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The Truth About Marissa Mayer: AnUnauthorized Biography

Illustration by Mike Nudelman/Photo by Fortune Live Media (http://www.flickr.com/photos/63750402@N07

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feTp6D-feTk8e-ff8JL3-ff8Cyh-feTgUc-ff8Abu-feTmvr-ff8xPq-feTvcp-ff8M7W-ff8Ln9-feTfvV-ff8ztj-ff8E4J-feTocr-

feTr4e-feTe8R-ff8eZm-feSZHn-ff8m2u-ff8n6y-ff8k8s-feT7fn-feSYur-ff8nYL)

On the morning of Thursday, July 12, 2012, Yahoo’s

interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, still believed he was

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Marissa Mayer Biography - Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8?op=1

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going to be named permanent CEO of the company.

He had just one meeting to go.

That meeting was a board meeting to be held that day

in a large conference room on the first floor of

Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters. Yahoo called

the room “Phish Food” — a funky room with lots of

glass and white leather couches and chairs.

The agenda for the meeting: Levinsohn was going to

brief the directors on his plan for Yahoo, should he be

named permanent CEO.

Levinsohn walked into the room; all of his top

executives followed.

There was Jim Heckman, Levinsohn’s top dealmaker, who’d spent

months negotiating a huge deal with Microsoft. There was Shashi Seth,

Yahoo’s top product management executive, already planning a

long-needed update to Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo homepage. There was

chief financial officer Tim Morse, who’d just completed a critical,

company-saving deal to sell a portion of Yahoo subsidiary Alibaba.

There was Mickie Rosen, a News Corp. veteran whom Levinsohn had

hired to run Yahoo’s media business. And there was Mollie Spillman,

whom he’d just made CMO.

Heckman, Seth, Morse, Rosen, Spillman, and handful

of others sat off to the side.

All of them believed that the meeting was a formality

— that Levinsohn was going to get the job.

They had good reason to be confident. For the two

months prior, the chairman of Yahoo’s board, Fred

Amoroso, had made it clear that he was going to do



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2 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Ross Levinsohn

everything he could to make sure Levinsohn and his

team would be running the company for the

foreseeable future.

Amoroso told Levinsohn this in private. He told

Yahoo employees this during an all-hands meeting in

May. He’d even joined a sales call to express support

for Levinsohn to Yahoo advertisers — an oddly

hands-on move for a chairman.

In June, Amoroso helped Levinsohn recruit a

high-profile Google executive named Michael Barrett

into Yahoo. During the recruiting process, Amoroso

promised Barrett that Levinsohn’s “interim” title was

only temporary — that it was safe to leave Google.

Levinsohn had another reason to be hopeful: For the

past few months, he’d been speaking with two of

Yahoo’s most important new directors, Dan Loeb and

Michael Wolf, almost every day. As important as it

was for Levinsohn to have Amoroso’s support, he

needed Loeb’s more. Loeb ran a hedge fund called





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Third Point, which owned more than 5 percent of

Yahoo and had, only months before, forced the

resignation of Yahoo’s previous CEO. Wolf was an

important ally for Levinsohn to have, too. Wolf, a

former president of MTV, was consulting for Third

Point on media investments when Loeb asked him to

join the Yahoo board and lead its search committee

for a new CEO.

Levinsohn began his presentation. It was going to be a

doozy, as he planned to seriously alter the direction of

Yahoo.

He wanted it to stop competing with technology

businesses like Google and Microsoft and focus

entirely on competing with media and content

businesses like Disney, Time Warner, and News

Corporation. As part of this transition, Levinsohn

wanted to spin off, sell, or shut down several Yahoo

business units. He said doing so would reduce

Yahoo’s head count by as many as 10,000 employees,

and increase its earnings before taxes and interest by

as much as 50 percent.

In fact, Levinsohn announced during his presentation

that he and his team had already started down this

road.

Levinsohn told the board that, under his direction,

Heckman had begun negotiating a deal with Microsoft

to exchange Yahoo’s search business for Microsoft’s

portal, MSN.com, and large payments in cash.

Levinsohn and Heckman had also been talking with

Google executive Henrique De Castro about turning

over some of Yahoo’s advertising inventory. There





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Heidi Gutman/CNBC

Dan Loeb controlled 5 percent of Yahoo and joined the

board a5er a bloody proxy fight.

was also talk of unloading some of Yahoo’s enterprise-

facing advertising-technology businesses into a joint

venture involving New York-based ad tech startup

AppNexus.

It was during this

part of his

presentation that

Levinsohn began

to feel the

permanent Yahoo

CEO job slipping

away.

Others in the room

got the same sinking feeling.

Wolf, the man in charge of the committee tasked with

hiring a permanent CEO, began to question the

wisdom of the deal.

Wolf asked, in a loud voice with a sharp tone, “I

understand why this is good for Microsoft, but why is

it good for Yahoo?”

Harry Wilson, another director brought onto the

board by Loeb, joined Wolf in his criticism of the deal

as “short-sighted.”

Their cross-examination of the deal eventually boiled

down to one question: Had Levinsohn and Heckman

made any irreversible commitments to either

Microsoft or Google?

It was obvious to several people in the room that Wolf

and Wilson wanted to make sure another candidate





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for the CEO job would not be forced to follow through

on a deal they had not negotiated.

This was a bad sign for Levinsohn’s candidacy.

But Wilson and Wolf’s loud complaints about the

Microsoft deal weren’t the worst sign for Levinsohn’s

chances; Loeb’s behavior during the meeting was.

Loeb is the suited, slick, and handsome Wall Street

type. He wears his salt-and-pepper hair short and

messy on purpose. He’s actually from Southern

California, and sometimes he puts off a surfer vibe.

During Levinsohn’s presentation, Loeb looked bored.

He wasn’t paying full attention. As the interim CEO

talked, Loeb stood at the back of the room and played

with his BlackBerry.

One person in the room remembers watching Loeb

texting for a while and then, “during the most

important part of the presentation,” getting up and

going to the bathroom for ten minutes.

This person remembers thinking: “Oh, OK. Sorry,

Ross, you’re not CEO anymore.”

After the meeting, Barrett, the Google executive

Amoroso had helped Levinsohn poach, called

Levinsohn to ask how it went. Levinsohn told him he

no longer felt like he was getting the job.

But who was?

That night, Levinsohn flew to Sun Valley, Idaho,

where investment bank Allen & Co. holds an annual

retreat for big-name media and technology





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executives.

Over the weekend, Levinsohn played a guessing game

with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Square CEO

Jack Dorsey, and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. With

each of them, Levinsohn and the other Silicon Valley

bigwigs ran through a long list of names, trying to

figure out who might be getting the job Levinsohn had

so hoped for. For each name they came up with, they

came up with a persuasive reason why that person

could not be it.

Whom had Wolf and Loeb so clearly already decided

on?

Finally, late Sunday night, Levinsohn got a call from a

friend of his at Google.

This person asked: Had Levinsohn heard that Marissa

Mayer had interviewed for the Yahoo job the

Wednesday prior?

Levinsohn realized everything all at once.

Levinsohn now knew who Yahoo’s next CEO would

be.

Soon, so would everyone else.

On Monday, July 16, four days after Levinsohn’s last

board meeting, Yahoo made it official: Thirty-seven-

year-old Marissa Mayer was Yahoo’s new CEO.

The board had indeed already made Mayer an offer by

the time Levinsohn went into that final meeting to

present his plan for Yahoo.





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Flickr/Fortune Live Media (http://www.flickr.com/photos

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enfCSt-9rxt6X/)

Marissa Mayer

After the news broke in public, Levinsohn admitted to

friends that he was disappointed. He had really

wanted the job, and believed he would have done very

well with it. He also felt bad for the team he put in

place, who would now have to report to an unfamiliar

leader.

But Levinsohn was also at peace. If he had to lose out

to someone, at least he lost out to an icon.

There is no one

else in the world

like Marissa

Mayer.

Now 38 years old,

she is a wife, a

mother, an

engineer, and the

CEO of a

30-billion-dollar

company. She is a

woman in an

industry

dominated by men. In a world where corporations are

expected to serve shareholders before anyone else,

she is obsessed with putting the customer experience

first.

Worth at least $300 million, she isn’t afraid to show

off her wealth. Steve Jobs may have lived in a small,

suburban home with an apple tree out front, but

Marissa Mayer lives in the penthouse of San

Francisco’s Four Seasons Hotel.





8 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

While rival CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook

and Larry Page of Google wear flip-flops, hoodies, and

T-shirts, Mayer wears Oscar De La Renta on the red

carpet.

Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesn’t look the

part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and glamorous

style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks.

Young, powerful, rich, and brilliant, Mayer is a role

model for millions of women. And yet, unlike

Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg,

Mayer resists calling herself a feminist. She even

infuriated working mothers across the world when

she banned Yahoo employees from working from

home.

Widely admired by the public at large, Mayer has

many enemies within her industry. They say she is

robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with

detail. They say her obsession with the user

experience masks a disdain for the money-making

side of the technology industry.

There is some truth to what they say.

And yet, a year after Mayer took over Yahoo, the

company’s stock price was up 100 percent. Engineers

wanted to work for Yahoo again. More importantly, so

did sought-after startup CEOs like Tumblr founder

David Karp, who agreed to sell his company to Yahoo

for $1.1 billion.

Questions persist

Most CEOs of Mayer’s stature — people running

multi-billion-dollar public companies the size of





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Yahoo — are gregarious, outgoing types — the kind of

person who might have been a politician if the world

of business and money hadn’t beckoned.

Baby-kissers. Back-slappers. Schmoozers. Mayer is

not that type. Peers from every stage of her life —

from her early childhood days to her first year at

Yahoo — say Mayer is a shy, socially awkward person.

How in the world has she overcome such a

disadvantage to rise so far, so fast?

To a public casually interested in her career, Mayer’s

career before Yahoo — spent entirely at Google — is

remembered as one success after another. It wasn’t.

Mayer started off at Google spectacularly well,

designing its homepage, creating its product

management structure, and becoming the face of the

company. She became one of the most powerful

people at one of the world’s most powerful

companies.

But then, suddenly, her peers were promoted past

her. Responsibility for the look and feel of Google’s

entire suite of consumer-facing products, including

the Google homepage, was taken away from her. She

was moved to a less important product: Google Maps.

She was removed from a council of executives that

met with Google’s CEO. To industry insiders, this

sudden change was a demotion for Mayer. Was it

actually? If it was, why did it happen? How did Mayer

recover?

Mayer’s move to the top of Yahoo during the summer

of 2012 was a shock for almost everyone — including





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the people who convinced her to do it. How did the

board pull it off?

Then there’s the biggest question about Mayer: Can

she save Yahoo?

Illustration by Mike Nudelman

Marissa Ann Mayer was born on May 30, 1975 to parents Margaret

Mayer, a Finnish art teacher and homemaker, and Michael Mayer, an

environmental engineer.

She grew up in Wausau, Wis., with a sports-playing

brother, Mason Mayer. It was a middle-class

upbringing. She went to public schools and worked a

summer job as a grocery clerk, but her family had

enough time and money to enroll her in countless

activities.

Most press photos of Mayer today show her on a

stage, speaking with an interviewer in front of a large

crowd or a TV audience. She’s usually wearing a

designer dress — probably from her favorite designer,

Oscar De La Renta — and looking strong, confident,

and in charge of the moment.

But Mayer, now 38 years old, wasn’t always so larger-

than-life. She describes the child and teenage version

of herself as “painfully shy.”

Indeed, the Mayer you see in photos today is not the one remembered

by the peers she grew up with in the small town of Wausau. For one, her

style involved more T-shirts, sweaters, and jeans — nice clothes, but

nothing flashy. And while Mayer has always presented well in front of an





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Owen Thomas, Business Insider

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the 2013 Goldman

Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.

audience, her peers don’t

remember her as

extroverted or larger-

than-life.

One of those peers

is named Brian

Jojade. He took

Advanced Math

with Mayer in 8th

grade. He

remembers Mayer

as someone who hated social attention. Once, Jojade

called the local radio station and told them it was

Mayer’s birthday. He asked the DJ to read her name

out on air. Jojade, who had a small crush on Mayer,

figured hearing her name would make her laugh. It

didn’t. “She wasn’t amused at all. You could just tell it

wasn’t fun for her.”

Otherwise, Jojade’s overriding memory of Mayer is as

the “professional” girl who sat in the front of the

classroom and “always worked hard and made sure

no matter what she was going to do, it was going to

get done right.”

Mayer’s Wausau West High School classmate Elize

Bazter says she best remembers Mayer as the girl who

was “kind to everyone” but would dodge

conversations on her way to go study somewhere else.

Wausau West had a class schedule system where,

instead of periods, the day was broken up into

20-minute “mods.” Classes lasted for 40 minutes or

an hour. That meant there were 20-minute breaks

during everyone’s day. Bazter said most





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Wausau West High Yearbook 1993

Mayer introduces the 1992 homecoming court

upperclassmen would use the time to congregate in

the school’s commons.

“You could study,” says Bazter, “but mostly it was

talking and eating and gathering with your friends.”

Not for teenage Marissa

Mayer.

“She would be the

person to come

down, get

something to eat

from the kitchen or

the vending

machines, and then

she would go to the

library or the

science lab to

study. She wouldn’t

be the one to stay

and sit there and

converse for 20

minutes.”

Bazter says the

image she thinks of

when she remembers Mayer is of her “in school,

books in hand, walking down the hallway to do

something else.”

None of this is to say that Mayer had a sad, lonely

time growing up in Wausau. She didn’t. Mayer is fond

of Wausau.

When she got married to a San Francisco banker





13 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

named Zachary Bogue in 2009, she held two

ceremonies: One was in California, and a second at

her childhood church, Immanuel Lutheran in

Wausau.

As a kid, Mayer’s peers in school had no idea what to

make of her. Likewise, Mayer says she was “painfully

shy” around them. But teachers? Teachers were

Mayer’s kind of people.

In 2010, Mayer returned to her hometown to be

inducted into the Wausau School District’s “Alumni

Hall of Fame.” At a luncheon held in honor of her and

25 teachers retiring that year, Mayer gave a speech

that the school district recorded in a video.

In the video, Mayer stands at a podium in a blue

designer dress with a yellow corsage pinned on. She

begins the speech by thanking her teachers, “each of

whom changed my life forever.”

Then she begins to list her teachers by name. As she

does — “… Mr. Freedly, Mrs. Stay, Mr. Flanagan …” —

you can see on Mayer’s face how important these

people were to her growing up. About six names in,

the timbre of Mayer’s voice actually breaks toward a

sob, and she has to catch herself with a breath and a

small gulp. She can’t stop her eyes from swelling with

held-back tears, though.

Most teenagers fondly recall sneaking into high school

their senior year for a prank — setting chickens loose

or toilet-papering the hallways. Mayer once snuck

into her AP Lit teacher’s classroom to decorate it like

a jungle because she was so inspired by the teacher’s





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lesson on “Heart of Darkness.”

Mayer’s fifth-grade teacher at Stettin Elementary,

Wayne Flanagan, remembers that Mayer refused to

leave his classroom the last day of that school year.

She did not want to go to middle school.

She told Flanagan she was worried that she wouldn’t

make it there, with all the new kids and teachers she’d

have to meet.

Flanagan says Mayer the little girl was “a home

person; she liked to be safe and know where she’s at.”

Flanagan, who says it was obvious even then how far

Mayer would go, told the reluctant little girl, “Oh, I

think you’re going to make it fine.”

Still, she wouldn’t go. Eventually Flanagan called

Mayer’s mother to let her know where her daughter

was.

Certainly the people Mayer spent most of her

childhood with were a particular kind of nurturing,

mentoring adult: coaches, teachers, counselors, and

instructors.

As a little kid, she was in Brownies. She took piano

lessons. She played volleyball and basketball. She

went to swimming and skiing lessons. She took ballet

for as many as 35 hours a week during middle school

and high school. Her mother says ballet taught her

“criticism and discipline, poise and confidence.”

