 4 hours a day to sleep, and that she worked 250 round-the-clock shifts in her first 5 years of work at Google. “I don’t really believe in burnout,” she said last year during her speech, “Many people have worked really hard for decades, such as Winston Churchill and Einstein.”
This incredible energy, it seems, was inherent in her from an early age, while she was still living in the small town of Wausau. She told Vogue magazine that she always had at least one club a day after school: ballet or figure skating, piano, swimming or debate (her team won the state championship), cheerleader training, the president of the Spanish club, and the treasurer of the Key Club. "; Yes, she studied ballet 35 hours a week to high school.During a speech at Stanford, when Mayer was asked about what made her successful, her answer was simple: "I love working." She repeated it and on the speech at Google, where her father came. People surrounded him and began to ask about Marissa. When asked the question: “Have you ever seen Marissa's performance?”, His answer was simple: “No. I am Marissa's father. I like to work".
“I lived in a bubble,” Meyer says, “I was good at chemistry, math, biology, physics in high school, and my teachers actively supported me.” If Marissa was unsure of herself, she did not demonstrate this.
“In high school, Marissa was damn smart and she knew that (not indulgent, but simply self-confident),” her former classmate Lif Larson describes Marissa in her blog. “She was always 100% business, all the time. She was not “popular”, but she was always actively involved and diligent. Whatever she did, she tried to do it perfectly. ”
She applied for 10 colleges, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford. After she was accepted by everyone, she made a table and ranked universities according to, for example, the criterion as a median score of accepted applicants (SAT). Stanford went ahead, where she initially planned to get a degree in biology or chemistry, to become a neurosurgeon's pediatrician in the future (they take a medical school only after receiving a bachelor's degree). However, when she realized that her curriculum was no different from the program and quite secondary universities, she decided to get a diploma in the area in which Stanford was unique - and changed her profile to “character systems”, a program that includes cognitive philosophy psychology, linguistics and programming.
Employee No. 20
Mayer stayed at Stanford for a master’s degree in Computer Science. She had 14 offers at the time of the release, but she chose Google, joining the company in 1999, the twentieth employee. She was also the first female engineer in the company.
At that time, work at Google was very diverse and intense: “Marissa worked on a par with everyone, but no more than others,” says one of the early employees. As the company grew, the press began to actively knock on Google’s doors, but its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were not particularly interested in communicating with the press and Google’s position was such that the company should not have an individual person; talk technology. (Although Meyer and Page have met for a while, most people insist that their relationship never affected their work).
Mayer is a true geek, according to one of Google’s former employees: “This part of the mythology about her is true,” and as a confirmation is given by a panel of LEDs inside the tennis balls installed at her home. But unlike most geeks, she speaks surprisingly well. Reporters who visited Google in its early period and met Marissa, were fascinated by its knowledge of technology, pragmatism, and ability to hold on. “It combines the qualities of a programmer and a humanist,” says reporter David Kirkpatrick.
Maier's 2006 speech can still be found at Stanford, where she discussed nine innovation theorems. She spoke very quickly, and she is now known for her quick speech, and she was wearing a blue T-shirt with black jeans. Her hair was not yet perfectly smoothed hairstyle blonde, which she has become now. She had a nervous tic, she made a “nnnhh” sound during pauses, which made her almost a parody of the classic “nerd”. Delivered also her laugh, which is even presented as a separate compilation on YouTube .A former Google employee said that Meier understood the importance of working with the press, and such a brilliant student like her could not help but become perfect in this. “It was a strategic unification of its interests and needs of the company,” says another former googler. “Larry and Sergey wanted to spit. And the culture of the company did not welcome the promotion of its individual representatives. But the press demanded ... She (Marissa) wanted it, but did not force it. ”
By the way, she spoke so well with the press that by the end of the 2000s the articles were not so much about Google or its business, as about Mayer herself. Her American and rather attractive appearance, love for fashion and decor, carefully thought-out parties, obviously fell into the sphere of interests of magazines like Glamor and Vogue.
