The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An

Unauthorized Biography


Illustration by Mike Nudelman/Photo by Fortune Live Media
On the morning of Thursday, July 12, 2012, Yahoos interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, still
believed he was 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 Yahoos 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, Levinsohns top dealmaker, whod spent months negotiating a huge deal with Microsoft. There was Shashi Seth,
Yahoos top product management executive, already planning a long-needed update to Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo home page. There was chief
financial officer Tim Morse, whod 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 Yahoos media business. And there was Mollie Spillman, whom hed just
made CMO.
Heckman, Seth, Morse, Rosen, Spillman, and handful of others sat off to the side.

Ross Levinsohn
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 Yahoos board,
Fred Amoroso, had made it clear that he was going to do 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. Hed 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 Levinsohns
interim title was only temporary that it was safe to leave Google.
Levinsohn had another reason to be hopeful: For the past few months, hed been speaking with
two of Yahoos most important new directors, Dan Loeb and Michael Wolf, almost every day.
As important as it was for Levinsohn to have Amorosos support, he needed Loebs more. Loeb
ran a hedge fund called Third Point, which owned more than 5 percent of Yahoo and had, only
months before, forced the resignation of Yahoos 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 Yahoos 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 Yahoos search business for Microsofts 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 Yahoos advertising inventory. There was also
talk of unloading some of Yahoos enterprise-facing advertising-technology businesses into a
joint venture involving New York-based ad tech startup AppNexus.

Heidi Gutman/CNBC
Dan Loeb controlled 5 percent of Yahoo and joined the board after a bloody proxy fight.
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 for the CEO job would not be forced to follow through on a deal they had not
negotiated.
This was a bad sign for Levinsohns candidacy.
But Wilson and Wolfs loud complaints about the Microsoft deal werent the worst sign for
Levinsohns chances; Loebs 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. Hes actually from Southern California, and sometimes he puts off a
surfer vibe.
During Levinsohns presentation, Loeb looked bored. He wasnt 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 10 minutes.
This person remembers thinking: Oh, OK. Sorry, Ross, youre 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 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 Yahoos next CEO would be.
Soon, so would everyone else.
On Monday, July 16, four days after Levinsohns last board meeting, Yahoo made it official:
Thirty-seven-year-old Marissa Mayer was Yahoos 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.
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.

Flickr/Fortune Live Media
Marissa Mayer
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 isnt 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 Franciscos Four Seasons Hotel.
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 doesnt 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 Facebooks 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 companys 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.
Marissa Ann Mayer was born 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. Shes 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, wasnt always so larger-than-life. She describes the child and
teenage version of herself as painfully shy.

Owen Thomas, Business Insider
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer at the 2013 Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.
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
audience, her peers dont remember her as extroverted or larger-than-life.
One of those peers is named Brian Jojade. He took Advanced Math with Mayer in eighth grade.
He remembers Mayer as someone who hated social attention. Once, Jojade called the local radio
station and told them it was Mayers 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
didnt. She wasnt amused at all. You could just tell it wasnt fun for her.
Otherwise, Jojades 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.
Mayers 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 everyones day. Bazter said most upperclassmen would use the time to congregate
in the schools commons.
You could study, says Bazter, but mostly it was talking and eating and gathering with your
friends.

Wausau West High Yearbook 1993
Mayer introduces the 1992 homecoming court
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 wouldnt 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 didnt.
Mayer is fond of Wausau.
When she got married to a San Francisco banker 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, Mayers peers in school had no idea what to make of her. Likewise, Mayer says she
was painfully shy around them. But teachers? Teachers were Mayers kind of people.
In 2010, Mayer returned to her hometown to be inducted into the Wausau School Districts
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 Mayers face how important these people were to her growing
up. About six names in, the timbre of Mayers voice actually breaks toward a sob, and she has to
catch herself with a breath and a small gulp. She cant 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 teachers
classroom to decorate it like a jungle because she was so inspired by the teachers lesson on
Heart of Darkness.
Mayers 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 wouldnt make it there, with all the new kids and
teachers shed have to meet.
Flanagan says Mayer the little girl was a home person; she liked to be safe and know where
shes at.
Flanagan, who says it was obvious even then how far Mayer would go, told the reluctant little
girl, Oh, I think youre going to make it fine.
Still, she wouldnt go. Eventually Flanagan called Mayers 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 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 Mayers mother would frequently stop by school to check
on her daughters 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.