In high school Mayer was also on the curling team.

She was a “pompom” girl and a debater. She was on





15 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

the precision dance team.

Mayer was so busy in part because her mother,

Margaret Mayer, pushed her to be.

Flanagan, the fifth-grade teacher, says Mayer’s

mother would frequently stop by school to check on

her daughter’s progress. He says he “got to be good

friends” with the Mayers. “They were concerned

about her and that she was making the right progress.

And she was. And she knew that — that her parents

were supportive of her.”

In one way, Mayer owes her career to the

relationships she was able to form with teachers.

Statistics show that many high school girls do not feel

like they belong in math or science classes. In 2003,

84 percent of high schoolers who took the SAT and

said they wanted to major in computer science were

boys — obviously, that means just 16 percent were

women.

Mayer says she never felt that bias at Wausau West.

“It wasn’t until I was a professional woman mentoring

other girls in math and science that I learned that

openly liking math and science is unusual for girls.

It’s actually considered far too nerdy and far too much

for the boys.

“Wausau schools were so supportive that I never felt

strange for a second about pursuing math and science

and being good in them.”

Mayer credits her teachers for helping her become

less shy.





16 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Wausau West High School Yearbook

Mayer was on Wausau West's state championship

winning debate team.

They did this by

showing Mayer

that she could

“organize” more

than just her

backpack, desk,

and homework —

that she could

organize people, as

their leader.

Mayer’s childhood

piano teacher,

Joanne Beckman,

remembers Mayer

being very

different from

other children in

that she was

someone who

“watched people” in order to “figure out why they

were doing what they were doing.”

“A lot of kids that age are very interested in

themselves,” Beckman says, “She was looking at other

people.”

By “looking” at her teachers, figuring out why they

were doing what they were doing, Mayer overcame

her “painful” shyness with peers by taking on the

teacher’s role.

Even when she was in fifth grade, Mr. Flanagan could

see the pedagogical side of Mayer developing. He

thought she would become a teacher someday.





17 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

In high school, Mayer took a leadership position in

every club she joined. She became president of the

Spanish club, treasurer of Key Club, and Captain of

the debate team.

One of her closest friends from Wausau, Abigail

Garvey Wilson, says, “When Marissa became captain

of the pompom squad, she wasn’t in with that clique

of girls, but she won them over in three ways.”

“First: sheer talent. Marissa could choreograph a

great routine. Second: hard work. She scheduled

practices lasting hours to make sure everyone was

synchronized. And third: fairness. With Marissa in

charge, the best dancers made the team.”

In 1993, Mayer applied to, and was accepted into, 10

schools, including Harvard, Yale, Duke, and

Northwestern.

To decide which one she would go to, Mayer created a

spreadsheet, weighing variables for each.

She picked Stanford. Her plan was to become a brain

doctor — a profession that doesn’t draw much on the

leadership traits Mayer was quickly developing.

But soon enough, Mayer would find herself once

again overcoming her shyness by taking charge of a

room full of peers, pushing them to work for hours.

Soon enough, she would find herself at the front of a

Stanford classroom, interacting with people in the

way that came most natural to her — teaching them.

Teaching was her calling.





18 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM


The summer before Marissa Mayer went to Stanford,

she began asking herself a question that would guide

her through college and for the rest of her life.

What does Zune think?

That summer, Mayer attended the National Youth

Science Camp in West Virginia. It was nerd heaven.

Picture science labs housed in wooden cabins shaded

by trees. Mayer especially loved one experiment

where they mixed water and corn starch to make a

sloppy goo-like substance that seemed to defy gravity.

One day, a post-doctoral student from Yale named

Zune Nguyen spoke to the campers as a guest

lecturer. He stunned all the smart kids in the room

with puzzles and brainteasers. For days, the campers

couldn’t stop talking about his talk.

Finally, one of Mayer’s counselors had enough.

“You know, you have it all wrong,” the counselor said

to Mayer and the campers. “It’s not what Zune knows,

it’s how Zune thinks.”

The counselor said that what made Nguyen so

amazing wasn’t the facts that he knew, but rather how

he approached the world and how he thought about

problems. The counselor said the most remarkable

thing about Nguyen was that you could put him in an

entirely new environment or present him with an





19 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

entirely new problem, and within a matter of minutes

he would be asking the right questions and making

the right observations.

From that moment on, the phrase: “It’s not what Zune

knows, but how Zune thinks,” stuck with Mayer as a

sort of personal guiding proverb.

In the fall, Mayer went to Stanford and began taking

pre-med classes. She planned to become a doctor. But

by the end of her freshman year, she was sick of it.

“I was just doing too many flashcards,” she says.

“They were easy for me, but it was just a lot of

memorization.”

She says she wanted to find a major “that really made

me think” — that would train her to “think critically,

and become a great problem-solver.” She also wanted

to “study how people think, how they reason, how

they express themselves.”

“I had this nagging voice in my head saying ‘It’s not

what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks.’”

Mayer began to answer the voice in her head — and

find a course of study that helped her learn how to

think — when she took an introductory computer

science class: CS105.

Mayer was engrossed by the challenge of

programming — taking a problem and using her mind

to solve it.

During the semester, she entered a class-wide design

contest for extra credit. Calling on the same part of





20 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Stanford University (http://www.flickr.com/photos/stanforduniversity

/5670897249/in/photolist-9D7Qbv-82faUa-8GFoCu-8GFoEG-

8GCdAR-8GCdwi-8GFovA-aFXn3p-bzchRw-bkHtjf-cZ2CV7-cZ2CnS

/lightbox/)

Stanford professor Eric Roberts says Mayer was an

incredible teacher.

her brain that made her such an excellent pompom

choreographer, Mayer made a screensaver featuring

exploding fireworks. In a class of 300, Mayer came in

second.

The design was good enough that Mayer’s CS105

professor, Eric Roberts, would also use an adaptation

of the screen saver as an assignment for the next

several years.

Roberts was also

impressed enough with

Mayer’s exploding

fireworks that he invited

her and a few other top

finishers over for dinner

at his house. He became

her mentor, as once

again, Mayer bonded

with a teacher.

Mayer had also

found her major.

Mayer opted for

symbolic systems — a combination of disciplines

straight out of Zune Nguyen’s head: Linguistics,

philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer

science classes.

Symbolic systems has become a famous Stanford

major in Silicon Valley. Besides Mayer, other alumni

include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; former

senior vice president of iOS software at Apple, Scott

Forstall; and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger.

Mayer’s teacherly leadership streak came out in a big

way when she took Philosophy 160A, then considered

a “weed-out course” for prospective symbolic systems





21 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

majors.

During Philosophy 160A, the students break into

study groups of a half dozen or so students, and the

groups are assigned problem sets. Mayer’s group —

just like all the others — put off doing their problem

sets until the day before they were due.

So that semester at Stanford was full of all-nighters

for Mayer and her Philosophy 160A group.

Mayer ended up in a group that included Josh Elman,

now a venture capitalist. Looking back on those study

sessions, Elman remembers “times when people in

the group were bouncing off the walls.”

He says, “Marissa was always like, ‘OK, back to work.

Let’s get this done.’ She was focused on making sure

we got the right answer quickly.”

“It felt like she was the smartest student in the room

— and the most serious. You always knew those two

things about her. Very smart. Very serious.”

The social dynamic of the group was typical for

Mayer. As usual, she commanded the room —

organized the group’s work in an all-business fashion

— but was otherwise shy, and somewhat reclusive.

In the years ahead, this combination — Mayer’s

willingness to be authoritative and demanding the

way a teacher would, with a “painful” fear or

reluctance of being personal — would cause problems

for Mayer.

One Stanford classmate interpreted Mayer’s shyness





22 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

as being “kind of stuck up.”

“She would do her work and then leave. When other

people would stay and hang out and have pizza, she’d

just be out of there because the work is done.”

Indeed, Mayer doesn’t seem to have had a very active

social life in college.

One person who lived in her dorm said she appeared

to always be “down to business” and “not much for

socializing.”

“She wasn’t one of those people into making new friends around the

dorm. She was always doing something more important than just

chilling.”

The simplest explanation for Mayer’s social behavior

at Stanford remains that Mayer was, as she has said

many times, “painfully shy.”

Later at Stanford, Mayer found herself in a group

setting that was less social, more comfortable, and

more familiar for her. As an upperclassman in

symbolic systems, she was tapped to teach a class.

She took to it naturally.

Computer science professor Eric Roberts, still Mayer’s

mentor, supervised her teaching. He says she was

“unusually good at it” and “extremely effective.”

After Mayer taught a course in the spring, Roberts

took a survey of her students. The results were

astounding: They loved her — even if she did

sometimes talk “a mile a minute.”





23 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Roberts asked Mayer to stick around Stanford to

teach another class over the summer; she readily

agreed.

“She loved teaching,” says Roberts.

Of course she did. Stanford students called her “stuck

up” when they were her classmates. But when she was

their teacher, they thought she was great.

Mayer

excelled

the rest

of her

years as

an

undergraduate at Stanford. After she got her

bachelor’s degree, she stayed at the school to get a

master’s in computer science, with a speciality in

artificial intelligence.

As graduate school drew to a close, word got out

about Mayer’s teaching ability.

She soon faced a choice.

Should she become a teacher, and step full time into a

role that had always suited her so well?

Or should she challenge herself and work somewhere

in the technology industry?





24 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Taking A 2 percent Chance On Google

When people ask Mayer why she joined Google after

getting her masters in symbolic systems at Stanford,

she likes to tell them her “Laura Beckman story.” It’s

about the daughter of her middle school piano

teacher, Joanne Beckman.

Mayer begins: “Laura tried out for the volleyball team

her junior year at high school. At the end of the

tryouts, she was given a hard choice: bench on varsity,

or start on JV.

“Most people, when they’re faced with this choice,

would choose to play - and they'll pick JV. Laura did

the opposite. She chose varsity, and she benched the

whole season.

“But then an amazing thing happened. Senior year

she tried out and she made varsity as a starter, and all

the JV starters from the previous year benched their

whole senior year.

“I remember asking her: ‘How did you know to choose

varsity?’

“And she said, ‘I just knew that if I got to practice with

the better players every day, I would become a much

better player, even if I didn’t get to play in any of the

games.’”

The moral of Mayer’s story is that it’s always better to

surround yourself with the best people so that they

will challenge you and you will grow.

“My quest to find, and be surrounded by, smart

people is what brought me to Google,” she says.





25 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

And that’s the overriding reason why Mayer joined

Google. But quests for self-improvement aside, it’s

also true that Mayer almost missed her chance to join

the company that would make her rich and powerful

someday.

Late on a Friday in mid-April of her last year at

Stanford, Mayer sat at her computer, eating pasta and

reading emails.

She already had 12 job offers to choose from, and

wasn’t looking for any more hard choices.

So when yet another pitch from a recruiter popped up

in her inbox, she tapped on her keyboard’s delete key

to get rid of it.

Only, she missed.

Instead of hitting delete, Mayer hit the space bar and

opened the email.

That email’s subject line: “Work at Google?”

Mayer read the email

and remembered a

conversation she had

with Eric Roberts who

was still a mentor years

after she took his

computer science class

for non-majors. The

prior fall, Roberts

listened to Mayer talk

about the

recommendation engine

she’d built, and then told her she should meet with a pair of Ph.D.

students who were working on similar stuff. Their names: Sergey Brin

and Larry Page.

Mayer realized that Google was their startup. Trusting





26 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Roberts' recommendation, she replied to an email she

had meant to delete, writing that she’d like an

interview.

She got one, and met with engineer Craig Silverstein.

Silverstein blew her away with his smarts. In the

Laura Beckman analogy, he was varsity.

Google offered Mayer a job. She seriously considered

it.

Her reservations were that she had planned on taking

a job at consulting firm McKinsey, where her clients

would be Silicon Valley companies.

Google was a riskier career choice. In her typical,

precise way, she’d crunched the data and had decided

that the company only had a 2 percent chance of

succeeding.

Also, some small part of Mayer was worried about

Google’s weird name, which she imagined would be

the punch line of family jokes for years to come.

She got over it.

“The turning point for me,” she says, “was realizing

that I would learn more at Google, trying to build a

company, regardless of whether we failed or

succeeded, than I would at any of the other companies

I had offers from.”

For the next 13 years, Marissa Mayer worked at

Google.





27 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Google

Mayer during her early Google days.


Marissa Mayer joined Google as a programmer and

rose to become the executive in charge of the way

Google search and many other popular Google

products looked to Web users.

She became a senior vice president, with thousands of

Google employees reporting to her and hundreds of

millions of people around the world using products

she helped build. The job made her worth hundreds of

millions of dollars. But then something strange

happened to Mayer, and people in the industry

wondered what went wrong.

Google in its early

days was a fun

place to work,

energized by

incredible success

and perks like free

food. But it was

also a grinding,

stressful

environment.

On Mayer’s second day at Google in 1999, she went to

the kitchen for a snack at around 11 A.M. There, she

bumped into Larry Page, then CEO of the company.

He was standing in a corner.

“I'm hiding,” he said. “The site is down. It’s all gone





28 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

horribly awry.”

He was exaggerating, of course. Google was actually

doing too well at the moment.

In 1999, Google.com was a cleaner-looking and faster

search engine than any of the others on the Web, and

it was rapidly taking share from older search engines

like AltaVista and Lycos. In fact, the site was down

that day because Google had just signed a deal with

Netscape to handle search queries from Netscape.com.

Google only had 300 computers serving search

results, and it asked Netscape to send just a fraction

of its traffic. Netscape ignored the request and sent all

of its users.

Down went Google.com.

Google went back online that day, but only after hours

of work from Mayer, Silverstein, and her new

colleagues. She went home at 3 a.m.

Perhaps because of long nights like that one, Mayer

and Page eventually grew very close. At one point

during Mayer’s early years at Google, she and Page

started dating.

Long hours would prove the norm for Mayer. During

her first two years at Google, she worked 100 hours a

week as a programmer.

Mayer thrived working the tough hours. She only

needed four hours of sleep a night, and when she was

awake, she would work harder than anyone. She

found a niche at Google: guardian of the clean,

easy-to-use look and feel of Google products. She





29 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Google

Mayer in 2005.

obsessed over pixels; their hue, shade, and placement.

She co-authored a handful of patents, including an

important one for Google: “Graphical user interface

for a universal search engine.”

By 2005, Mayer moved into management, overseeing

the look and feel of Google’s most important products.

She was very good at it.

During her first several

years at Google, Mayer

had been able to

continue teaching at

Stanford. She taught

3,000 undergraduates by

the time she was

promoted, so the part of

managing that has to do

with leading, teaching,

and organizing came

easy to her. She enjoyed working with younger Google employees so

much that she even started teaching classes at Google.

She created a mentorship program called “APM”

which stood for “associated product manager.” Each

year Mayer would select junior Google employees for

the APM program, give them assignments, and teach

them classes. Then, at the end of the program, Mayer

would take the entire APM “class” on a weeklong trip

abroad to Google offices around the globe.

When it came to developing Google products, Mayer

had a bigger challenge.

Mayer has never been someone who easily relates

with others. That’s why people call her robotic or

“stuck up.” This trait is why people sometimes walk

out of meetings with her feeling deeply insulted by a





30 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Mayer at the height of her power at Google.

perceived slight.

But being in charge of how Google products should

look, Mayer’s job was, basically, to relate with

Google’s millions of users. How would she do that?

In the end, it proved to be an advantage for Mayer

that empathy doesn’t come naturally to her. It forced

her to be intentional about figuring out what users

want and how they behave.

She came up with two clever methods of relating.

The first is that she

would recreate the

technological

circumstances of her

users in her own life.

Mayer went without

broadband for years

in her home, refusing

to install it until it

was also installed in

the majority of

American homes. She

carried an iPhone at

Google, which makes

Android phones, because so did most mobile Web users.