At this point, Marissa was among the top managers of Google. Her position was called “Vice President of Search Products and User Interfaces” (“vice president of search products and user experience”). In an interview, Meyer reported that her task was “to coordinate everything related to Google search: what users saw on the main page, and all the code hidden behind it.” Glamor called her a "visionary", San Francisco magazine wrote: "Almost everything that happens in a company in Mountain View ... falls under the microscope of Marissa."
Such statements are somewhere in the gray zone between truth and artistic exaggeration. No one denies that Marissa played a key role in shaping how users interact with Google. She seems to have a rare ability, in particular for an engineer, to understand what users want. But its area was the side interacting with users, where it gave the go-ahead to products before they entered the market. Mayer was not among the three-person squad that created Gmail. It had nothing to do with the business side that created products for advertisers (and where a significant part of Google’s revenue comes from). She did not lead the development of search as such, algorithms that give us the desired results. A separate team worked for this.
Even the look of Google is not Meer’s sole merit. Sergey Brin came up with a minimalistic look of Google and the original logo; designer Ruth Kedar brought it to today's style. (Although Mayer did not come up with Google doodles alternating on the main page - they first appeared in 1999 when Bryn and Page placed a stick figure on the page symbolizing that they left for Burning Man - she supervised them).One of the fans, Meyer, says that even though she did not make all the decisions about what the main page would look like, “she accepted this point of view, defended and supervised her.” She seems to have been doing this on a completely extraordinary level, known for testing 41 shades of blue to create coherence between various Google products.
Exaggerating the role of Mayer is not necessarily her fault - the myth of superwoman extremely attractive to journalists - but, nevertheless, he created hostility inside Google, the feeling that she is credited with achievements that are not entirely or not completely hers. “In the early period, the press was completely devoted to Google, and it was great,” says a former employee. “Later it turned into“ We created a monster! ”Another former employee tells me that Mayer can be described very differently. “Is she a great product manager and engineer? Of course. Does she feel insecure and in need of attention? Of course. Is she narcissistic? Of course. All these descriptions have a grain of truth. ”
In some areas, the problem was more than aversion to Meyer’s growing fame. Among those who worked closely with her, there is a significant degree of skepticism about her managerial skills. "Despite the fact that she did a lot of good and useful things, she pushed people away because she made hasty conclusions about products, and she was not always right, but she always thought she was right," says Google's top manager. The product manager who worked with her feels that she eventually became more of a hindrance, a micro-manager, rather than an assistant. “All she did was swap pixels. The team grew tremendous discontent. She was becoming more and more authoritarian, and she could just say no if she was in a bad mood or didn’t like the color. I hated working for her and you won’t find any of my colleagues who would like to work with her again. ”
When I answer that this is certainly an exaggeration, he says: "Tell me at least one writing code engineer from Google (who worked with her), who went to Yahoo for her."
Meyer’s problems were mostly with people at her level. “She’s a dictator, another Google employee said, but it’s not suitable for working with people who feel equal to her.”
However, younger employees often loved Meier. She founded the Associate Product Manager program, a two-year course at Google, designed to shape future technology leaders, and its graduates now occupy significant positions throughout the Valley. “If you are on her team, she protects and helps you,” says Meyer's fan, “if not, she may not be so pleasant.”
People who know Meyer in her personal life say that she is both sincere and generous. “She has a sense of responsibility and a share of generosity that is not characteristic of the geeks among whom she is,” says journalist Kirkpatrick. “She has a fairy godmother complex,” says a former colleague, “she sincerely likes to bring joy to other people. Her parties are about this - the upheaval of other worlds. " (Meyer organizes an annual Halloween party, in which she demonstrates fantastic things, such as, for example, a 100-pound pumpkin with carefully carved mathematical formulas, a chocolate tree, a backyard cinema and a pastry bar. ” Willy Wonka ", as described by one of the guests).
However, her working manners can shock people who are used to seeing her on stage or reading about her in official biographies. She does not demonstrate much (if ever) warmth (at least to those who are not part of her inner circle) and often avoids looking into the eyes of other people. In the Valley, where the presence of Asperger's Syndrome has become almost a sign of honor, aren't all the super-smart people a bit socially awkward? - it should not have much value. The rules, however, have always been slightly different for women, and Meyer’s features go beyond the usual coldness. She became unpleasantly known for lining up at her door for hours of staff waiting to meet with her. "She has absolutely no respect for someone else's time," says a top manager from the industry who knows well how things are going at Google. “She forced 30 or 40 people to wait for hours. She demanded her approval for each of her decisions, and they had to wait. She caused a huge amount of hostility. ”
“Marissa insisted on control from the beginning to the end, which caused annoyance to a large number of colleagues,” said a top Google manager and added: “Such people usually do not work very well”. A former Google employee commented: “It was very effective in its early years, but over time it became more and more narcissistic.”