Wausau West High School Yearbook
Mayer was on Wausau West's state championship winning debate team.
Mayer says she never felt that bias at Wausau West.
It wasnt 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. Its 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.
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.
Mayers 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 teachers 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.
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 wasnt 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 doesnt 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.

Page 3 of 8)

Illustration by Mike Nudelman
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 cornstarch to make a sloppy goo-like substance that
seemed to defy gravity.
One day, a postdoctoral 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 couldnt stop talking about his talk.
Finally, one of Mayers counselors had enough.
You know, you have it all wrong, the counselor said to Mayer and the campers. Its not what
Zune knows, its how Zune thinks.
The counselor said that what made Nguyen so amazing wasnt 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 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: Its 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 Its 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 classwide design contest for extra credit. Calling on the same
part of her brain that made her such an excellent pompom choreographer, Mayer made a screen
saver featuring exploding fireworks. In a class of 300, Mayer came in second.
The design was good enough that Mayers CS105 professor, Eric Roberts, would also use an
adaptation of the screen saver as an assignment for the next several years.

Stanford University
Stanford professor Eric Roberts says Mayer was an incredible teacher.
Roberts was also impressed enough with Mayers 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 Nguyens
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.
Mayers teacherly leadership streak came out in a big way when she took Philosophy 160A, then
considered a weed-out course for prospective symbolic systems majors.
During Philosophy 160A, the students break into study groups of a half dozen or so students, and
the groups are assigned problem sets. Mayers 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. Lets 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 groups work in an all-business fashion but was otherwise shy, and somewhat
reclusive.
In the years ahead, this combination Mayers 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 Mayers shyness 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, shed just be out of there because the work is done.
Indeed, Mayer doesnt 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 wasnt 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 Mayers 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 Mayers 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.
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.
WATCH: Marissa Mayer teaches a class at Stanford
Mayer excelled the rest of her years as an undergraduate at Stanford. After she got her bachelors
degree, she stayed at the school to get a masters in computer science, with a speciality in
artificial intelligence.
As graduate school drew to a close, word got out about Mayers 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?

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. Its 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 theyre 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 didnt get to play in any of the games.
The moral of Mayers story is that its 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.
And thats the overriding reason why Mayer joined Google. But quests for self-improvement
aside, its 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 wasnt looking for any more hard choices.
So when yet another pitch from a recruiter popped up in her inbox, she tapped on her keyboards
delete key to get rid of it.
Only, she missed.
Instead of hitting delete, Mayer hit the space bar and opened the email.
That emails subject line: Work at Google?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin
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 shed 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 Roberts' recommendation, she replied to
an email she had meant to delete, writing that shed 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, shed 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 Googles 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.

(Page 4 of 8)

Illustration by Mike Nudelman
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
Mayer during her early Google days.
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 Mayers 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. Its all gone 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 Mayers 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 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 Googles most
important products.
She was very good at it.

Google
Mayer in 2005.
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. Thats 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 perceived slight.
But being in charge of how Google products should look, Mayers job was, basically, to relate
with Googles millions of users. How would she do that?
In the end, it proved to be an advantage for Mayer that empathy doesnt 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.

Mayer at the height of her power at Google.
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.
Mayers 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.
Mayers 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 Google couldnt decide between two
blues, so theyre 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 cant operate in an environment like that. Ive grown tired of debating such minuscule
design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Bowman went to Twitter.
Mayers obsession with data-driven design would only gain more and louder critics over the
years. But Mayers methods also made her one of the Internets 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.