Mayer’s second method was to lean on data. She

would track, survey, and measure every user

interaction with Google products, and then use that

data to design and re-design.

Mayer’s design-by-numbers approach to product

development was not always popular.

Famously, a lead designer named Doug Bowman quit

Google over it.

In a farewell blog post, Bowman wrote: “… a team at





31 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

San Francisco Magazine

Julian Guthrie profiled Marissa Mayer in San Francisco

Magazine's March 2008 issue.

Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re

testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one

performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a

border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked

to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment

like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule

design decisions. There are more exciting design

problems in this world to tackle.”

Bowman went to Twitter.

Mayer’s obsession with data-driven design would only

gain more and louder critics over the years. But

Mayer’s methods also made her one of the Internet’s

most effective design and product development

leaders during her years at Google. People at Google

credit her with the success of not just Google search,

but also many others, including Gmail, Google Maps,

and Google News.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin says: “Marissa makes

the decisions she feels are right, and history proves

that she probably calls it right.”

Fame and

Glory

As Google

became a

world-

famous

company,

Mayer

began to

get

attention





32 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

from the media. Newsweek called her one of the “10

Tech Leaders of the Future.” Business 2.0 named her

to the “Silicon Valley Dream Team.” Now-defunct

technology news site Red Herring said Mayer was one

of “15 Women to Watch.”

Then, in 2004, Google went public. Its stock price

soared. This made Mayer and hundreds of her

colleagues rich in an instant. The media’s fascination

with Google kicked up several notches. Mayer, in

charge of the look of Google’s most important

product, and a rare photogenic woman in the

technology industry, was a natural subject of the

media’s fixation.

Mayer also boosted her public profile by deciding to

spend her new riches conspicuously. She bought the

$5 million penthouse suite at the Four Seasons in San

Francisco, and another home closer to Google’s

Mountain View campus. She started throwing

fabulous parties at both, jumping feet first into San

Francisco’s high-end social scene. Guests at her

homes would see expensive original artwork from

famous artists, like the 400-piece glass installation

Mayer commissioned from Dale Chihuly.

Mayer did not mind the attention. In fact, she asked

Google public relations staff to get her more of it, but

in the right outlets.

Mayer’s eagerness to be known by the public may

appear to contradict her claim that she suffers from

shyness. It doesn’t. She describes her shyness as a

need to withdraw from social situations almost as

soon as she enters them. Being featured in a glossy





33 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Mayer in Vogue in 2009

magazine does not require her to interact with every

reader, so she probably doesn’t have as much anxiety

about it as she does making small talk at a party.

Plus, there is such a thing as overcompensation.

By the end

of the

decade,

Vogue

magazine

would

profile

Mayer, and

describe her

as “the

34-year-old

mega-millionaire, Oscar de la Renta-obsessed, computer-programming

Google executive who lives in a penthouse atop the Four Seasons.”

Outside Google, her star was never brighter. Inside

Google, however, where wealth was supposed to be

quietly spent, and engineers were supposed to rule,

Mayer would soon be under siege.

Demoted

At the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, Marissa

Mayer’s remarkable career suddenly lost momentum.

First, in Oct. 2010, Mayer was removed from the top

of Google’s search organization and put in charge of

Google Maps and other “local” products.

Technically, this was a lateral move, if not a

promotion, because Mayer retained her vice president

title and she was, at the same time, given a seat on





34 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Google CEO Larry Page did not put Mayer on his

executive team.

Google’s Operating Committee — then CEO Eric

Schmidt’s roundtable of top executives from the

company.

In reality, it was a demotion. Mayer was no longer in

charge of what Google’s most important product

looked like or how it worked. At Google, there is

search, which generates nearly all of the company’s

revenues and profits, and then there is everything

else. Running Google search, Mayer was managing

the most important product at the world’s most

important Internet company. Running Google Maps,

she was not.

Still, there was the mitigating factor that Mayer was

on Google’s Operating Committee, and she therefore

reported directly to CEO Eric Schmidt.

That went away too.

In December 2010,

co-founder Larry Page

announced that a decade

after giving the CEO job

up to Eric Schmidt, he

was going to take it back.

When Page

formally took

control of Google

in April 2011, he

dissolved the

Operating Committee and created a new council of

executives who would report directly to him. This

group came to be known as the “L-Team.” Mayer was

not named to it.





35 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Then, to make matters worse for Mayer, Page put

another Google executive, Jeff Huber, in charge of

“Geo/Local,” the group Mayer had been tasked to run

only months before. Mayer now reported to Huber,

who joined Google in 2003 — four years after her.

Mayer’s loss of authority was felt across the company.

One former colleague says that prior to 2010, Mayer

was always able to “get what she needed” from

management.

“If her boss [Google senior vice president of product]

Jonathan Rosenberg didn’t approve of something —

didn’t give her head count or didn’t give her an

acquisition or whatever — she’d just go right above

him and get what she needed.”

That now stopped.

“She would try to do something and HR would say

that’s not the kind of thing she could do anymore.”

“That whole paradigm broke apart.”

Another former colleague says, “When I first turned

up, Marissa was very powerful at Google. Marissa

used to issue edicts and everyone did them. Over time

that proved not to be so true.”

Another way to track the rise and fall of Mayer at

Google is to look at the company’s own, public list of

executives in the “About Google” section of Google.com.

In November 2005, Mayer’s name and bio finally

appeared on Google’s management page. By May

2011, her name was off the site.





36 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

What happened to Marissa Mayer’s career?

One explanation is that Mayer’s career stalled as 2010

ended and 2011 began because that is exactly when

Larry Page decided he was going to become Google

CEO again.

Because Mayer and Page had dated years before,

some wonder if Page decided he could never allow

Mayer to report directly to him because it would be

unethical or show favoritism.

Everyone at Google had long known about the

relationship, and no one ever made it an issue — it

was too taboo to bring up.

One Googler explains: “Google is one of those places

where, like a cult, there are things that are OK to talk

about and things that are not OK to talk about. That

was one of those things that was not OK to talk

about.”

It’s actually hard to find someone at Google who was

bothered by the fact that there once was a romantic

relationship between Mayer and Page.

Perhaps this is because both of them have so publicly

moved on.

In 2007, Page married a Stanford graduate student named Lucy

Southworth. The ceremony was on Richard Branson’s private island.

That same year, a Google colleague emailed Mayer to

say: “I’m bringing a boy I think you’d be interested in.

Be cool.” The “boy” was Zachary Bogue. Tall and

dark-haired, Bogue looks like he could be the star of

“The Bachelor.” He had played football at Harvard,





37 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

FameGame (http://newsletter.famegame.com/page/14/)

Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue

and was now a

banker in San

Francisco. In

2009, Mayer

and Bogue

married. Vogue

covered the

ceremony. Of

their married

life, he says:

“We continue to do work in the evening. There’s never

a distinct line between work and home. Marissa’s

work is such a natural extension of her. It’s not

something she needs to shed at the end of the day.”

It’s possible that Mayer’s romantic history with Page

stalled her career at Google. But that’s not a widely

held belief among Mayer’s former colleagues.

A more common explanation was that she may not

have had the right kind of ambition to go much

further.

There’s a philosophy that corporations exist to benefit

three constituencies: shareholders, employees, and

customers. At Google, there are two kinds of

customers: the users of Google’s services and the

advertisers who pay Google to be seen by users.

Mayer spent all her years at Google worried about just

half of one of those constituencies: users.

To be fair, that was her job.

From Google’s earliest days, Mayer had always been

tasked with making products that users love. And she





38 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Doug Edwards, Xooglers

Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar during Google's early

years

pursued this task with a single-minded passion,

sleeping four hours a night, working 100-hour weeks,

grinding through back-to-back meetings without

breaks.

But Mayer may have been a bit too single-minded in

this pursuit — at least for the sake of her future at

Google.

Compared to some Google executives who joined the

company around the same time as Mayer, Mayer

showed much less interest in learning about the

business side of the company.

One former Google executive who worked in ad sales

says, “I did not work with her, and that’s telling.”

This executive says that even before Mayer joined

Google’s Operating Committee, she had an open

invitation to join its meetings — out of respect for her

importance to the company and in an effort to develop

her career. But while Mayer would always show up for

meetings about Google’s products, “she would never

show up for a business review.”

By contrast, two of

Mayer’s peers —

Susan Wojcicki and

Jeff Huber — “would

make the time and be

there because they

were interested in

expanding their

horizons.”

By 2010, when

Mayer’s Google

career started





39 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Matt Rosoff

stalling, Wojcicki and Huber were getting promotions.

Both would end up reporting directly to Larry Page.

Huber would become Mayer’s boss. Today, Wojcicki

is considered one of the two or three most powerful

executives at Google.

Mayer missed several of these types of opportunities.

In the months before he became CEO again, Larry

Page would hold two-hour, post-Operating

Committee meetings on Mondays that were more

focused on long-term strategy.

One executive who was flattered to be invited says, “I

was pretty interested in understanding the connection

between Chrome and Android.”

But Mayer would hardly ever show, “either because

she was traveling or who knows.”

Several of the regular attendees at those meetings

ended up with positions reporting directly to Page.

One of them was Sundar Pichai, now leading

development of both Google’s Chrome and Android

products. Pichai’s ascent had to be bittersweet to

Mayer. He used to work for her, and she had

promoted him. Now he was passing her by.

But a former

colleague says Pichai

was a perfect contrast

to Mayer when it

came to being

involved with Google

as a whole.

“Sundar would

do anything to





40 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Sundar Pichaihelp the

company. He

was internally working cross-functionally to get

results. If someone was offline and didn’t get the

strategy he’d sit down with them one-on-one. He

really put work into it. Marissa didn’t do that at all.”

One of Mayer’s former colleagues says she skipped all

those meetings because, when it came to the business

side of Google, Mayer was always “less interested.”

“She has a disposition toward the consumer side, and

users.”

This trait undoubtedly shaped Mayer’s career at

Google, and it would be very important later at Yahoo.

But more than her lack of interest in the business side

of Google, and certainly more than her history with

Page, there was one overriding reason for Marissa

Mayer’s sudden decline in power.

Her great strength, her teacherly I-know-best

leadership style had finally begun to grate on people

at Google. Worse, it had begun to slow the company

down.

Eventually, a group of Google engineers decided to try

and do something about it.

John Battelle, who has put on several large tech

conferences in the Bay Area, many of them featuring

Marissa Mayer as a speaker, says of her: “I've never

had a conversation with her when she wasn’t

completely certain she was right.”





41 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

http://ashleyannphotography.com (http://ashleyannphotography.com)

Mayer and and Salar Kamangar clashed o5en.

This pedantic style works when you are the traffic cop

in a room full of designers and product managers, but

it alienated some of Mayer’s colleagues over the years.

One peer it irked in

particular was Salar

Kamangar. Now the

CEO of Google-owned

YouTube, Kamangar

joined Google as its

ninth employee. He

drafted its original

business plan, and

handled financing

and legal early on.

Younger than Mayer,

he rose along with her

at Google, though not as conspicuously.

Mayer and Kamangar clashed often.

The specific habit of Mayer’s that drove Kamangar

nuts was her ability to speak incredibly fast, not

allowing him to re-enter the debate.

“In an academic situation, that’s okay because the

best ideas rise and you have discussion,” says one

Googler, familiar with Kamangar’s complaints about

Mayer. “But in a place where there are personal

feelings involved, if you can’t win the debate

regardless of how hard you try, because she will

out-talk you, that’s a challenging situation.”

The rivalry between Mayer and Kamangar was so

intense that when Kamangar was made a vice

president before her, she threatened to quit the

company. She got her promotion months later.

Another Mayer habit that annoyed colleagues was one

she picked up straight from academia.





42 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

For many years at Google, Mayer insisted that if her

colleagues wanted to speak with her, they had to do so

during her “office hours.” Mayer would post a

spreadsheet online, and ask that anyone who wanted

to speak with her sign up for a five-minute window.

When Mayer’s “office hours” rolled around in the

afternoon, a line would start to form outside of her

office and spill over into the nearby couches.

“Office hours” are socially acceptable in an academic

environment because the power dynamic is clear. The

students are subordinate to the professor, usually

their elder and mentor.

But Mayer’s office hours were not just for her

subordinates, but also her peers.

So there, amid the associate product managers

waiting to visit with Mayer to discuss their latest

assignment or a class trip to Zurich, sat Google vice

presidents — people who had been at the company as

long as Mayer, and in some cases held jobs as

important as hers.

What made the “office hours” even more obnoxious

for some Google engineers and product managers was

that all consumer-facing product launches or updates

required Mayer’s sign-off.

“Her weakness was an unwillingness to delegate,”

says Craig Silverstein, the Google engineer who hired

Mayer years ago. “She doesn’t need any sleep. When

you have four or five more hours in the day than most

people do, you don’t learn to delegate because you

don’t need to.”





43 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

sigir2006 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/sigir2006/210350950/sizes

/o/in/photolist-jA71w-J9Ey8-5vqdFY/)

One story is that Amit Singhal told Larry Page that

Mayer had to go.

The team who grew most frustrated with Mayer over

the “office hours” and, more generally, the need for

her to sign off on product changes, were the engineers

in charge of Google search.

Several of Mayer’s

former Google colleagues

confirm that among the

most put off was Amit

Singhal.

While Mayer was

in charge of the

way Google Search

looked, Singhal,

was one of the

engineers in

charge of creating

the algorithms that actually power the search engine.

After he re-wrote Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s

original code in 2001, he was named a “Google

Fellow.” He’s a big deal inside the company.

One of Mayer’s former Google colleagues says that it

was actually Singhal and three other search engineers

who finally went to Larry Page and asked that Mayer

be removed from the top of Google’s search

organization.

“These four guys, they were constantly being

hampered. They’d say: ‘We want to roll out this

ranking change.’ Marissa’s like, ‘until I review it, you

can’t launch it.’ They’re like: ‘But it’s been three

weeks.’”

Finally, says this source, Singhal and the other

engineers went to Larry Page and said, “Take your





44 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

pick. Her, or us.”

In this person’s telling, Page made his choice and

that’s why Mayer was moved out of search. She had

become a bottleneck.

Other people say Page removed Mayer from her perch

atop search after lots of input from lots of people.

Says one Googler: “What Larry saw as he became

CEO was that Marissa has a tough user-interface that

causes problems with other stakeholders.”

Another Googler familiar with those discussions says:

“Everyone agreed that something needed to change.”

This Googler wonders if Mayer was unfairly punished

in 2010 and 2011.

“Sometimes she got into trouble because she’s

ambitious and a woman and that’s tough in a man’s

world. People take potshots at her because she was

very young and successful. I also think she’s young

and learning and you sometimes don’t get things

right.”

Another reason for Mayer’s career stall in 2011 was

that Google, as a company, had grown up.

By 2010, Google had 24,000 employees. It wasn’t

going to be the kind of place where, just because an

executive had been there a long time and knew the

co-founders personally, she was going to be able to

get whatever she wanted.

“You couldn’t run the company like that anymore,”

says one person who lived through the transition.





45 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

AdMeld

Michael Barrett had only joined Yahoo weeks before

Mayer.

“As you grow you have to hire people who have done

this stuff before, and having people who haven’t lord

over them doesn’t work.”

So, by early 2011, Marissa Mayer’s progress at Google

had stalled. But another, greater opportunity was

about to come her way.


On the afternoon of Monday, July 16, 2012, Yahoo chief revenue officer

Michael Barrett stood at a gate in New York’s JFK airport, waiting to

board a plane to London.

Suddenly, his phone

rang. It was a

reporter. She said,

“Oh my God. You

have a new boss.

What do you think?”

The reporter

told Barrett the

news: Yahoo

had a new CEO.

It was Marissa

Mayer from

Google.

Barrett was shocked.