You can, of course, try to look at the complaints from another point of view. Meyer was responsible for revising the products before they went out of the door of the company, and this clearly contributed to making it unpopular. She frantically protected the look of Google from overload. “I am the gatekeeper,” she said in an interview with Fast Company, “I say no to a large number of people.” Not without envy, according to others. Many believe that Meyer’s appearance in a show like Today or the like, where she spoke directly about Google, has always been to the benefit of the company. And between engineers and product managers there is a natural friction, because engineers focus on logic, while product managers want the best solution for users. I even heard a speech in defense of Meyer’s work schedule from Jesse Lee, who once took part in the Associate Product Manager program, and now is the CEO of Polyvore. She said she considers the queue under the office the highest manifestation of democracy. "There was no priority order, there was just a queue."
By the end of 2009, everything looked as if Meyer was at the top. Her elaborate wedding with an entrepreneur, a pretty Harvard graduate, whom she met in 2007, was illuminated by Vogue, who called her "a dazzling gugler, who makes the world" iskomee "to our joy."However, inside Google, her career stalled. At the end of 2010, she was removed from search oversight and appointed to lead Google's geolocation services — maps and restaurant recommendations. It could sound good to the outside world, but within the company, the search was the center of the universe, and everything else was distant planets. In April 2011, Larry Page became CEO again, replacing Eric Schmidt. He dismissed the operational committee, in which Mayer had a seat, and created a high-level committee called "Team L". Mayer was not invited there. Her colleagues, Susan Wojczyk and Salar Kamangar, became vice presidents. Mayer - no. At about the same time, another top manager was appointed as head of geolocation services. Mayer became his subordinate.
According to journalist Nicholas Carlson, writing for Business Insider, the engineers rebelled when they came to Peijd and essentially said, "Either we or she." Three people from Google confirmed to me that this is exactly what happened. "According to many people, she was not a team player, rather hindered than helped, and the main thing that mattered was how it would be better for Marissa Mayer," one of them said. She also had a reputation for not making too much of a strategic discussion. "She just walked through, just to intercept the thread of the conversation," says one of those who dealt with her, "she definitely needed to be the smartest person in the room."
However, the permutations were not just out of a desire to remove Meier. According to the Googlers, "Team L" personified the conviction that it is better that one person manage the service in order to reduce the heat between product managers and engineers. There were other people who lost their previous power.
Friends say that Mayer was hurt. However, in public, she did not blink. She answered questions, saying that her new role involves managing a large number of people. She speaks at conferences. She gets rewards. She is everywhere. And someone who knows her thinks that Meier “grew up” because of this experience. “She was much tougher and much more stubborn when she worked in the search,” says one of Google’s former employees, “People change and grow up. She made a big step forward. ”
Others also saw the lesson learned in this situation. “The reaction inside the company was approximately:“ OMG, wow, Marissa has no more power! - says another former Google employee, - Outwardly, she was just gorgeous. She suffered it with incredible dignity. She contracted her PR team and said, “Oh, now I manage a large number of people.” And it worked: most of the notes about Meyer almost did not touch on the topic of its decline.
“She is perfectly able to position herself, and she is unsinkable,” said a top manager from the Valley, “she had a lot of enemies in Google. They neutralized her, but they did not kill her. ”
“She was a genius,” another top manager said, “She played political games better than anyone. She swallowed it, did not quit, took up what she had been instructed, and did not allow her to get rid of her. And when she had the opportunity to make the transition, she did it. ”
Where startups go to die.