San Francisco Magazine
Julian Guthrie profiled Marissa Mayer in San Francisco Magazine's March 2008
issue.
Fame and Glory
As Google became a world-famous company, Mayer began to get attention 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 medias fascination with Google kicked up several notches.
Mayer, in charge of the look of Googles most important product, and a rare photogenic woman
in the technology industry, was a natural subject of the medias 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 Googles Mountain View campus. She started throwing fabulous parties at both,
jumping feet first into San Franciscos 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.
Mayers eagerness to be known by the public may appear to contradict her claim that she suffers
from shyness. It doesnt. She describes her shyness as a need to withdraw from social situations
almost as soon as she enters them. Being featured in a glossy magazine does not require her to
interact with every reader, so she probably doesnt have as much anxiety about it as she does
making small talk at a party.
Plus, there is such a thing as overcompensation.

Mayer in Vogue in 2009
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 Mayers remarkable career suddenly lost
momentum.
First, in Oct. 2010, Mayer was removed from the top of Googles 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 Googles Operating Committee
then CEO Eric Schmidts roundtable of top executives from the company.
In reality, it was a demotion. Mayer was no longer in charge of what Googles most important
product looked like or how it worked. At Google, there is search, which generates nearly all of
the companys revenues and profits, and then there is everything else. Running Google search,
Mayer was managing the most important product at the worlds most important Internet
company. Running Google Maps, she was not.
Still, there was the mitigating factor that Mayer was on Googles Operating Committee, and she
therefore reported directly to CEO Eric Schmidt.
That went away too.

By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Google CEO Larry Page did not put Mayer on his executive team.
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.
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.
Mayers 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 didnt approve of
something didnt give her head count or didnt give her an acquisition or whatever shed
just go right above him and get what she needed.
That now stopped.
She would try to do something and HR would say thats 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 companys own,
public list of executives in the About Google section of Google.com.
In November 2005, Mayers name and bio finally appeared on Googles management page. By
May 2011, her name was off the site.
What happened to Marissa Mayers career?
One explanation is that Mayers 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.
Its 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.

FameGame
Mayer and her husband, Zachary Bogue
In 2007, Page married a Stanford graduate student named Lucy Southworth. The ceremony was on
Richard Bransons private island.
That same year, a Google colleague emailed Mayer to say: Im bringing a boy I think youd 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, 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. Theres never a distinct line
between work and home. Marissas work is such a natural extension of her. Its not something
she needs to shed at the end of the day.
Its possible that Mayers romantic history with Page stalled her career at Google. But thats not
a widely held belief among Mayers former colleagues.
A more common explanation was that she may not have had the right kind of ambition to go
much further.
Theres a philosophy that corporations exist to benefit three constituencies: shareholders,
employees, and customers. At Google, there are two kinds of customers: the users of Googles
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 Googles earliest days, Mayer had always been tasked with making products that users
love. And she 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 thats
telling.
This executive says that even before Mayer joined Googles 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
Googles products, she would never show up for a business review.

Doug Edwards, Xooglers
Susan Wojcicki and Salar Kamangar during Google's early years
By contrast, two of Mayers peers Susan Wojcicki and Jeff Huber would make the time and be
there because they were interested in expanding their horizons.
By 2010, when Mayers Google career started stalling, Wojcicki and Huber were getting
promotions. Both would end up reporting directly to Larry Page. Huber would become Mayers
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 Googles Chrome and
Android products. Pichais ascent had to be bittersweet to Mayer. He used to work for her, and
she had promoted him. Now he was passing her by.

Matt Rosoff
Sundar Pichai
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 help the company. He was internally working cross-functionally
to get results. If someone was offline and didnt get the strategy hed sit down with them one-on-
one. He really put work into it. Marissa didnt do that at all.
One of Mayers 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 Mayers 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 Mayers 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 wasnt completely certain she was right.
This pedantic style works when you are the traffic cop in a room full of designers and product
managers, but it alienated some of Mayers colleagues over the years.

http://ashleyannphotography.com
Mayer and and Salar Kamangar clashed often.
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 Mayers that drove Kamangar nuts was her ability to speak incredibly fast,
not allowing him to re-enter the debate.
In an academic situation, thats OK because the best ideas rise and you have discussion, says
one Googler, familiar with Kamangars complaints about Mayer. But in a place where there are
personal feelings involved, if you cant win the debate regardless of how hard you try, because
she will out-talk you, thats 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.
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 Mayers 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 Mayers 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 Mayers sign-off.
Her weakness was an unwillingness to delegate, says Craig Silverstein, the Google engineer
who hired Mayer years ago. She doesnt need any sleep. When you have four or five more
hours in the day than most people do, you dont learn to delegate because you dont need to.
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.