Barrett himself had only joined Yahoo from Google





46 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

less than a month before.

Barrett’s job at Google had been a good one. He’d only

left because Yahoo chairman Fred Amoroso had told

him that interim CEO Ross Levinsohn was going to

get the full-time job.

As Barrett got back off the plane, he thought: What

the hell happened?

- - -

The story of how Marissa Mayer came to Yahoo

begins in the summer of 2011.

That’s when Dan Loeb, the manager of a hedge fund

called Third Point, decided he could make a lot of

money investing in Yahoo if he could force a few

people to quit its board and install a CEO of his

choosing.

There were two simple reasons Loeb believed Yahoo

was a worthwhile investment, despite a decade of

mismanagement. The first was that 700 million or so

people still went to Yahoo.com every month, even

though the company hadn’t come up with a cool new

product in years.

The second was that Yahoo had made a brilliant

investment in two Asian Internet companies, Alibaba

and Yahoo! Japan, and Loeb did not believe this

investment was being taken advantage of by

management.

So Loeb took a 5 percent stake in Yahoo and began a

letter-writing, shareholder-activist campaign to





47 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

David Needleman

Dan Loeb asked Michael Wolf to find a CEO for Yahoo.

unseat its CEO and several of its board members. In

his letters, Loeb accurately pointed out that Yahoo

had been mismanaged for a decade, and that it was

largely the board’s fault. In December, Yahoo’s board

hoped to appease Loeb by hiring PayPal president

Scott Thompson to be Yahoo’s new CEO.

Loeb was not appeased. Publicly, he began lobbying

Thompson to install new board members. Privately,

Loeb asked a consultant he’d hired, former MTV

president Michael Wolf, to begin looking for someone

who could replace Thompson.

With this mission in

mind, Loeb and Wolf

flew to San Francisco for

a series of meetings in

January 2012.

One morning

during their trip,

Loeb and Wolf

drove south to

meet with venture

capitalist Marc

Andreessen for

breakfast at his

house. Famous for co-founding Netscape, the original

Web browser company, Andreessen had gone on to

found two other billion-dollar companies and a

successful venture capital firm. By the winter of 2012,

Andreessen had become Silicon Valley’s go-to wise

man.

Loeb and Wolf asked Andreessen if he’d join their

slate for Yahoo’s board. He refused to participate in a





48 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

deal perceived to be hostile to Yahoo’s founders and

current management, but said he was happy to talk

about Yahoo strategy.

The New Yorkers asked him: Whom should Yahoo

hire: a media person or a product person?

By a “media person,” they meant an executive who

could run Yahoo almost like a television network or

magazine publisher, but on the Internet. This person’s

specialties would be the ability to identify great

content, close deals with the people who create it and

those who could distribute it, and the skill set to sell

ads against it. CBS chief executive Les Moonves and

former News Corp chief operating officer Peter

Chernin are this kind of executive. So was Michael

Eisner when he spent 20 years transforming Disney

from a sleepy studio into a corporate giant.

By a “product person,” Loeb and Wolf meant someone

who could get teams of engineers and designers to

build software tools that consumers find useful,

addictive, or fun. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is

this kind of executive. So was Apple co-founder, Steve

Jobs.

Almost since its beginning, Yahoo had struggled with

its identity.

Should it act like a “media” company — one that tries

to attract consumers by producing and buying content

and distributing it through Yahoo.com? Or should Yahoo

act like a “products” company — where Internet

software tools like search, Webmail, stock charts, and

photo storage attract users?





49 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

AP

Marc Andreessen

Andreessen said: If you

get the chance to run

Yahoo, the only way

you'll be able to save it is

if you hire someone who

can make great Yahoo

products.

Andreessen talked

about the

difference between

technology

companies and

“normal”

companies. He

said the output of

normal companies

is their product:

cars, shoes, life

insurance. In his

view, the output of technologies companies is

innovation. Whatever they are selling today, they will

be selling something different in five years. If they

stop innovating, they die.

Andreessen said the person at the top of Yahoo needs

to know how to pioneer and produce a steady stream

of innovative products if the company was going to

survive in a competition with large companies like

Google, Facebook, and Apple or even some of the

Valley’s many startups.

The message stuck.

In May 2012, Loeb finally figured out a way to get

Scott Thompson out of the CEO job.





50 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Flickr/Yodel Anecdotal (http://www.flickr.com/photos/yodelanecdotal

/6643144387/sizes/l/in/photostream/)

Scott Thompson resigned from Yahoo a5er Dan Loeb

revealed his bio was false.

Loeb learned that Thompson had graduated from

Stonehill College in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in

accounting — not a “bachelor’s degree in accounting

and computer science” as Yahoo claimed on its

website, and more importantly, in an SEC filing from

April.

On May 3, Loeb drafted a letter containing this

information, and sent it to the Yahoo board and the

SEC, which would publish it for the public. On May

13, Thompson resigned, citing health issues.

The Yahoo board, which

had hired Thompson

without the help of an

outside executive search

firm, also capitulated. In

a legal settlement, it gave

Loeb much of what he’d

been asking for since the

summer before.

Five directors

resigned

immediately. Loeb

and Wolf gained

board seats, and more importantly, the chairmanship

of two important committees. Loeb would chair the

board’s transaction committee, which meant he would

have sign-off power on any sale of Yahoo’s valuable

Asian assets. Wolf would lead the executive search

committee, which had the immediate task of finding

Yahoo’s next CEO.

Wolf had someone in mind — just the kind of

“products” CEO Andreessen had recommended. He

hired executive recruiter Jim Citrin of Spencer Stuart,

and gave him a description of the Yahoo CEO job.





51 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

The document Wolf gave Citrin said Yahoo needed to

hire someone who can “modernize” Yahoo’s “user

experiences” on mobile devices by building a culture

that attracts the best “content, developer, product

innovation, advertising, marketing and managerial

talent.” The document said the board sought someone

who could “reestablish Yahoo!’s credibility and

reputation in the tech-innovator community” and

build partnerships with companies such as

“Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.”

At Citrin’s first meeting with the board the week of

May 21, 2012, he told the directors there were only a

few people in the industry who could do the job

described in Wolf’s document. Citrin said those

people were at companies like Amazon, Apple, and

Google. He said that it was going to be very difficult

for Yahoo to hire any of them.

The board came up with a list of candidates for Citrin

to approach.

Though he was a “media,” not a “products” executive,

the top prospect for most of the directors was Ross

Levinsohn, who became interim Yahoo CEO when

Thompson stepped down.

Levinsohn, who worked in Yahoo’s Santa Monica

office, is the kind of executive who looks like he

belongs in the CEO’s office of a West Coast

entertainment company. He'll point at the camera

when he’s having his picture taken. He’s got a wide

smile. His hair is combed back. He wears suits. He

looks good in the fleece zip-up sweater vests they give

out at Allen & Co’s Sun Valley conference for media





52 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

AP

Apple's Eddy Cue was a candidate for the Yahoo CEO

job.

moguls.

Levinsohn joined Yahoo in October 2010 as an

executive vice president in charge of the “Americas”

region. Levinsohn had impressed shareholders with

his performance at Yahoo’s annual shareholder

meeting in 2011, when he presented a vision for

Yahoo as “the world’s premier digital media

company.” For a moment, he’d ended the confusion

about what kind of company Yahoo was — a “product”

company or a “media” company. To many directors, it

seemed like Levinsohn understood the value of

Yahoo’s audience, and had a plan to tap it.

Among the other names

were Nikesh Arora, the

chief business officer at

Google; Eddy Cue,

Apple’s senior vice

president of Internet

Software and Services;

and Jason Kilar, then the

CEO of Web TV site

Hulu.

The board also

asked Citrin to

approach Google’s Marissa Mayer.

Citrin cautioned that Mayer appeared to be a lifer at

Google and was unlikely to be interested in the job.

Many of the directors wondered whether Mayer was

actually capable of leading a large public corporation.

They asked question like: Had she ever managed a

balance sheet? Hadn’t she been demoted only a year

before?

Citrin said he’d call Mayer anyway.





53 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

World Economic Forum (http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum

/8412862071/sizes/k/in/photostream/)

- - -

In the middle of

June 2012,

Marissa Mayer

sat on a plane,

thinking and

preparing. That

Monday, she’d

gotten a call

from Jim Citrin

of executive

search firm

Spencer Stuart.

He’d been

retained by

Yahoo, and he

had Yahoo director Michael Wolf with him.

Would she like to speak to Wolf? She would.

Now Mayer was flying to New York to have dinner at

Wolf’s Manhattan apartment with Wolf, Citrin, and

three other Yahoo directors: David Kenny, John

Hayes, and Thomas McInerney.

After 13 years at Google, she was surprised to find

herself actually, finally, truly considering leaving.

The past two years at Google — since she was,

according to the rest of the world “demoted” — had

been quieter than the first 11, but in many ways more

challenging and exciting.

In local and geo, she’d taken over a much more

massive operation than the one she’d been running at

Google.

Whenever people asked her about the “demotion,” as

Wolf and the other directors might over dinner,

Mayer always pointed out how she had gone from





54 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

managing 250 product managers in search to

supervising a much larger, more diverse group of

managers — 1,100 people managing engineering,

design, marketing, and sales. Mayer would tell people

that she was supervising some 6,000 contractors.

She’d figured out that by the fraction of the company,

the geo and local piece that she was running was

something like 20-25 percent of the company’s overall

headcount.

The business challenges she’d dealt with in those

years had been as diverse as the types of people she

managed.

In September 2011, she went and bought Zagat for

$125 million. It was not the kind of deal someone who

had been “demoted” could do. It was Google’s tenth-

largest acquisition ever. More than that, the

integration of Zagat into Google search signaled a

major change in Google’s philosophy.

Previously, the company had steadfastly refused to

own or produce content that would show up in its

search engine. It would just index what was already

out there being created by the rest of the world.

But after Mayer joined geo in 2010, she found that the

“rest of the world” wasn’t as good at gathering

geographic data and putting it on the Web as it was

creating websites for Google to index. So she decided

it was time for Google to start owning data. Her boss,

Jeff Huber, and Larry Page had backed her on the

deal and the philosophical change, and now Google

had lots of content for location-based searches — a





55 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

popular kind of search to do on mobile, which was

quickly becoming the future of the Internet.

Even as Mayer was on the plane, she was playing a

crucial part in helping Google fend off one of its

toughest competitors in mobile: Apple. Months

before, she’d noticed that Apple had started buying

companies in the mapping space. Then executive

recruiters sent by Apple had started reaching out to

her people.

Obviously, they were up to something big. Mayer

didn’t know — Apple would never announce it until it

was done — but she figured it planned to remove

Google Maps from the iPhone and replace it with its

own Apple Maps. She’d already countered Apple’s

offers by giving her people what they really wanted.

Sometimes it was raises. Sometimes it was

independence. Sometimes it was new titles.

Sometimes it was actually more work, more

responsibility. She knew what her people wanted.

None of her reports ended up quitting to join Apple.

Now, Mayer had her team working on a new Google

Maps app for iPhone. She was confident it was going

to beat anything Apple’s people could come up with.

Mayer knew that her job switch in 2010 looked like a

demotion to some people outside the company —

especially people in the media. But as she flew to New

York that day in June 2012, Marissa Mayer knew that

she’d spent the previous two years learning a lot from

a bigger job than she’d ever had before.

And now she knew that she was ready for an even

bigger one.





56 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

On the evening of June 24, Mayer arrived at Wolf’s

modern, Fifth Avenue apartment. An informal dinner

was served.

Mayer read for the part of Yahoo CEO.

Throughout the conversation, Mayer touted a

surprisingly thought-out plan for overhauling Yahoo’s

culture, executive suite, and product line-up.

After Mayer left, one of the board directors said to

Citrin: “That’s the next CEO of Yahoo.” The

committee agreed that Wolf would stay in touch with

her.

One of the directors noticed something funny, but

decided to keep it to himself. Wolf had served a very

expensive bottle of wine, and Mayer hadn’t had a sip.

Probably she was just nervous.

Wolf wants to hire Mayer, but everyone else?

After that dinner, Wolf, the chair of Yahoo’s search

committee, had decided that Marissa Mayer should be

the next CEO of Yahoo.

With her experience running cornerstone Google

products like Search, Google Maps, and Gmail, she

was exactly the kind of innovative, products-oriented

CEO that Silicon Valley wise man Marc Andreessen

had told him to hire back in January.

But Wolf, and his pro-Mayer allies on the board, had

a problem.

By mid-June, other Yahoo directors had already all

but decided that interim CEO Ross Levinsohn should





57 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Yahoo Advertising (http://www.flickr.com/photos/56984041@N00

/6969638374/in/photolist-bBTdES-asRrcg-asRr7P-a7YqRc-a82k1G-

a7Ysxa-a82iks-a7YrmX-a82j7Q-a7YsrR-a82i8A-a7Ymjg-a7YroD-

a7YsyK-dSDrzC-dSDt6L-dSxUb2-dSDqp1-dSDs4y-dSDrn7-dSDqbw-

dSxUsD-dSxUWx-dSDqHh-dSDr7U-dSDpXN-dSDtxd-dSxVoB-

dSDshm-dSxTrc-dSxRmZ-dSDqVJ-9RB2T6-biVYb2-biVYe6-biVY8g-

bQMVnr-aCR7mS-aCNpCM-aCR7pE-aCNpv6-aCNpAT-

a9JFW8-9Vz3yM-a82icJ-a82jwb-a7YqBg-a82jHy-a82idN-a7YqJF-

a82jDq)

Ross Levinsohn and Katie Couric

get the full-time job.

When Thompson

resigned in the middle of

May, and Levinsohn was

named interim CEO, new

chairman Fred Amoroso

pulled Levinsohn aside

and told him to run

Yahoo like he was going

to be the full-time CEO.

After that conversation,

Levinsohn sent a memo

to all of Yahoo’s

employees. He wrote,

“I’m fired up and I hope

you are too. I believe in

the power of what we’re

doing. We have an

incredibly talented team,

unparalleled strengths in

key areas and most importantly, I see the purple pride building

everywhere. Let’s move forward quickly with conviction and

confidence.”

Levinsohn ran with the opportunity, and by the end of

June — really, just a few weeks — he’d accomplished a

lot. He’d signed a deal with Facebook over patents. He

was able to quickly recruit impressive executives into

Yahoo, including Google advertising executive

Michael Barrett. Levinsohn and his top dealmaker,

Jim Heckman, were also able to nail down several

content partnerships in just a few weeks, including

one with on-demand music service Spotify. Levinsohn

and Heckman were also busy working on much larger

deals with Microsoft, Google, and a fast-growing ad

tech company based in New York called AppNexus.

As Levinsohn worked hard to earn the full-time job,

Yahoo directors began to come under pressure from

the rest of the industry to hand him the job.





58 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

All Things D (http://allthingsd.com/video

/?video_id=D36F34C7-3485-4DCC-9CC1-EE6BD8C68FE1)

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and cofounder Reid

Hoffman lobbied for Ross Levinsohn.

Levinsohn’s allies across the media, advertising, and

entertainment industries wrote Yahoo directors

letters recommending him.

At The Wall Street

Journal’s D: All Things

Digital conference,

LinkedIn CEO Jeff

Weiner and Linkedin

co-founder and venture

capitalist Reid Hoffman

enthusiastically

endorsed Levinsohn, and

said Yahoo would finally

be in good hands if it put

him in charge.

After several

weeks went by without Yahoo naming a full-time

replacement for Thompson, even Marc Andreessen

wrote a note to Loeb suggesting that Yahoo should

just put Levinsohn in the job permanently and

commit to a media strategy, since it seemed unlikely

they could get a top-end product CEO, and continued

delays would permanently damage the company.

Meanwhile, All Things D reporter Kara Swisher —

who had, over the years, covered Yahoo closer than

anyone thanks to board-level sources — seemed to be

actively pushing for Yahoo to hire Levinsohn. She said

the only reason the board hadn’t hired him yet was

that it was looking for a “unicorn CEO — one who

actually does not exist but who sounds just dreamy.”