If the star Mayer at Google was in decline, then the star of Yahoo has already rolled. A shocking result for a company that, along with Netscape, is considered to have engendered what was later called the Silicon Valley phenomenon. Yahoo was founded in 1994 when two Stanford students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, created the “Jerry and Dave Guide to the World Wide Web,” which in essence was a directory of websites. At that time, before the emergence of search services, Yahoo became the main way of searching the Internet, and everyone came to Yahoo. Since the classics of the start-up genre were buying traffic until the end of the boom of the 90s, they all paid Yahoo for advertising. At the height of its fame, in early 2000, Yahoo was worth $ 128 billion, twice as much as Walt Disney. It was right before the bubble burst and the bankruptcy of numerous startups affected Yahoo's earnings. Already by 2001, it cost about $ 4.7 billion.
The board of directors hired Terry Semel, the legendary veteran of Warner Bros., to reform the company, and he did it: by 2008, Yahoo’s stock price had risen to $ 28 apiece, and the company’s revenue rose from $ 1 billion in 2001 to almost $ 7 billion in 2007 However, Semel was not too technically savvy, he barely coped with his email, and the company failed to make its way to the future. In the Valley, Yahoo is notorious for its deals that it has not committed. One of the worst is Facebook. In the summer of 2006, Yahoo had the opportunity to buy a company for $ 1 billion. Semel decided to bargain and offered $ 850 million, and Mark Zuckerberg, who was not too keen on selling, - according to the former top manager, - used this as an excuse to exit the deal.
Yahoo spent billions on a host of other deals, many of which were supposed to give the company a leading role in everything that matters today: from social networks to sharing photos, but everything was lost inside the conglomerate that Yahoo has become. The company began to be called "a place where startups come to die."
Perhaps most importantly, according to the former top manager, Yahoo technologies have never been adapted for application development. “If you wanted to make an application, you had to use Yahoo technologies that no one in your mind would use to develop applications,” the source said, “Actually, nobody used them. It was too hard. ” In support of this thought, he cites as an example the last interesting product launched inside the company - Fantasy Sports, which was released in 1998.
Semel left the company, and in 2007, Young became CEO. Despite the fact that in the Valley they love him, he is not a fan of making difficult decisions.For example, he is known for rejecting Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo at a price of $ 31 per share (cash and Microsoft shares). Ultimately, Yahoo made a "search" deal with Microsoft, which by this time had already thought about buying a company. Search engine Bing, which Yahoo rented as part of a deal, was not very good. “Yahoo lost its soul by abandoning its own search engine,” commented Danny Sullivan, the publisher of Search Engine Land.
At this point, Yahoo was headed by Carol Bartz, former CEO of Autodesk. In 2011, the board of directors fired her over the phone. Yahoo has been crippled. “We had a lot of“ burnt out ”people,” says a former top manager. A lot of former and current Yahoo employees talked about internal friction, the lack of clear decisions, bureaucracy, and clerical work that is exhausting people to the extent that they refuse to do anything at all. In the age of smartphones, Yahoo employees still had BlackBerry.
And then Dan Loeb appears. On Wall Street, he is known for his sharp attacks on the company's top managers, and at the time Bartz was fired, he bought 5% of the shares and demanded that the people he had chosen personally join the board of directors.
Loeb needed not so much Yahoo. Despite the mistakes of Semel, his team made at least two transactions that more than compensated for lost opportunities. One of them is Yahoo Japan, in which Yahoo owned 35%. Another, much more important, as a result of which Yahoo received 40% of the Chinese company Alibaba in 2005. Alibaba became the Chinese equivalent of eBay and Amazon combined, and by the fall of 2011 it was clear to smart people on Wall Street: whenever Alibaba is going to sell its shares, they will be extremely valuable. People familiar with Loeb say that he valued Yahoo shares at only a few dollars apiece, and Alibaba was the main target for his purchase.