sigir2006
One story is that Amit Singhal told Larry Page that Mayer had to go.
Several of Mayers 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 Brins original code in 2001, he was named a Google Fellow. Hes a
big deal inside the company.
One of Mayers 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 Googles search organization.
These four guys, they were constantly being hampered. Theyd say: We want to roll out this
ranking change. Marissas like, until I review it, you cant launch it. Theyre like: But its
been three weeks.
Finally, says this source, Singhal and the other engineers went to Larry Page and said, Take
your pick. Her, or us.
In this persons telling, Page made his choice and thats 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 shes ambitious and a woman and thats tough in a
mans world. People take potshots at her because she was very young and successful. I also think
shes young and learning and you sometimes dont get things right.
Another reason for Mayers career stall in 2011 was that Google, as a company, had grown up.
By 2010, Google had 24,000 employees. It wasnt 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 couldnt run the company like that anymore, says one person who lived through the
transition.
As you grow you have to hire people who have done this stuff before, and having people who
havent lord over them doesnt work.
So, by early 2011, Marissa Mayers progress at Google had stalled. But another, greater
opportunity was about to come her way.

(Page 5 of 8)

Illustration by Mike Nudelman

On the afternoon of Monday, July 16, 2012, Yahoo chief revenue officer Michael Barrett stood at a gate in New Yorks JFK airport, waiting to
board a plane to London.

AdMeld
Michael Barrett had only joined Yahoo weeks before Mayer.
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 less than a month before.
Barretts job at Google had been a good one. Hed 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.
Thats 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 hadnt 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 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 boards
fault. In December, Yahoos board hoped to appease Loeb by hiring PayPal president Scott
Thompson to be Yahoos new CEO.
Loeb was not appeased. Publicly, he began lobbying Thompson to install new board members.
Privately, Loeb asked a consultant hed hired, former MTV president Michael Wolf, to begin
looking for someone who could replace Thompson.

David Needleman
Dan Loeb asked Michael Wolf to find a CEO for Yahoo.
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 Valleys
go-to wise man.
Loeb and Wolf asked Andreessen if hed join their slate for Yahoos board. He refused to
participate in a deal perceived to be hostile to Yahoos 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 persons 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?

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 Valleys many startups.
The message stuck.
In May 2012, Loeb finally figured out a way to get Scott Thompson out of the CEO job.
Loeb learned that Thompson had graduated from Stonehill College in 1979 with a bachelors
degree in accounting not a bachelors degree in accounting and computer science as Yahoo
claimed on its website, and more importantly, in a Securities and Exchange Commission 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.

Flickr/Yodel Anecdotal
Scott Thompson resigned from Yahoo after Dan Loeb revealed his bio was false.
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 hed 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 boards transaction
committee, which meant he would have sign-off power on any sale of Yahoos valuable Asian
assets. Wolf would lead the executive search committee, which had the immediate task of
finding Yahoos 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.
The document Wolf gave Citrin said Yahoo needed to hire someone who can modernize
Yahoos 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 re-establish Yahoo!s credibility and
reputation in the tech-innovator community and build partnerships with companies such as
Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.
At Citrins 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 Wolfs 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 Yahoos Santa Monica office, is the kind of executive who looks like
he belongs in the CEOs office of a west coast entertainment company. He'll point at the camera
when hes having his picture taken. Hes 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 & Cos Sun Valley
conference for media 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 Yahoos
annual shareholder meeting in 2011, when he presented a vision for Yahoo as the worlds
premier digital media company. For a moment, hed 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 Yahoos audience, and had a plan to tap it.