By the beginning of July, several board members were

almost completely sold. They wanted Levinsohn to

keep the job.

The top secret interviews





59 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

moooster (http://www.flickr.com/photos/moooster/512631847/sizes

/o/in/photolist-MinA8-2irZBx-2ncJgh-2UyJk7-2UyJs3-44soQt-

44wDGo-44xrUA-44ya77-4q4jps-4vSyJv-4Rveg4-55WH6S-581iWb-

581j7L-581jbw-5ki9Wz-5uJWU9-5vNgpe-652ckZ-652cBF-656t4J-

6i2uGk-6i4o1M-6i4pZv-6i8wMj-6i8z7o-6HZEV1-6M2ywz-6M2yAR-

6M2yCi-6M2yD6-6M2yFi-6M2yHB-6M2yJZ-6M2yNr-6M2yPx-

6M2yQr-6M2yRn-6M2yUg-6M2yWn-6M2yYV-6M6HNA-6M6HRh-

6M6HSo-6M6HTo-6M6HXy-6M6J1w-6M6J5J-6M6J6J-6M6Jbq/)

The Four Seasons in Palo Alto

On the morning of

Wednesday, July 11,

2012, a small bus pulled

in front of the Four

Seasons Hotel in East

Palo Alto, California; a

squat all-glass building

in the middle of a

parking lot next to a

highway. As the bus

idled, about a dozen

middle-aged executives

quietly boarded.

These executives

were the Yahoo

board of directors,

and as they boarded that bus, they had no idea where

they were going. Their destination was a secret

because these people — people who would soon have

to come together and decide the fate of Yahoo — did

not trust each other.

That day, the board was going to interview, for the last

time, four finalist candidates for the Yahoo CEO job.

The search committee had decided that if the entire

board knew where the final interviews were taking

place, one of the directors would inevitably leak the

location to All Things D reporter Kara Swisher. For

years, the aviators-wearing, tough-talking Swisher

had been reporting Yahoo layoffs, firings, hirings, and

acquisitions before they actually happened. The new

directors assumed she had a source, or sources, on

the old board, and they were determined not to

provide her new ones.

Six days before, Swisher had reported, accurately,

that the board was considering Hulu CEO Jason Kilar





60 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Google Street View

This is the secret location of the Yahoo CEO

interviews

for the job. The report had made things awkward for

Kilar with Hulu’s corporate parents, Disney and News

Corporation, and he’d pulled himself out of the

running — taking a good option away from the board.

Some members of the board felt Swisher had meant to

nuke Kilar in order to help Levinsohn get the job.

(Swisher denies this, and there isn't any evidence to

back the allegation.)

David Kenny was particularly insistent on secrecy.

The fall prior, before Scott Thompson was hired,

Kenny had interviewed for the CEO job at Yahoo.

Word of his meetings in Sunnyvale had gotten out,

and Kenny had to resign from Akamai, where he was

president. Kenny recovered nicely — he’d become the

CEO of The Weather Channel — but he didn’t want

the same thing happening to any of the executives

interviewing that day.

The directors rode in the bus for exactly five miles —

south on University, south on 101, off the highway at

Oregon Expressway, and continuing onto Page Mill

road.

After 10 to 15 minutes,

the the bus pulled into

an office park, and

everyone got out.

They’d arrived at

the offices of Third

Point’s law firm,

Gibson Dunn. The

location was

ostensibly picked

by headhunter Jim Citrin, who’d also arranged the





61 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

buses. But some of the directors took it as a signal

from the Third Point board members about whose

show this really was.

Citrin had also arranged for a car to pick up

Levinsohn. He had no idea where he was going,

either. He also didn’t know who the other finalists

were.

Levinsohn went first. He presented his plan, which

the board was familiar with by then. He wanted to get

Yahoo out of the “platform” business, where it was

competing with Google, Microsoft, and Facebook —

and move it into the content business. Levinsohn

knew some of the directors were worried that he’d

ignore Yahoo’s engineers and product development

people, so he talked about how he’d been spending a

lot of time with product boss Shashi Seth and his

team.

The interview felt strange to Levinsohn. He’d been

talking to Loeb a handful of times, every day. He said,

“You guys know where I’m at. You know what I'm

doing.”

After, Jim Citrin told Levinsohn he’d done well.

Levinsohn was told that if the board decided to go in

the “media” direction, the job was his.

Levinsohn left.

After enough time had passed to ensure that they

wouldn’t spot each other, Mayer arrived by limo.

Anyone remotely familiar with her childhood, studies,

and career could have predicted what happened next.





62 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Mayer walked into that room at Gibson Dunn and

blew them away.

She described her long familiarity with Yahoo and its

products. She described how Yahoo products would

evolve over time under her watch. Her presentation

included an extraordinary amount of detail on

Yahoo’s search business, audience analytics, and

data. She talked about fixing Yahoo’s culture with

more transparency, perks, and accountability. She

named her perceived weaknesses, and explained how

she planned to address them — including by hiring

people who had the skills she didn’t have.

When Mayer was done, Jim Citrin told her he’d call

her with the board’s decision by 8 p.m.

She left. The board still had a tough final decision to

make.

A number of the Yahoo directors still opposed hiring

Mayer. They argued that she didn’t have enough

corporate experience. Some of the directors favored

Levinsohn because they felt that the Third Point

directors were just trying to install someone they

could control. They had not overlooked that the

“secret” location of the final interviews had been the

offices of Third Point’s lawyers.

The directors who opposed Mayer — most vocally Amoroso, but also

Brad Smith and David Kenny — argued that Levinsohn, with his

“media” strategy, had a better plan for Yahoo than Mayer and her

“products” strategy.

They argued that Mayer may present a greater upside

— she was more likely to come up with the next

Facebook or Google Maps or Twitter — but that





63 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Intuit (http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_kit

/intuit_town_hall/)

Brad Smith worried Mayer didn't have enough

corporate experience.

Levinsohn was the

safer bet, a more

guaranteed return.

Loeb, who had

fought a bloody

fight to get onto

the board, and

whose vote

undoubtedly

mattered the most,

didn’t mind that Mayer was a high-risk, high-reward

play. In his view, the sale of Yahoo’s Asian assets and

the returning of those proceeds through share

buybacks or dividends would provide enough of a

“floor” in Yahoo’s value that it was worth betting on

the greater upside Mayer brought to the table.

The 8 p.m. deadline came and went. Mayer, at a

dinner party on the other side of town, tried to stop

checking her phone.

At 9:45 p.m., the board still hadn’t called her. She

signaled to her husband, Zachary Bogue, that she

wanted to leave the party.

Wolf lobbied his fellow directors in favor of Mayer to

the point of annoyance.

Finally, the pro-Mayer directors proposed a solution.

What if they made Mayer the CEO and offered

Levinsohn a huge amount of money to stay on as her

COO? That way she’d be able to pursue her “products”

strategy, and he could keep running the sales force

and making deals with major media companies.





64 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Spencer Stuart

Jim Citrin called Marissa Mayer to offer her the job.

An informal vote was cast. The pro-Mayer directors

were in the majority, with Amoroso and others voting

against.

It was over. A formal vote was cast.

This time the board unanimously voted to name

Marissa Mayer the new CEO of Yahoo.

Meanwhile, Mayer and Bogue had decided to stay at

their dinner party, but it was finally time to go. As

they began to say their goodbyes, Mayer’s phone

finally rang. It was Jim Citrin. She let it go to

voicemail.

Citrin told her: “Marissa

… you should be smiling.

We’re smiling. Call me

ASAP.”

When the board

reached Mayer to

offer her the job,

she did not accept

it right away. First

she had some

news to share.

She was five months pregnant. That’s why she hadn’t

touched her wine at Michael Wolf’s apartment the

month before.

The offer stood. After three days of negotiation with

Wolf, she accepted.

The morning after Mayer got the voicemail from

Citrin, Levinsohn was unaware that his fate had

already been sealed. Once again he presented his plan





65 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

for Yahoo to the board — this time with his executive

team there to fill in the details.

He’d woken up that morning still feeling confident

that he was going to get the job. But this was the

meeting where, midway through, Loeb left to go to the

bathroom and Wolf stood with Wilson to loudly

question the deals Heckman had been negotiating

with Google, Microsoft, and others.

Levinsohn went into the weekend at Allen & Co.’s

mogul conference at Sun Valley sure he’d lost the job,

but unsure to whom. By Sunday, Ross Levinsohn had

found out that the board had also interviewed Marissa

Mayer. When he heard her name, he knew it was

over.

On Monday, Levinsohn went to work. Yahoo had to

report its second quarter earnings that week, and he

worked with CFO Tim Morse’s team to prepare some

remarks for the company’s conference call with

analysts. Levinsohn kept telling the team, “don’t write

this for me, write it for a CEO. It should be generic.”

When that was done, Levinsohn went back to his

office to wait for the news. He’d wanted this job. He’d

fought for it. He’d done well.

Finally, Fred Amoroso walked into Levinsohn's office and delivered the

blow.

Back in New York and barely off a British Airways

plane now heading for London, Michael Barrett

joined a conference call with other top Yahoo

executives.

Amoroso explained the news.





66 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Fox Business News (http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4487781/rovi-the-new-

netflix-/)

Fred Amoroso broke the bad news to Levinsohn.

He said, “We

love Ross. We

thank Ross. We

want him to

stay. We weren’t

looking for

someone like

Marissa, but

when she

showed up, boy

were we

impressed.”

“Although it was a hard decision, and we think Ross is

doing a great job, she brings a different level of

perspective and talent to the organization we couldn’t

pass up.”


On Tuesday, July 17, 2012, David Filo stood waiting at

the entrance of Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale,

Calif. He was very excited.

Filo is a quiet, unassuming engineer for Yahoo. He

works in a cubicle. He also happens to be a

co-founder of the company.

In 2012, Filo still owned 6 percent of Yahoo. He was

its largest individual shareholder. According to

Forbes, there were only 959 people on the planet with





67 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Marissa Mayer's Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marissamayer

/8295066273/)

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and co-founder David Filo.

more money than

him.

And yet, the

reason Filo was

waiting near the

entrance of Yahoo

was so that when

Marissa Mayer

arrived, he would

be able to unfurl a

long purple carpet before her feet.

Yahoo’s hero was coming. But huge challenges faced

her.

Yahoo’s websites were getting fewer and fewer visitors

every year. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s mobile apps were

being largely ignored.

For years, Yahoo’s most talented executives and

engineers had been quitting the company to join

faster-moving rivals like Facebook and Google. Those

who stayed at Yahoo tended to show up late and leave

early, or log-in from home. Mayer had to fix Yahoo’s

culture.

Mayer also walked into the office that day seven

months pregnant. Her new colleagues looked to see if

she was showing. They wondered how in the world

she would manage a baby and the huge job ahead of

her.

The excitement was everywhere in the building. One

enthusiastic Yahoo employee had made a poster with

Mayer’s face on it in the style of Shepard Fairey’s





68 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

2008 campaign

poster for Barack

Obama. Across the

lower third, the

poster has one

word in all-caps:

“HOPE.”

When she finally arrived, Mayer’s first job was to meet

the one group of Yahoo employees who were not as

excited by her arrival — Yahoo’s senior executives,

several of whom had risen to their jobs thanks to Ross

Levinsohn.

Levinsohn, despite personal pleas from Amoroso and

whispers of a generous compensation package, was

not staying as Mayer’s chief operating officer. Since

he took the interim job in May, he’d warned the board

that if he didn’t get the permanent gig, he was going to

try to become a CEO somewhere else.

If Levinsohn ever had any notion of reconsidering,

that was squashed by his first scheduled meeting with

Mayer.

After he’d learned that she was getting the job, he’d

flown back home to Los Angeles. When Mayer said

she wanted to meet, he agreed to fly back up to

Sunnyvale. But when he showed up at their appointed

time, Mayer’s assistant told Levinsohn she was

running late.

Levinsohn said to the assistant, “My office is three

doors down. I'll be in there.”

Suddenly anxious, the assistant said: “You have to





69 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

wait here.”

She wanted him to wait so that when Mayer was done

with whatever she was doing, he would be

immediately available.

Levinsohn said, “Not so much.” He walked away.

Soon he walked out of the building for good.

Levinsohn decided that no good would come of him

staying. He could see what would happen: Yahoo

would devolve into a place where there were his

people and there were Mayer’s people. The whole

“media” versus “products” battle would rage on, and it

would be an ugly fight.

And so, feeling that the rug had just been ripped out

from underneath them, Yahoo’s senior executives

walked into Mayer’s new office at Yahoo — the one

Fred Amoroso had been using days before.

Many of these people were meeting Mayer for the first

time, and they expected to sit across from the woman

they’d read about in so many fluffy profiles and had

seen on TV or on stage at conferences — someone

who was charismatic and warm; personal.

That was not what they got.

One by one, they walked in and sat down at a table across from Mayer.

Then, she launched into questions. She asked: “Where did you get your

education?” “Where are you from?” “What do you do here?” And so on.

As Yahoo executives answered, Mayer took notes on

their answers with pen on paper, hardly looking up.

“It kind of felt like you were summoned to the





70 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

TechCrunch (http://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/7257855608/)

principal’s office,” says one executive who went

through one of these introductory meetings with

Mayer.

“You would have thought a fair portion of [that

meeting] would have been about ‘so what are you

going through? How are you feeling? Sorry about

Ross. We love him. We’d like to keep him.

Realistically, he won’t stay but that doesn’t have any

impact on you.’

“There wasn’t any kind of commiseration or any kind

of bear hug. There wasn’t even a question of ‘Are you

in or are you out?’ It was: ‘I assume you’re in. Let me

know otherwise.’

“There was no time for short conversation or human

emotions. It was very boom, boom, boom.

“Most people walked away from that meeting saying,

‘Holy shit.’”

One Yahoo executive attended such an introductory

meeting between his boss and Mayer. His boss asked





71 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Mayer “Would you like to meet the people I brought?”

Mayer looked at them.

“No.”

The truth is, the person Yahoo’s top executives sat

across from in those first meetings was not the

Marissa Mayer they thought they knew from the

media coverage of her. It was the Marissa Mayer her

Stanford classmate Josh Elman remembers from late

night study sessions.

Just as during those all-nighters almost 20 years

before, Mayer wasn’t at Yahoo to socialize. In one

early meeting Mayer said that Yahoo was going to fail

— shut down — in the next few years if it did not get

things going soon. She told a top product executive

that Yahoo lagged in innovation and talent, and that

its culture was broken.

She was there to save the company, and that was

going to take a lot of work. It was past time to get

started.

Some of the executives Mayer met with had a hard

time connecting with her. Just as some of her

Stanford study mates mistook her shyness for being

“stuck up,” some of her new Yahoo colleagues took

her all-business attitude as being “demeaning.”

For the people who were making Yahoo’s products at

the time, the meetings were even more intense.

A designer or a top product manager would sit down

and Mayer would assault them with a series of





72 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

jdlasica (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jdlasica/3921911015/)

Jim Heckman's and Marissa Mayer's personalities

clashed.

questions.

“How was that researched?”

“What was the research methodology?”

“How did you back that up?”

One person who went through a Mayer grilling says,

“It was scary for a lot of people because of its

intensity.”

The most pivotal

meeting Mayer had in

her first few days at

Yahoo was with

Levinsohn’s dealmaker,

Jim Heckman.

She had to learn

exactly what

Heckman had

been negotiating

with Yahoo’s

competitors. She had to decide whether or not to

finalize these deals or to unwind them altogether.

More broadly, Mayer had to understand the direction

Heckman and Levinsohn had been taking Yahoo, and

decide whether to keep it going that way or to slam on

the brakes.

It is possible that, in the history of business, there has

never been a meeting between two people whose

personalities, styles, and priorities clash more than

Mayer’s and Heckman’s.