The board of directors, instead of taking seriously Loeb, did not answer his phone calls and hired a new CEO, Scott Thompson, the former eBay top manager. He almost instantly announced plans to cut 2,000 employees (out of 14,000). Robert Chapman, hedge fund manager, says he advised Thompson to act differently. “I told him: give Loeb seats on the board of directors. Once he is inside, he will not fool your head. Don't let your ego get in your way. ” However, he did not heed my advice. And Dan is one of those people who will take revenge. ”
That is what he did. Another former Yahoo top manager recalls a meeting that was attended by about 16 people from among the top management, and led by Thompson in the spring of 2012. Suddenly, Thompson rose and left, followed by his PR manager and general adviser to Yahoo. He was not about half an hour, and when he returned, he did not give any comments on his absence. One of those present in the room soon discovered the hot news on AllThingsD: Loeb sent a letter to the Yahoo board of directors stating that although Thompson indicated in his official biography that he had an engineering degree, this is not true. “We all said:“ Your mother! ”
Thompson "left" 130 days after his appointment to the post of CEO and Loeb received the seats in the council that he wanted so much - as many as three. He also insisted that the director he led, former MTV executive Michael Wolfe, enter the search committee of the new CEO. At that time, Yahoo appointed Ross Levinson, the former head of global media, as interim CEO. Wolf soon said, according to people closely watching the events: “I think we can get Marissa Meyer. She had difficulties, and I suppose she was searching. ”
The rest of the committee was not imbued with instant enthusiasm for Meyer’s candidacy. One of the directors, Fred Amoroso, noted that he would like to see Levinson as a CEO. There were other candidates: Jason Kilar, a respected CEO of Hulu, and Brian McAndrews, who created aQuantive and sold it to Microsoft. Another former member of the board of directors said that Tom McInerney, the former top manager of Barry Diller's InterActive Corp, initially opposed Meyer’s candidacy the most because her experience was too narrow. From the point of view of the board, she never managed the very essence of the company, for example, did not manage the accounting of profits and losses and did not carry out staff reductions.
And she only worked at Google, where you never had to worry about how much money you spent, and whether advertisers love you. Despite the fact that members of the council did not conduct active conversations with people from Google, fearing leaks of information, they nevertheless discussed the known shortcomings of Meier - her need for attention and the need to learn to recognize the contribution of other people to the common cause. “She was a puzzle. She had excellent strengths, but the question was whether she could overcome her shortcomings. ”
Then Kilar dropped. The Board interviewed the remaining three candidates on 10 and 11 July 2012. Levinson, who believed that he had received the position, presented his plan, in which Yahoo was leaving the technology sector in the content area, with a much smaller number of employees.
And then there was Meier, who presented an incredibly detailed, carefully scrutinized plan covering all areas of the company's business. “Those present were pleasantly taken aback,” says one of the former members of the board of directors, “I hired many CEOs, and this was one of the best interviews I have ever seen.” Meyer also passed the test, conducted by Spencer Stewart's headhunter company, and aimed at measuring managerial skills and leadership abilities. Her results were beyond praise. She said exactly what the board of directors wanted to hear in response to concerns about its weaknesses. For example, the fact that she plans to surround herself with strong people and is counting on the help of the council in this task. (Meyer first informed the council that she was pregnant at the end of June, and no one considered this a problem).
When the news that Mayer was to become Yahoo's fifth CEO in the last 5 years was announced on July 16, the reaction was enthusiastic. “Everyone gasped in amazement: was Yahoo able to smuggle it out of Google?” Inside the company, someone posted posters with a portrait of Mayer and the title: “Hope”, as on Obama's famous election posters.Meyer organized a meeting with Levinson at the insistence of the council, since he hoped that despite the current situation, Levinson could be kept in the company. According to one employee familiar with the situation, Levinson came at the appointed time to the Mayer office. He waited, waited and waited. Then he told her assistant: “I plan to continue waiting in my office,” which was two steps away from Meyer’s office. The assistant replied: "No, no, you need to sit and wait right here." Levinson flew out of the waiting room bullet, and left Yahoo shortly after this episode.
Meyer's negotiations about her compensation package were also somewhat strange. The board of directors offered her a solid offer: an annual salary of one million dollars, a bonus of two million, plus $ 56 million in stocks and options. Maier did not want to increase Yahoo’s share of salaries and bonuses, although this would have a very positive effect on its image (and potentially reduces income tax). One of the commentators said that she was worried not so much by the amount of compensation as by the numbers that would appear in the press - they had to demonstrate that she began to earn more than at Google. “Money is important to some CEOs, statistics are important to others, toys are important to someone. And it was important for her what the public thought. ”
The inscribed Lady *
* Hint at Sheryl Sandberg's book “Lean In”.
In his first year, Meyer turned some skeptics into followers. She broke into Yahoo with a hurricane. Or you can say that she “Googleed” Yahoo. She got rid of Blackberry, replacing them with iPhones and Androids. She started feeding employees for free, like any self-respecting Valley company. She implemented a process that allows employees to complain about the bureaucracy within the company. She started leading meetings on Fridays called FYI's, where employees could ask any questions to her and other top management representatives. She removed stock quotes from Yahoo’s internal portal, saying she didn’t want employees to focus on short-term results. Her first hired employee was her PR man from Google, and press reviews were mostly benevolent.“She practically single-handedly transformed the company's culture and made people proud again that they work here,” Eric Jackson shared. “I didn’t always admire her at Google,” said the former googler, “I don’t think it was effective. But what she did at Yahoo is phenomenal. ”
Another CEO from the Valley tells me that Meyer regularly appears at the monthly dinner for the CEO of the main companies in the Valley, and despite her reputation at Google, she is thoughtful, attentive and interested in other people's experiences. In an interview with TechCrunch, Michael Arlington asked Mayer what her super powers were, what she was really good in her opinion. “I think I have empathy,” she replied, “The last year for Yahoo was tense, including because of my arrival and numerous changes ... If I have a superpower, this is probably empathy.”
Proof that Meier is able to take other people's views was the acquisition of Tumblr, a popular social network and microblogging platform, in the spring of 2013. In the Valley, they consider that to offer $ 1.1 billion to a company that has practically no income and, all the more, profits, and persuade them to condescend before accepting your offer - and truly an achievement. Meyer personally promised David Karp, the 27-year-old founder of Tubmlr, that his company would continue to be managed independently. “I believe that they have established a good understanding,” comments one of the venture investors who participated in the transaction, “She demonstrated that Tumblr understands and David trusts her ... If it were not for this relationship, it’s completely unclear whether deal".
Last fall, at the insistence of Loeb Meier, she sold part of Yahoo's share in Alibaba back to a Chinese company for $ 7.1 billion (Yahoo still owns a 24% share of Alibaba); to date, she has spent $ 4 billion of them on buying back Yahoo shares, a move that investors usually like. She closed many of the acquired companies, since it was the so-called “acquisition-hiring”, which is now necessary, because it is so hard to find talented engineers that it is sometimes easier to buy their company. Despite the fact that the purchase of companies that do not generate income, for big money, reminds of the “old” Yahoo, in the Valley they believe that it has made reasonable deals.
With the advent of Mayer, Yahoo's new self-determination is “a global technology company whose mission is to bring inspiration and entertainment to the daily tasks of humanity.” She updated Yahoo's existing products, including the home page, news portal, and Flickr (although the latest design update was already in full swing before it came). Last spring, Yahoo launched a weather forecast app that “shot” so well that Apple's design guru, Johnny Ive, sent Mayer a congratulatory note; The app is in the top 10 products on the App Store. Updating the Fantasy Football app has sparked rave reviews. It also helps Yahoo become more mobile. At the moment, according to Mayer, 800 million users visit Yahoo every month, which is 20% more than at the time of its entry into the company,and 390 million of them go through mobile devices. (Not all, however, consider these figures to be convincing. Analyst Ben Miner, who covers Yahoo for Macquarie Securities, notes that Yahoo does not provide enough information for analysts to be sure that these are meaningful, high-quality page views).
Meyer entered into content deals, starting with the purchase of rights to the old editions of Saturday Night Live, to create an archive of video content, to negotiate an interview with Katie Couric, and hiring New York Times star columnist David Pogh to write for Yahoo. Mayer was also not at all afraid to take bold and controversial steps. In particular, in early 2013, she sent a notice to the employees about the ban on remote work from home.
And, again, an incredible rise in the value of Yahoo shares. Its market value has grown by $ 14 billion since Mayer joined the company, and the value of the share even slightly exceeded Microsoft’s 2008 offer. Maier, who promised to perform the yodel when it happened, apologized to the staff for not having enough time to take singing lessons.