Mayer is passionate about the pixels in the picture.

She’s shy. She’s careful. She’s bold, but not reckless.





73 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

She’s idealistic about people. She'll pay $60,000 to

meet a designer, but wear his dress modestly.

Jim Heckman breaks glass. He’s squinty-eyed and

caffeinated. He makes deals. He uses your first name.

He quotes the comedian Daniel Tosh of Tosh.0. He

doesn’t care about the headcount; he cares about the

bottom line. Once, at a Yahoo party held on a yacht

during the Cannes Lions Festival in France, Heckman

brought a date who decided to go topless. There was a

lot of shouting on the yacht.

Heckman met with Mayer during her first few days at

Yahoo. Heckman laid out the plan he and Levinsohn

had been working on for the past year. If

implemented it would have completely changed the

way Yahoo did business.

Yahoo makes its money by selling advertising.

Heckman and Levinsohn believed that Yahoo had

spent too much money and too much time trying to

invent advertising technology that would allow Yahoo

to charge higher ad rates. He believed that companies

like Google, Microsoft, and AppNexus were far ahead

of Yahoo in the world of ad tech, and that Yahoo was

better off partnering with one of those companies and

getting rid of the people it employed to work on ad

tech.

Heckman told Mayer he believed partner ad

technology would immediately raise Yahoo’s ad rates.

Moreover, with the money Yahoo would save by

getting rid of the people it had working on ad tech, it

could go out and buy high quality video content from





74 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Microsoft

Steve Ballmer was ready to give MSN.com to Yahoo.

Hollywood studios. He argued that advertisers would

be willing to pay much higher ad rates if Yahoo’s

content quality were higher. He said rates could go

from under $2 per 1,000 impressions to $20.

In Heckman’s vision, Yahoo.com was more like a cable

TV provider with a large, installed audience, than it

was a maker of technology products.

Heckman said he already

had a deal negotiated

with Google executive

Henrique De Castro to

begin using Google’s

advertising technology

instead of Yahoo’s.

Heckman said the

same theory could

be applied to other

second-, third-, or

fourth-place Yahoo businesses. He talked about how

Boeing lets GE, Rolls-Royce, and Pratt-Whitney make

the actual engines for its airplanes.

He told Mayer that he’d negotiated a deal with

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, wherein Yahoo would

turn over its entire search business — patents and all

— in exchange for Microsoft’s large online media

property, MSN.com, and long-term, guaranteed cash

payments.

Heckman said his plan would allow Yahoo to run with

just 4,000 full-time employees, far fewer than the

15,000 full-timers and thousands more contractors

Yahoo employed then. He said Yahoo EBITDA

(Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and





75 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Amortization) would increase by 50 percent if Mayer

closed his deals.

Mayer heard him out, taking notes the whole time.

Within 24 hours, Mayer let Heckman know that she’d

canceled all his deals and that his services were no

longer needed by Yahoo.

Heckman flew to Ibiza, Spain for a 30-day vacation.

Mayer began to hire her own people.

Ironically, one of her biggest hires in her first few

months at Yahoo was the Google executive Jim

Heckman had been negotiating with, Henrique De

Castro.

Mayer made De Castro Yahoo’s COO, and agreed to

pay him as much as $62 million over four years, not

counting annual stock grants.

This hire came as a surprise to Michael Barrett, the

Google executive Ross Levinsohn had hired to run

Yahoo ad sales. Though Barrett had been hired by

Levinsohn, he was trying to make a go of things at

Mayer’s Yahoo.

Barrett had heard rumors that Mayer was going to

hire someone to replace him, but when he confronted

her about them she said she wasn’t going to hire

anyone above him, and certainly not Henrique De

Castro. She even hinted that Barrett could be Yahoo’s

chief operating officer.

But then Barrett read a story on AllThingsD.com saying

that De Castro had been hired.





76 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Hurt, but politic, he called Mayer’s office intending to

congratulate her on the big hire. He wanted to begin

discussing his own exit, as well.

Barrett got Mayer’s assistant.

She said, “Marissa is unavailable. I’m sure she’d love

to hear from you. Could I have her call you back?”

Barrett said fine.

Mayer called him back while he was out to dinner in

San Francisco.

As he picked up the phone, he expected her to begin

the conversation with an apology for blindsiding him.

But all Mayer said was, “You called?”

Stunned that Mayer would either pretend to not know

why he called or actually didn’t know why, Barrett

said, “Yeah, I just wanted to say congrats on

Henrique. He sounds like a really great hire.”

Mayer said, “I wasn’t able to tell anyone I was hiring

him. I don’t think you should feel bad.”

“I don’t really feel bad at all,” he said.

The two never talked again, and Barrett left Yahoo

with a severance package worth many millions of

dollars.

De Castro has a distinct reputation among his former colleagues on the

advertising side of Google’s business. All consider him sharp and

effective. But he speaks with a heavy accent, is considered deeply

pompous, and likes to speak in aphorisms. His nickname is “the most

interesting man in the world,” after the Dos Equis spokesman.





77 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

All Things D (http://allthingsd.com/video/?catname=d10)

Henrique De Castro's nickname is “the most interesting

man in the world,” a5er the Dos Equis spokesman.

Steven Henry, Getty Images

Jackie Reses is Mayer's executive bagman.

Mayer’s next

most important

and

controversial

hire was a

long-time

private equity

investor named

Jacqueline

Reses.

Though Reses had no experience in human resources,

Mayer put her in charge of it at Yahoo. Mayer hired

Reses because Mayer’s plan to improve the talent level

at Yahoo was to buy lots of failed startups for small

amounts of money.

Mayer believed that Reses would be expert at nailing

down those kinds of transactions. She has been. In

Mayer’s first year, Yahoo bought more than 20

startups.

Reses, a “gruff” and

“matter-of-fact,”

executive also served

another purpose for

Mayer: executioner.

In December 2012,

she called up Michael

Katz, a Yahoo

executive based in

New York, and asked

him out for a drink at

a Mexican restaurant

called Dos Caminos.

It was a Sunday and

Katz was celebrating the second night of Hanukkah, but he figured

Reses would only ask him out at such an inconvenient time for

something important. One drink in, she fired him — just weeks before a

multi-million-dollar bonus was due. (He sued.)





78 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Mayer replaced Levinsohn’s chief marketing officer,

Mollie Spillman, in August — while Spillman was on

vacation. The new CMO was Kathy Savitt, a “bubbly”

and “charismatic” executive who’d founded a startup

in 2009 after running marketing for teen retail giant

American Eagle Outfitters.

After completing the sale of some Alibaba stock back

to Alibaba and netting Yahoo almost $8 billion in

cash, CFO Tim Morse left the company at the end of

September 2012. Mayer hired the plain-spoken Ken

Goldman to replace him.

Mayer kept some of Levinsohn’s people in place

during her first year. Media boss Mickie Rosen would

last until July 2013.

In the middle of all this, a baby

On Sept. 30, 2012

Mayer gave birth

to a baby boy. For

weeks, Mayer and

Bogue called their

child only “BBBB”

for “Big Baby Boy

Bogue.” They

would eventually name him Macallister.

Mayer’s pregnancy had been a fascination of the

media, women around the world, and plenty of her

Yahoo coworkers. Everyone wondered how she would

handle having a newborn while trying to turn around

a multi-billion-dollar public company.

Mayer made the baby-raising part look easy.





79 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

She took just a two-week maternity leave. Then, two

months after giving birth, Mayer told the audience at

a conference on women in business: “The baby’s been

way easier than everyone made it out to be.”

What Mayer didn’t say was that, thanks to her

incredible wealth and power at Yahoo, she had a lot of

help with Macallister. At home, she had a full-time

staff. At Yahoo, she knocked down a wall in her office

and set up a nursery so that Macallister — and his

nanny — could come to the office with her every day.

The comments upset a lot of women. Lisa Belkin of

The Huffington Post wrote an open letter to Mayer, in

which she said, “Dear Marissa Mayer … Putting ‘baby’

and ‘easy’ in the same sentence turns you into one of

those mothers we don’t like very much.”

Many of the same women would also take issue with

Mayer in the spring of 2013, when she banned

employees from working from home. Working from

home was a convenient way for many of them to

continue their careers after giving birth. Why was

Mayer taking such a stance against it?

Mayer hadn’t intended to make a statement. She’d

only wanted more people in the office at Yahoo. As for

fighting for the working conditions of women, Mayer

says that she is not a “feminist.” She says she is “blind

to gender.”

Mayer goes missing

By the middle of the fall of 2012, a camaraderie

developed between all of Mayer’s direct reports, and

enthusiasm in the Yahoo workforce was swelling.





80 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

REUTERS/Stephen Lam

This was in part due to a series of cultural reforms

Mayer brought to Yahoo almost immediately upon her

arrival.

She wanted to recreate

the high-energy,

high-productivity culture

of Google’s early days,

when she had been

happy working 100-hour

weeks as a programmer.

She made the food

free and started

taking her own

lunches in the

employee

cafeteria. She took

down cubicle

walls. She joined

in on email chains

with lower-level

employees. She banned BlackBerrys and gave top-of-

the-line company smartphones to every employee.

She created a forum where employees could complain

about issues and suggest solutions. Parking lots that

had been empty until 10 a.m. and again after 4 p.m.

were suddenly full from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.

On Fridays, Mayer would host a weekly meeting she

called “FYI.” All Yahoo employees were invited. She’d

go over her plans for the company, that week’s “wins”

for Yahoo, and answer questions from the crowd.

Mayer dazzled. She was in her element. It was like she

was back at Stanford, teaching fellow undergraduates

the material she’d just learned the year before.





81 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

“If you go to the Friday meetings, it’s like a Berkshire

Hathaway annual meeting,” says one executive who

attended them.

“We would take the stage after she would open, so we

were standing off the stage, watching the audience.

You should have sees the rapture in their eyes. They

were like smitten teenagers. It is unbelievable.

“She is deified. The first 50 rows are packed with the

engineering team and they’re cheering her on. There

is no question that there’s a palpable level of energy

and renewed enthusiasm and renewed pride.”

Just a few weeks in, Yahoo employee morale and

productivity hit a high not seen in a decade.

There was only one serious complaint from Mayer’s

top executives: She never seemed to be around when

they needed her. What was she working on all the

time?

Mayer demanded all of her staff across the world join

the call, so executives from New York, where it was 6

p.m., and Europe, where it was as late as midnight

would dial-in too.

Inevitably, Mayer herself would show up at least 45

minutes late. Some calls started so late that Yahoo’s

executives in Europe didn’t hang up till 3 a.m. their

time.

One of Mayer’s former Google colleagues says the

lateness habit is something Mayer picked up during

her 13 years at Google.





82 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Lockerz

Even executives hired by Mayer, like CMO Kathy Savitt,

felt ignored by her early on.

“Eric, Larry,

and Sergey were

always late and

causing

everybody in the

organization to

be late. They

would hold you

over, and then

you would be

late. And then the next meeting would start late and

then run late. And then all of the staff in that meeting

would be late. It would just trickle down through the

organization. Is Marissa Mayer always late? Well,

yeah. But it was endemic to the organization.”

Mayer’s lateness was a pain, sure. But by the early fall

of 2012, Mayer’s staff had grown used to it. In fact,

they were actually glad when she’d show up late to a

meeting, because that meant at least she hadn’t blown

it off entirely.

Mayer had approximately 25 people reporting directly

to her during her first year at Yahoo. In theory, she

was keeping up with each of them in a regularly

scheduled weekly meeting. In practice, she would go

weeks without talking to people because she was so

busy.

For a while, each of those 25 people thought that

Mayer was just picking on them, individually. The

people who had been at Yahoo before Mayer joined

assumed that this meant she was going to fire them

soon. The people Mayer had just hired into the

company, including Reses and Savitt, were even more





83 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

puzzled. Why had they been hired only to be ignored?

But then, during one of those long waiting periods

after 3 p.m. on a Monday, a conversation unfurled

that revealed all.

Making small talk, one executive said to another: “Did

she cancel one of your one-on-ones again?”

A third jumped in: “Oh my god, she does that to you

too?”

It turned out that everyone in the room and on the call

had been canceled on by Mayer, frequently.

“Everyone assumed that they were the only one being

canceled on. But then they realized that they weren’t,”

says one person who was in those meetings.

The problem with Mayer canceling her scheduled

meetings with everyone is that it was otherwise

impossible to see her.

“That was your only point of contact with her. There

wasn’t a lot of serendipity of bumping into her or

having her pop her head into a meeting. Getting onto

her calendar was nothing short of impossible.”

One person who kept getting blown off by Mayer

remembers thinking: “I may not be you, but I'm

running a huge part of your business. I've got

thousands of people reporting to me. The chance that

I would miss a meeting with my directs without an

explanation is none.

“First of all, I don’t miss those meetings. Maybe it

happens once in a year because of something. But





84 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

then I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to

call them and I'm going to apologize and I'm going to

say I'm sorry, I'll make it up to you, let’s schedule

some other time. I'm not going to make them wait for

more than five minutes because I know they have

incredibly important things to do. And they are

human beings.”

During those staff meetings, Mayer made little time

for certain topics early on — especially those having to

do with revenue, advertising technology, or

distribution.

Mayer would only entertain three deals per week, and

it was quickly obvious the ones she would always

prefer to talk about: anything to do with product. If

Reses wanted to talk about an aqui-hire that would

bring a talented product manager into Yahoo, Mayer

would prioritize the conversation. If there was talk of

a partnership with Apple on a new Weather app, that

would definitely be discussed.

There was a reason for Mayer’s lateness, for the

skipped meetings, and for the priority of product

discussions during those meetings, though.

Prior to joining Yahoo, Mayer had decided the

company’s many problems boiled down to one:

everything going out the front door from PR to

marketing to products was flawed. In her first months

at the company, Mayer’s plan was to immediately stop

that from happening ever again.

It would take an incredible amount of time and effort.

Picture a dam sprouting leaks, and Mayer trying to





85 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

plug them with all her fingers and toes.

“Who is this woman and what is she actually saying?”

A week after Mayer joined Yahoo, a Yahoo employee

took a photo of one of the purple-on-purple Marissa

Mayer HOPE posters taped to the walls of Yahoo and

sent it to a Google employee named Hunter Walk.

Walk tweeted it, and soon the poster was a news story.

One of Mayer’s former subordinates from Google,

Katie Jacobs Stanton, by then a vice president at

Twitter, saw the tweet, and replied to Walk in her own

public tweet. She wrote: “I hope that went through UI

review :)”

The joke is a reference to the user-interface reviews

that Mayer famously insisted on conducting for every

consumer-facing Web product Google launched from

2005 to 2010 before she was removed from the top of

the search products organization.

Stanton was suggesting that the Mayer she knew, the

one she once reported to, would soon have strict

control over all of Yahoo, and especially anything

Yahoo made for the public’s consumption.

Stanton was spot on.

Upon taking control of

Yahoo, Mayer’s first

instinct was to survey

and quantify everything

that Yahoo was doing

that the public could see,

and then start

controlling it.

This applied to all





86 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Fortune Live Media (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fortunelivemedia

/5957948631/)areas of Yahoo,

including public

relations. Throughout the fall, every week, all the

Yahoo PR people had to complete a big spreadsheet

with the names of every reporter they wanted to talk

to and what the business objective was. This

spreadsheet was then submitted to the head of Yahoo

PR, Anne Espiritu. Espiritu would then submit the

form to Mayer. Mayer, in turn, would approve or

reject every call or email and then pass the form back

down the line.

If Yahoo’s public relations staff had any complaints

about these tactics, they could bring them to Espiritu

during her weekly office hours.

No group had a shorter leash than Yahoo’s largest,

most important team: the hundreds of people in

charge of creating, developing, designing, and

updating Yahoo products.

On Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012, Marissa Mayer wrote a

blog post announcing a new version of Yahoo Mail for

the Web, Windows 8, the iPhone, and Android.