However, this does not mean that investors finally believe in Yahoo. This growth is provided in a small part by the growth of the cost of Yahoo Japan, and in large part by the huge interest in Alibaba, which announced plans to enter the IPO. According to rumors, its capitalization is estimated between $ 70 and $ 200 billion. “The media is interesting for Yahoo as a whole,” says Miner, “But the main part of Yahoo’s Wall Street investors is indifferent.” Mayer understands this. When asked by TechCrunch about the stock price increase, she said: "I think we had a very reasonable investment, for which I owe my predecessors."
The biggest question is whether Meyer’s initial success ensures her future bright future. Some doubt. "She is fearless in making decisions, not because she is fearless, but because she doesn’t admit that she can be wrong," said a former top Yahoo manager. “I say this in a positive way. One of Yahoo’s mistakes was that the company did not make decisions for years because it had no convictions. Marissa makes a decision for a decision, and unlike her public image, without data and without much knowledge. However, this affected her initial success. ”
There is also a polar opinion regarding the story of the great change of Marissa Mayer, suggesting that she really hasn’t changed a bit: “By the time someone becomes the CEO of a large company, they already have established habits and a system of work, and they do not change, ”says a top manager from the industry,“ The most dangerous thing is to assume that they can change. ”
Indeed, some of the stories about what's happening at Yahoo are strikingly reminiscent of what's happening at Google. She can still be cold with top managers accountable to her. One of the former top managers recalled how he had warned members of his team before meeting with Marissa so that they would not expect to get what they were hoping for. "Despite the warning, people, very experienced people with dozens of years of experience, came out and said:" It was the worst meeting in my career. " She can bring a box of blueberries to the meeting and just look at you, sending berries in her mouth. People feel so ignored! ”
Mayer still makes people wait. She is never late for the Friday FYI meeting with all Yahoo employees, but she is regularly late for meetings with other top managers. “It’s already been ten times, probably,” says the former top manager, “You gather a team, you wait [Marissa] for 10 minutes, 20, 30, two hours ... and she never appears.”
Last winter, Mayer had scheduled a meeting with top managers of the company for the whole day to discuss the budget for 2013. The meeting was supposed to start in the morning. “Minutes went, Marissa was not there,” said one of those who were present there. - Time goes on and on, she is still gone, and here we learn that she is interviewing Inu Garten. By this time, two or three hours had passed. Finally, her assistant appears and says: "There will be no discussion today." As this person says: "A little respect never hurts." Another former top manager agrees with the complaint, but notes that once he ran into the doorway with Meyer and she gave a good assessment of the work of his team.
Last December, Mayer announced in a corporate blog about plans to completely change Yahoo Mail. “Mail is almost the basic daily habit,” she wrote. This is true, however, Yahoo Mail is of great importance for another reason. According to rough estimates, although no one knows the exact numbers, about 275 million users, accounting for more than half of Yahoo's traffic, use mail. In other words, if Yahoo loses these people, there may be a domino effect.
The re-design team worked for days to catch up to the deadline for launch, according to Business Insider. The day before the launch, Meier called a team meeting and insisted on changing the color scheme from blue and gray to yellow and purple. At least four people who were involved in the project quit. “They are not against hard work,” says one of those who worked with this team, “But they are against a sword brought over their heads: Either you do it, or not at all.” It was the most unpleasant experience in the life of everyone. ”
Only recently, Yahoo released another update of its mail (the main color is purple), and tens of thousands of complaints followed. One of the people involved in the first restart says that the explanation is quite simple: on the first attempt Mayer lost people she could not afford to lose.
Exit Loeb .
And from the very beginning went friction with Daniel Loeb. According to numerous sources, Meier indicated in her business plan that the 14,000-strong Yahoo staff should be reduced to a level of 7-9 thousand. However, in the autumn she changed her mind to make reductions, arguing that the company's culture is already fragile enough to survive the layoffs. What bothered some members of the board of directors, including Loeb, was that she refused to do any analysis. “This was her original plan! - says one of the people familiar with these events, - it would be perfectly normal in her case to simply say: "I was wrong, here are the results of the analysis." But she did not offer any data. Many people say that in their opinion the problem is that Mayer wants to look like a savior and, as one of them put it: “Saviors do not shorten.” (Mayer, however,introduced a new and rather controversial staff ranking system, and seems to be planning to get rid of people in this way. The system causes extreme dissatisfaction among employees who pour out their complaints, including the Internet).