It was a huge moment for the new Yahoo. No Yahoo

product, perhaps other than the Yahoo homepage, is

as important to Yahoo as Yahoo Mail. It’s the biggest

reason any of Yahoo’s 700 million users ever bother

to go to Yahoo.com in the first place. And over the

previous few years, it had slowly been losing users.

“Email is the ultimate daily habit,” Mayer says in the

post. “It’s often the first thing we check in the

morning and the last thing before going to bed.”





87 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Three months before those words hit the Web, Mayer

and 30 designers, product managers, and engineers

sat around a huge table in one of Yahoo’s large,

traditional conference rooms.

Mayer was talking. Fast. As she spoke, two of the

people seated near her typed away like crazy, trying to

take verbatim notes in Google Docs. They were

struggling to keep up.

This group of people had been meeting three times a

week for a month, and they’d turned the conference

room into a space that now looked more like a design

studio. Windows ran down one side of the room. On

the other side, projectors hung from the ceiling,

rendering screens on the wall. Between the

projections stood 20 or 30 huge pieces of foam core

pinned up with a collection of ideas about what a new

Yahoo homepage and a new Yahoo email could look

like.

For the 30 people sitting around the table, their first

meetings with Mayer over the past month had been

terrifying.

For years, Yahoo had been a place where the CEO was

a distant figure who would meet with various

members of his or her executive leadership team to

lay out broad strategies for each function: design,

technology, product, etc.

Mayer skipped all that.

“She was like ‘yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get to that. Let’s

first get some stuff out the door that actually works,’”

says a witness to those early days.





88 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

It was a level of energized scrutiny none of them were

used to.

Mayer came at them with “a voracious flood of

possibilities” about what the new products could look

like. Her ideas were both big and small — minute

even. Mayer displayed such a “profound capacity for

detail,” that the leadership in the room finally set up

the two transcribers so that later they could “share

and dissect” all of Mayer’s ideas and decisions.

One of them remembers thinking: “Who is this

woman and what is she actually saying?”

But soon, as the weeks wore on, the 30 people in that

room began to learn how to respond to what Mayer

was saying.

Some of the people in the room were growing

frustrated with the pace, but others began

contributing. Among those who contributed, Mayer

learned who to trust. Those trusted people began to

grow in confidence and they started to contribute

even more.

Soon, these once-terrifying meetings became friendly,

fun. Jokes started to fly around.

“It warmed up,” says someone who was in those

meetings. “Once we learned how to operate on that

level of intensity with her, she softened and it became

more of an interaction.”

“You’d look at her and she’s smiling!”

This was Mayer in her ultimate element.





89 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

She was pushing the pace as she had those late nights

working on problems for Philosophy 160A. She was

teaching, as she had 3,000 Stanford undergraduates.

She was creating, as she had those pompom routines

25 years before. She was using data to empathize with

hundreds of millions of people all at once, as she had

learned to do at Google.

“I've never seen anybody like [her],” says someone

from those meetings. Mayer, he says, was “somebody

who could see a whole collection of possibilities and

could just talk about her experiences and principles.”

“In that way she would start to not only share how she

was thinking, but also help us learn a lens to look

through to be able to connect where she was coming

from and what we were about.”

Mayer’s intensity

was contagious. By

November, the

Yahoo Mail team

was working

nights and

weekends, racing to finish by an insane early

December deadline. This was a credit to Mayer and

the leader of the Mail team, Shashi Seth, a product

leader Mayer inherited.

Finally, the Mail team finished their work at the end

of November. They were proud of their work, and

they deserved to be. Never had Yahoo built and

launched a version of Mail so quickly. The last time

Yahoo had done it, it took 18 months to build the

product and another six months to roll it out.





90 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

But then Yahoo learned another lesson about what

making products would be like with Marissa Mayer as

CEO.

One day before the new Yahoo Mail was set to launch,

Mayer called a meeting with CMO Kathy Savitt,

Shashi Seth, and the entire product and engineering

leadership team — about 10 people in total. They met

in Phish Food, the conference room where months

before, Ross Levinsohn had pitched an alternate

reality for Yahoo to a board that wasn’t really

listening.

Everyone settled in; Mayer dropped a bombshell. For

months, it had been decided that the new Yahoo

Mail’s colors would be blue and gray. The thought was

that users were going to be looking at Yahoo Mail on

their phones all day long, and so it was best to choose

the most subtly contrasting colors possible.

Mayer wanted to change the colors entirely — from

blue and gray to purple and yellow.

Seth’s body language shifted immediately. He looked

deflated. He was going to have to tell his people the

news.

Changing the color of a product like Yahoo Mail

sounds easy, but it’s not. Mayer’s decision meant that

some unlucky group of people were going to have to

manually go and change the color in literally

thousands of places — all while working under a

deadline.

Seth’s team got the changes done, but there was

fallout from Mayer’s decision. The lead Yahoo Mail





91 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

designer quit and went to Google. The Yahoo Mail

product manager went to Disney. The lead engineer

left and founded a startup. Seth himself left Yahoo in

January 2013, a month after Mail launched.

One person, frustrated by the incident, says he’d

hoped the Yahoo Mail launch would make people

“incredibly proud of what they've accomplished” and

that they would be inspired to “stick around for years

to come.”

“It was the exact opposite,” he says.

But others have a different perspective.

Their view is that Mayer refused to launch a product

that she didn’t think was finished. A product’s color

may seem superficial, but Mayer is obsessed with data

that shows it is not. At Yahoo’s scale, if you can

change a color a little bit and affect the performance

by some factor of .01 percent, that translates into

millions of dollars.

In this view, when Mayer forced already burnt-out

people to work even harder at the very last minute to

make sure a product went out as good as it could be,

she set a marker for the new era of Yahoo.

“The precedent made the next project easier to deal

with,” says one person who helped launch Yahoo

Mail. “We’d gotten comfortable with what Yahoo-ness

was about.”

Yahoo's mobile problem

When Mayer came to Yahoo in 2012, Yahoo’s mobile

traffic was still tiny compared to other big tech





92 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Mayer put Adam Cahan in charge of a new group called “Mobile and

Emerging Products.”

companies like Google and Facebook. Yahoo’s mobile

apps weren’t very popular either.

So when Mayer joined Yahoo, she knew that a top

priority had to be developing mobile apps that

consumers would make a part of their daily lives.

To try to figure out what those apps should be, Mayer

conducted a survey.

The results made her laugh.

She learned that after activities like calling people,

texting, and maps, the main things people do on their

phones everyday are: check email, check weather, get

news, get stock quotes, check sports scores, get

entertainment news, share photos, communicate with

groups, and ask questions.

What made Mayer laugh was that those are all things

people go to Yahoo for on the Web. Yahoo’s biggest

products are Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo

Finance, Yahoo Sports, and so on.





93 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

At a speech in New York in May 2013, Mayer said:

“Yahoo has had the functionality and content people

want on their phones. Now we need to get it into apps

and the mobile web in a way people can really

consume it on their phones.”

In her first year at Yahoo, Mayer made two big moves

to expand mobile reach and usage.

The first move was to put a Yahoo executive named

Adam Cahan in charge of a new group called “Mobile

and Emerging Products.” Cahan came to Yahoo when

it acquired his mobile startup, IntoNow, for $20

million in 2011.

Yahoo lacked the mobile talent to staff such a group,

so Mayer spent $200 million at the end of 2012 and

through August of 2013 acquiring more than 20

mobile startups. In almost every case, Yahoo would

shut down the startup’s product, sign its engineering

and product development people to two- and

four-year contracts, and integrate them into Cahan’s

team.

Mayer’s second big move to improve Yahoo’s standing

in mobile would turn out to be the biggest transaction

of her entire career. It would cost Yahoo $1.1 billion.

Could Mayer close the deal?

On the evening of Thursday, May 16, 2013,

26-year-old David Karp looked at his iPhone and saw

he had a voicemail from the chief operating officer of

Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg.

He listened to her message. All Sandberg said was

that she’d like Karp to call her back.





94 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Screenshot/Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01

/02/tumblr-david-karps-800-million-art-project/)

David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr.

But she had said

enough.

Karp, the founder

of a blog network

called Tumblr, told

his investment

banker Jonathan

Turner at Qatalyst

Partners about the voicemail.

They decided they had to call Yahoo and let them

know Sandberg had called.

That day, All Things D reporter Kara Swisher and her

colleague Peter Kafka had reported that Yahoo was in

serious talks to buy Tumblr.

Karp, his board, and his bankers believed Sandberg

was calling to see if the report was true, and if

Facebook could possibly join the bidding for Tumblr.

On the one hand, a bidding war between Facebook

and Yahoo would be great news for Tumblr, its

bankers, and its investors.

On the other, Turner was terrified that the leak would

spoil their deal. Mayer was from Google, and Google

was infamous for pulling the plug on deals if it felt like

the other side was trying to gin up interest in the

press. Throughout every stage of the slow courtship

between the companies, Turner had been paranoid

about the press.

After originally offering only $800 million to buy Tumblr, Yahoo had

finally upped its bid to $1.1 billion and was going through the final

stages of due diligence. The deal was basically done, and the Tumblr





95 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

World Economic Forum (http://www.flickr.com/photos

/worldeconomicforum/6772171435/)

When Sheryl Sandberg le5 a voicemail on David

Karp's phone, it threatened to blow up the deal.

board didn’t think it was

time to get greedy.

Still, Yahoo had to

be told about the

voicemail. The

companies had

signed an

“exclusivity”

agreement, which

meant that Tumblr

had to notify

Yahoo of any other approaches.

Turner had nothing to worry about.

When Mayer found out about Sandberg’s voicemail,

she only became more eager to get the deal done.

She went to her M&A team, led by “gruff” New Yorker

Jackie Reses, and told them to hurry up and wrap

things up; she didn’t want to lose out on Tumblr — not

after all those months of work and so many meetings

with Karp.

Talks between the two companies had begun in

November 2012, when Karp went to Sunnyvale and

met with Mayer.

By then, Tumblr, founded in 2007, had grown to an

astounding 200 million worldwide users a month, but

Karp still hadn’t figured out how the blog network

could make a lot of money off all those users.

He was taking meetings on the West Coast to see if

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo wanted to

make a strategic investment. He thought one of those





96 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

companies might want to sell ads on Tumblr.com and

split the revenues.

That first meeting between Karp and Mayer left both

parties cold. Mayer mostly talked about what she was

trying to do at Yahoo, and a potential deal between

the two companies didn’t really come up.

After the meeting, Karp told his board and his

bankers that the new CEO of Yahoo was very nice, but

that he didn’t see a deal happening.

At investment bank Qatalyst, Turner passed the news

onto his boss, legendary tech banker Frank

Quattrone.

Quattrone had gotten rich and powerful during the

dot com bubble. He also got in some hot water with

the law, though he eventually extricated himself. He’s

brash. He’s got a mustache. He looks like the cartoon

version of a deal-making, back-slapping, investment

banker. And yet, he’s probably the best deal-maker in

the business.

Quattrone thought he would be able to get Mayer

more interested in Tumblr. So, in early 2013, he met

with her, and pointed out that one of Tumblr’s great

strengths was how popular it was on mobile devices.

He accurately noted the incredible amount of time

young people were spending on Tumblr.

Quattrone had said the magic word: “mobile.”

Mayer said she’d take a second look.

When Marissa Mayer studies a topic, she doesn’t do it





97 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Mario Tama, Getty Images

“She really took ownership of this, really persuaded

David that she would let Tumblr stay independent.”

superficially. After her meeting with Quattrone, she

spent an entire weekend using Tumblr, poking

around the site, and studying metrics.

Mayer decided to get back in touch with Karp. Only,

she didn’t want to do an advertising deal or make a

strategic investment. She wanted to buy his company.

If that was going to happen, it was going to take some

doing. Karp didn’t want to sell his company. Facebook

and Google had started trying to talk him into it, but

he refused, even though a sale would net him more

than $100 million after taxes. He wanted to keep

control over his company.

Mayer realized she

needed to put on a

full-court press.

Mayer flew to New

York in February

and had dinner

with Karp and

Jackie Reses on a

Saturday night.

Mayer was able to

win Karp over that night. She said that Tumblr was an

excellent product — an amazing tool for

self-expression. She noted that it was beating

Facebook with younger consumers.

That Saturday night, Mayer told Karp that she had a

board meeting coming up soon, and that she’d like to

bring up the possibility of buying Tumblr.

Would he be able to meet again that Sunday?





98 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Karp agreed to meet again. That Sunday night over

dinner, Mayer talked about how the new paradigm for

tech acquisitions was for the acquiring company to

allow the acquired company to continue operating

independently, as a subsidiary with its own brand.

She said that’s what Google had done with YouTube,

what Facebook had done with Instagram, and it’s

what Yahoo would do with Tumblr.

They stayed out till 2 a.m. Karp told Mayer to bring up

the idea at her board meeting.

During her first-quarter board meeting, Mayer said

she’d like to buy Tumblr. She said Tumblr would, in a

snap, improve Yahoo’s position in mobile and make

its overall audience much younger. The board gave

her full support to pursue the deal.

Everything went fine from there. The All Things D

report and Sandberg’s voicemail only hurried the

process along.

Finally, over the next weekend, Karp and his board

accepted Yahoo’s offer.

It was a triumph for Mayer and Yahoo.

For years, Yahoo had tried to acquire hot startups that

would help it become more popular with users, and

eventually begin growing its revenues again. But time

and again, the entrepreneurial ambitious types

running hot startups would refuse to sell to Yahoo,

preferring to sell to Google or Facebook.

For Mayer, the deal showed how far she’d come as an

executive. Her penchant for teacherly mentoring





99 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

allowed her to cultivate a relationship with Karp and

close a deal that had seemed impossible.

One source close to Tumblr’s now defunct board said

he was blown away by how much effort Mayer put

into the deal.

“Where I give her high marks is that you don’t

typically get CEOs that engaged.”

“She really took ownership of this, really persuaded

David that she would let Tumblr stay independent.

“She turned David around. He was very reluctant.

He’s not motivated by money in the same way as the

rest of us. He’s really passionate about the product.

His concern about selling to Yahoo was that it would

get subsumed.

“Marissa convinced David that this wasn’t the old

Yahoo and that she’s going to run it differently.”


Now into her second year as Yahoo CEO, Marissa

Mayer from Wausau, Wisc., says “I’m having the time

of my life.”

A natural teacher, she has, in her 20s and 30s, turned

that skill into the ability to inspire thousands of

people to make technology products that millions of

people use.





100 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

The challenge she’ll face in her 40s is: Can she

become the rare, complete technology CEO who can

create magical products and deliver financial results?

By one measure, Mayer did incredibly well during her

first year. Since David Filo unrolled the purple carpet

for Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s stock has gone from

$15.74 per share to hovering around $28 in August

2013.

But, while investor confidence in Mayer’s vision and

performance so far certainly plays some role in the

stock’s magnificent surge, a much greater factor has

been Alibaba, the Chinese Internet company in which

Yahoo is a part-owner.

Yahoo has benefitted from Alibaba in two ways.

In the months before Mayer joined Yahoo, CEO Scott

Thompson and CFO Tim Morse hammered out a deal

in which Alibaba bought back a small portion of

Yahoo’s stake for $7.6 billion. When he was still CEO,

Thompson signaled that he would use that money to

buy back Yahoo shares, driving up their price. When

she took over, Mayer went along with this plan.

Because of Alibaba, Yahoo has been able to spend

billions of dollars buying its own stock. With the

supply of shares shrinking, and a few billion

dollars-worth of demand in the market, the shares

have naturally risen.

The other way Alibaba has helped Yahoo shares grow

in value is by growing in value itself.