Yahoo's core business is struggling hard: increasing traffic has no effect on financial results. Mayer assured since the days of Google that "money follows users ... If you manage to attract a significant number of users, and they will use your product every day, money will follow them." This was true for Google, and this is a common truth in the Valley.
However, there is a small snag: not all traffic is quoted. Yahoo's banner advertising revenues continued to fall each of the last three quarters, when Meyer was at the helm. Yahoo's share in the global digital advertising market continues to shrink, while Google and Facebook share grow. And it's not just the numbers going down. Over the past three quarters, Yahoo's business results have disappointed analysts; the company does not achieve results even according to its own forecasts, which it provided to Wall Street. Goldman Sachs just lowered its forecasts for the growth of revenue and profits of Yahoo.
Poor results on advertising revenue created some friction on the board of directors. Mayer, according to one of the participants of the events, assures that this is only a short-term hitch, but refused to dig deeper. “She thinks like a debater, but not like an analyst,” says this person. "She makes hasty conclusions, and then begins to defend her position, even if there are contradictory facts."
But Loeb sold the bulk of his share not for this reason. His plan, according to several people, was that if everything worked, the shares would rise to $ 25- $ 30 apiece, and they reached $ 29 last spring. Therefore, he went to Meyer and announced his desire to sell 20 million shares, one third of his stake. On Friday, July 19, Meier returned with a counter offer. She said that Yahoo itself would like to buy back these shares, which means that Loeb would be guaranteed a price that he probably could not have received on the free market, but only if 40 million shares were sold. This reduced Loeb’s share to 2%, which meant that he and his people lost their seats on the board of directors. Loeb was shocked that she wanted to get rid of him and his team, according to two faces, but it was too good a deal to miss.July 22, Yahoo announced the repurchase of 40 million shares from Loeb, the whole story of Yahoo brought to his hedge fund about 1 billion dollars.
This situation can be viewed from two different sides, and each will be truthful to a certain extent. One is that Mayer did not want to have opposition, and Loeb is one of those investors who constantly opposes. The other is that it belongs to a small number of people who managed to outplay Loeb. “She dodged a bullet,” said a top executive from the industry, “I thought he and Dan would separate. That he will achieve her dismissal. They are both very strong personalities. Dan would have made his move at some point. She made him first and achieved his departure. ”
Immediately after Loeb’s departure, Vogue published a flattering article about Meier entitled “Glorify the Chef,” with a photograph of Mayer reclining in a chair and holding her own photo open on the iPad. In this article, Mayer told Vogue that “she didn’t plan to lead technology companies,” continuing: “I’m just a geek and shy, and I love code.” She also reported that Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, remarked to her that “when you want to have more influence than you can achieve by yourself, you move to the manager’s position ... And I’m saying:“ Oh, it’s really nice to have have more influence than I could have done alone. " Not that I had a grand plan, in which I weighed all the pros and cons about what I would like to do - it just happened. ”
The most interesting reaction to this statement is observed in those people from the Valley, who believe that its history is not about how the reward itself pursues a talented hero, but about how an ambitious person persistently and wisely follows his goal. What is not so bad, just do not deny it. The only reasonable reason Mayer does this, the woman’s top manager believes, is because she’s afraid of the criticism that women often openly admit to their strength. Another top manager looks at the situation from a slightly different angle. This man believes that Mayer realized quite early that being a female engineer is a rarity in a culture that glorifies engineers, gave her the advantage that other women did not have, without this line in the resume. In the end, her failings, such as the habit of being late,can be easily corrected if she wanted to do it. “The idea that she’s shy and a modest engineer in general is complete nonsense!” Says this top manager. “She just knows that this creates a“ Teflon coating ”for her.
Well, at least for the time being, Marissa has a Teflon coating, thanks to her celebrity status and Yahoo's share in Alibaba. In the Valley there is a belief that the ability to create innovative products compensates for other shortcomings. And if this is the case, if Meier's superpower is not in empathy, but in the ability to create products that users need, if she really possesses this rare magic, then she will remain on top.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/212003/
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