Alibaba has yet to go public. Because Yahoo still owns





101 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

a large stake in Alibaba, it is actually one of the few

ways investors are able to place bets on it. Those bets

even have a pay-off date. As a part of the deal

Thompson and Morse negotiated, Yahoo will sell even

more stock when Alibaba does finally IPO. Some

analysts think Yahoo will get another $7 billion in

cash out of that deal.

Another reason to be skeptical of Mayer’s

performance is that the person more responsible than

anyone else for her being the CEO of Yahoo, Third

Point’s Dan Loeb, sold off most of his holdings in the

company in July 2013. That month, he, Michael Wolf,

and Harry Wilson resigned from Yahoo’s board, as

their settlement with the board required them to do if

Third Point’s stake in Yahoo ever fell below 2 percent.

Third Point remains a major Yahoo shareholder, but

Loeb’s liquidation is still a strong signal that he thinks

the upside from where Yahoo is now is more limited

than it was in 2012.

All that said, there is no question that Mayer has

drastically improved Yahoo in her short time there so

far.

You can see it in the metrics. Yahoo claims that after

Mayer’s redesigns, traffic to apps for Yahoo Mail is up

120 percent; Yahoo Weather, 150 percent; and Yahoo

News, 55 percent. In her first year, Mayer was able to

keep traffic to Yahoo Mail on the Web flat, and even

slightly grow Yahoo.com. In an age where big websites

usually shrink because people check their email and

news on their phones, that’s remarkable. In the

middle of August 2013, ComScore reported that





102 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Yahoo Web properties had passed Google properties

as the most popular in the United States.

Beyond the metrics though, Mayer has revolutionized

the culture at Yahoo.

One Yahoo executive told me that before Mayer

arrived, “what was missing was leadership from the

very top, which was able to cut to the chase and get

some tough decisions made, get focused in the right

places, get the sense of urgency, and also somebody

who could really be the chief quality control leader of

the company.”

And indeed, the quality of Yahoo products has gone

up since Mayer arrived. The Yahoo Weather app that

launched for iPhone in 2013 is stunning. Mayer’s

redesign of Flickr is a delight.

Yes, some people don’t get along with her because of

her direct, all-business style.

Sometimes her brusque manner comes off as rude,

“demeaning,” or “stuck up.” It can insult people.

But even some of those people say Yahoo has become

a far more vibrant place under her leadership.

One person Mayer frequently clashed with at Yahoo

told me, “You have to give Marissa a lot of credit. Just

because I don’t like what she’s done to me and I don’t

like what she’s done to many other people, doesn’t

mean I'm going to shy away from giving her credit.

She brought life back to Yahoo. There’s no question

about it.





103 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

“The Friday before she came on, the parking lots

would be empty till 10 a.m. and would be empty again

after 4 p.m. That happened day after day after day for

seven months in a row. Marissa comes, the next week,

the parking lots are full at 8 a.m. and people are still

there at 6:30.

“The changes that she brought — making food free,

focusing on quality, shutting some things down, being

open and honest during the Friday FYI meetings — all

brought belief back for a lot of people.”

“If she hadn’t come in, all the smart people would

have left.

“And that would have been the end of Yahoo.”

═══

A note on sources

═══

This story is based primarily on first-hand reporting

consisting of dozens of interviews.

This story would not exist if not for the cooperation of

many people who did speak with me, including those

who grew up with Mayer, taught her, or worked with

her at Google and Yahoo. Some of these people are or

were employed at Yahoo and spoke to me at the risk of

their careers. Many of these people spoke on a

not-for-attribution basis. Some spoke on the record. I

have not identified many on-the-record sources

because I did not want to allow for the process of





104 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

elimination to identify others.

This story, being told in a narrative fashion, does not

identify the sources of information for particular

facts, including thoughts. I would caution readers

against assuming that because I have reported a

person’s thoughts, that person is a direct source. A

person will often share thoughts about pivotal

moments in their lives with a large group of people.

As a part of the narrative, my story includes dialogue.

I am grateful to James B. Stewart’s “note on sources”

at the end of his book, “DisneyWar

(http://www.amazon.com/DisneyWar-James-

B-Stewart/dp/0743267095/).” That note helped me

think about how to describe my own sourcing. In his

note, Stewart describes how he sources dialogue. It’s a

perfect explanation, and I’d like to quote it and use it

as my own explanation.

“As part of the narrative, I have included passages of

dialogue. Dialogue— what words were said— is a fact

like any other. It is not necessarily a quotation from

an interview with me and I would discourage readers

from inferring that one or both of the speakers is a

direct source. Especially in today’s world of instant

communication, it is sometimes amazing how many

people turn out to be privy to what others may assume

is a private conversation. Many of the conversations

reported in this book either took place before an

audience or became known to a wide circle of people,

often within minutes of their taking place. … In a few

cases other people were listening in on

speakerphones, extensions, or overheard





105 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

conversations without one or both of the speakers’

knowledge. Readers should bear in mind that, given

the vagaries of human memory, remembered dialogue

is rarely the same as actual recordings and

transcripts. At the same time, it is no more nor less

accurate than many other recollections.”

═══

Bibliography

═══

Guthrie, Julian. "The Adventures of Marissa." San

Francisco. Feb. 8, 2008.

(http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story

/the-adventures-of-marissa)

Guynn, Jessica. "How I Made It: Marissa Mayer,

Google's champion of innovation and design." Los

Angeles Times. Jan. 2, 2011.

(http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/02/business

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Holson, Laura M. "Putting a Bolder Face on Google."

The New York Times. February 28, 2009.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business

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Marissa Mayer's IIT commencement address.

YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com

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chief-yahoos-marissa-mayer/)

Sellers, Patricia. "New Yahoo CEO Mayer is

pregnant." Fortune. July 16, 2012.

(http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07

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Sellers, Patricia. "Marissa Mayer: Ready to rumble at

Yahoo." Fortune. October 11, 2012

(http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/10

/11/40-under-40-marissa-mayer/).

Stone, Brad. "Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?"

BloombergBusinessWeek. August 1, 2013.

(http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles

/139562-can-marissa-mayer-save-yahoo)

Swisher, Kara. "The King Is Dead, Long Live the …

Whatever: Levinsohn’s Management Moves at Yahoo

(Internal Memo)." All Things D. May 17, 2012.

(http://allthingsd.com/20120517/levinsohns-

management-musical-chairs-at-yahoo-internal-

memo/)

Swisher, Kara. "Ross Still Not the Boss (Yet): Yahoo

CEO Selection Now Likely to Take Longer Than Many

Expect)." All Things D. July 12, 2012.

(http://allthingsd.com/20120712/ross-still-not-the-

boss-yet-yahoo-ceo-selection-now-likely-to-take-

longer-than-many-expect/)

Warner, Fara. "How Google Searches Itself." Fast

Company. June 30, 2002.

(http://www.fastcompany.com/45129/how-google-

searches-itself)





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(http://www.businessinsider.com

/this-small-

patch-could-

make-you-

invisible-

to-mosquitoes-

2013-7)

This Small Patch

Could Make You

Invisible To

Mosquitoes


/this-small-patch-


/forgotten-

operating-

systems-

2013-8)

11 Extinct

Operating Systems

That Time Forgot


/forgotten-

operating-

systems-2013-8)


/china-is-trying-

to-make-

chinese-

tourists-

less-embarrassing-

2013-8)

China Is Trying To

Make Chinese

Tourists Less

Embarrassing


/china-is-trying-


/infamous-

microsoft-

employee-

blog-mini-

microsoft-

is-back-

and-loving-

todays-ballmer-

news-2013-8)

Infamous Microso=

Employee Blog

Mini-Microso= Is

Recommended For You

Unbylined. "From the Archives: Google’s Marissa

Mayer in Vogue." Vogue. 2009.

(http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/from-

the-archives-marissa-mayer-machine-dreams/#1)

═══

Acknowledgments

═══

I'm grateful to Jay Yarow and Alyson Shontell for

reading this story and suggesting edits. Jill Klausen

and Liz Wilke saved me with wonderful copy edits.

Mike Nudelman contributed excellent illustrations

that bring the story to life. I'm grateful to people in

California, Wisconsin, and around the world who took

my calls and agreed to talk.

� Share

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2013-7)

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2013-8)

Back and Loving

Today's Ballmer

News


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microso=-

employee-

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More:

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from_post=52127cb769bedd8f5b00000e&redirect=/marissa-mayer-biography-

2013-8)

11 Little Known Facts About Marissa Mayer Before She Became A

Tech Rockstar (http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-

childhood-and-early-years-2013-8)

(http://www.businessinsider.com/author/nicholas-carlson)

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Join The Discussion

Editors' Picks

The Board Room

Ari on Aug 24, 8:19 AM (http://www.businessinsider.com

/c/5218a4e6ecad045a5000002d) said:

Awesome article Nick. My 2c on the demotion, not sure if it is

accurate: When Bing launched it was a bit of a wake up call to

Google since objectively it was better at search across a number

of dimensions, specifically image search and vertical search in

health and travel. At Google search had been stagnating at that

time, and vertical search in particular was considered an

unexciting area for investment. I've got to believe that these

factors played a role in tarnishing her image at the company

since it put the core into jeopardy.

Reply

Blake Bath on Aug 24, 12:24 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com

/c/5218de416bb3f7eb3c00004c) said:

One of the better articles I have read about technology

executives, and i have read thousands. Beautifully develops the

foundational components of her personality, and then

objectively assesses the arc of her career, with appropriate

highlighting. My high school senior is devouring the article,

and hopefully she draws inspiration from a talented and driven

Marissa.

Reply

on Aug

24, 4:45 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com

/c/52191b6d69bedd6302000034) said:

Great writing Nicholas! This is BusinessInsider at its best. I

read EVERY word, didn't skip ahead. That is great writing.

Marissa is a special person. I am a huge fan. She always had

time for me as a low level Googler, and even when I worked for

Microsoft. I was surprised at the "robot" characterization by

people who have worked with her, but perhaps that was a

Don Dodge

(/commenter?id=4c4d9beb7f8b9a1358680700)





110 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

reaction to the way she juggles hundreds of balls at a time. That

has not been my experience.

Yahoo is lucky to have Marissa as CEO. She has done what

none of the previous CEOs could do. She has inspired Yahoo

employees, given them confidence, and convinced the stock

market she has a winning plan. More than anything Yahoo had

a crisis of confidence. Marissa has fixed that. No one else could.

Henry, give Nicholas a raise, and give him the time to write

more stories like this. This is quality journalism that will

attract readers and advertisers.

Reply

on Aug

24, 3:15 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com

/c/5219063b6bb3f7de10000010) said:

Thank you for a well-written, balanced article. There is so much

lionizing and vilifying of this woman in the press that it's hard

to separate fact from fiction. What I enjoyed, particularly,

about this narrative is how it provides coherence and causality

rather than the jigsawing together a bunch of provocative

cliches and soundbites.

I don't want to reduce this story to a gender thing - no one's life

is just about their gender, of course. But, I know many women

in the tech world like the Mayer described here, especially in

her earlier days - focused, driven, very smart, uncompromising,

with a greater cognitive capacity than most around her and a

visionary who can see both the big picture and the little details.

This isn't to say that some men are not all of these things as

well. Nor does it mean that these women are perfect in every

way. But, somehow, it seems that we are not evolved enough

yet in the world of business / tech, to give these women the

same amount of leeway that we give to similar men. For

example, I wonder if Scott Thompson or Ross Levinsohn, who

were likely not perfect when leading Yahoo, got as much press

or critiquing about their leadership / management styles. I

don't recall much at all.

Reply

jennybhatt

(/commenter?id=52190079ecad04ee77000021)





111 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

Insiders All Comments Apply To Be An "Insider" »(/register?first=index&

pundit_request=1)

Comments (http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-

biography-2013-8/comments.rss)

�

7 182

� 9 19 �Ari on Aug 24, 8:19 AM


/c/5218a4e6ecad045a5000002d) said:

Awesome article Nick. My 2c on the demotion, not sure if it is

accurate: When Bing launched it was a bit of a wake up call to

Google since objectively it was better at search across a number of

dimensions, specifically image search and vertical search in health

and travel. At Google search had been stagnating at that time, and

vertical search in particular was considered an unexciting area for

investment. I've got to believe that these factors played a role in

tarnishing her image at the company since it put the core into

jeopardy.

Reply

� 4 9 �

(URL) (http://t.co

/o7HpRb8vjI) on Aug 24, 2:35 PM (http://www.businessinsider.com

/c/5218fce7eab8ea1561000007) said:

Levinsohn would have misdirected the company and subdued to

Google. I wonder what is he doing now.

Reply

panalit

(/commenter?id=4ef3fbf569bedd800600003c)

� 3 9 �

on Aug 24, 3:15

PM (http://www.businessinsider.com/c/5219063b6bb3f7de10000010)

said:

Thank you for a well-written, balanced article. There is so much

lionizing and vilifying of this woman in the press that it's hard to

separate fact from fiction. What I enjoyed, particularly, about this

narrative is how it provides coherence and causality rather than the

jigsawing together a bunch of provocative cliches and soundbites.

jennybhatt

(/commenter?id=52190079ecad04ee77000021)





112 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

I don't want to reduce this story to a gender thing - no one's life is

just about their gender, of course. But, I know many women in the

tech world like the Mayer described here, especially in her earlier

days - focused, driven, very smart, uncompromising, with a greater

cognitive capacity than most around her and a visionary who can

see both the big picture and the little details. This isn't to say that

some men are not all of these things as well. Nor does it mean that

these women are perfect in every way. But, somehow, it seems that

we are not evolved enough yet in the world of business / tech, to give

these women the same amount of leeway that we give to similar

men. For example, I wonder if Scott Thompson or Ross Levinsohn,

who were likely not perfect when leading Yahoo, got as much press

or critiquing about their leadership / management styles. I don't

recall much at all.

Reply

� 49 6 �

on Aug 24, 4:45

PM (http://www.businessinsider.com/c/52191b6d69bedd6302000034)

said:

Great writing Nicholas! This is BusinessInsider at its best. I read

EVERY word, didn't skip ahead. That is great writing.

Marissa is a special person. I am a huge fan. She always had time

for me as a low level Googler, and even when I worked for Microsoft.

I was surprised at the "robot" characterization by people who have

worked with her, but perhaps that was a reaction to the way she

juggles hundreds of balls at a time. That has not been my

experience.

Yahoo is lucky to have Marissa as CEO. She has done what none of

the previous CEOs could do. She has inspired Yahoo employees,

given them confidence, and convinced the stock market she has a

winning plan. More than anything Yahoo had a crisis of confidence.

Marissa has fixed that. No one else could.

Henry, give Nicholas a raise, and give him the time to write more

stories like this. This is quality journalism that will attract readers

and advertisers.

Reply

Don Dodge

(/commenter?id=4c4d9beb7f8b9a1358680700)

� 4 3 �Guest101 on Aug 24, 7:05 PM





113 of 115 8/26/2013 1:02 PM

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The Bleachers

Show Comments

(http://www.businessinsider.com/c/52193c25ecad04936500001d) said:

This reads like a Jeffery Archer/Fredrick Forsyth thriller novel.

Great reading.

Reply

� 12 4 �

on Aug 25, 2:26 AM

(http://www.businessinsider.com/c/5219a37aecad042622000063) said:

This article should be transformed in a book.

Reply

André Kenji De Sousa

(/commenter?id=50034af86bb3f71236000015)

� 2 2 �

on Aug 25, 12:12

PM (http://www.businessinsider.com/c/521a2ce969beddb41600001f)

said:

She reminds me of the character in the movie, "ELECTION" with

Director: Alexander Payne

Writers: Tom Perrotta (novel), Alexander Payne (screenplay), 1

more credit »

Stars: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein | See full

cast and crew

Reply

dot_compost

(/commenter?id=50c5d079eab8ea3d77000009)





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marissa mayer biography - business insider

Documents

tech http

yahoo calledthe room

yahoo mail

yahoo homepage

nicholas carlson http

fortune live media http

funky room

ross levinsohn