AP
Apple's Eddy Cue was a candidate for the Yahoo CEO job.
Among the other names were Nikesh Arora, the chief business officer at Google; Eddy Cue, Apples
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 Googles 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? Hadnt she been
demoted only a year before?
Citrin said hed call Mayer anyway.
- - -

World Economic Forum
In the middle of June 2012, Marissa Mayer sat on a plane, thinking and preparing. That Monday, shed
gotten a call from Jim Citrin of executive search firm Spencer Stuart. Hed 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 Wolfs 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, shed taken over a much more massive operation than the one shed 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 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.
Shed 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 companys overall headcount.
The business challenges shed 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 Googles 10th-largest acquisition ever. More
than that, the integration of Zagat into Google search signaled a major change in Googles
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 wasnt 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 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, shed 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 didnt 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. Shed already countered Apples 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
Apples 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 shed spent the previous two years learning a lot from a bigger job than
shed ever had before.
And now she knew that she was ready for an even bigger one.
On the evening of June 24, Mayer arrived at Wolfs 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
Yahoos culture, executive suite, and product line-up.
After Mayer left, one of the board directors said to Citrin: Thats 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 hadnt had a sip. Probably she was just nervous.
Wolf wants to hire Mayer, but everyone else?
After that dinner, Wolf, the chair of Yahoos 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 get the full-time job.

Yahoo Advertising
Ross Levinsohn and Katie Couric
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 Yahoos employees. He wrote, Im fired
up and I hope you are too. I believe in the power of what were doing. We have an incredibly talented
team, unparalleled strengths in key areas and most importantly, I see the purple pride building
everywhere. Lets move forward quickly with conviction and confidence.
Levinsohn ran with the opportunity, and by the end of June really, just a few weeks hed
accomplished a lot. Hed 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. Levinsohns allies across the media,
advertising, and entertainment industries wrote Yahoo directors letters recommending him.

All Things D
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and cofounder Reid Hoffman lobbied for Ross Levinsohn.
At The Wall Street Journals 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 hadnt 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

moooster
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 for the job. The report had made things awkward for Kilar with Hulus corporate
parents, Disney and News Corporation, and hed 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 hed become the CEO of The Weather Channel but he didnt 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.

Google Street View
This is the secret location of the Yahoo CEO interviews
After 10 to 15 minutes, the the bus pulled into an office park, and everyone got out.
Theyd arrived at the offices of Third Points law firm, Gibson Dunn. The location was
ostensibly picked by headhunter Jim Citrin, whod also arranged the 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 didnt 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 hed ignore Yahoos engineers and product development people, so
he talked about how hed been spending a lot of time with product boss Shashi Seth and his
team.
The interview felt strange to Levinsohn. Hed been talking to Loeb a handful of times, every day.
He said, You guys know where Im at. You know what I'm doing.
After, Jim Citrin told Levinsohn hed 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 wouldnt spot each other, Mayer arrived by
limo.
Anyone remotely familiar with her childhood, studies, and career could have predicted what
happened next.
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 Yahoos search business, audience analytics, and data. She talked about
fixing Yahoos 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 didnt have.
When Mayer was done, Jim Citrin told her hed call her with the boards 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 didnt 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 Points
lawyers.

Intuit
Brad Smith worried Mayer didn't have enough corporate experience.
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 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, didnt mind that Mayer was a high-risk, high-reward play. In his view, the sale of
Yahoos Asian assets and the returning of those proceeds through share buybacks or dividends
would provide enough of a floor in Yahoos 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 hadnt 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 chief operating officer? That way
shed be able to pursue her products strategy, and he could keep running the sales force and
making deals with major media companies.
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, Mayers phone finally rang. It was Jim Citrin. She let it
go to voicemail.

Spencer Stuart
Jim Citrin called Marissa Mayer to offer her the job.
Citrin told her: Marissa you should be smiling. Were 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. Thats why she hadnt touched her wine at Michael Wolfs
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 for Yahoo to the board this time with
his executive team there to fill in the details.
Hed 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 hed
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 Morses team to prepare some remarks for the companys
conference call with analysts. Levinsohn kept telling the team, dont 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. Hed wanted this
job. Hed fought for it. Hed done well.

Fox Business News
Fred Amoroso broke the bad news to Levinsohn.
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.
He said, We love Ross. We thank Ross. We want him to stay. We werent 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 couldnt pass up.

(Page 6 of 8)

Illustration by Mike Nudelman
On Tuesday, July 17, 2012, David Filo stood waiting at the entrance of Yahoos 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.

Marissa Mayer's Flickr
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and co-founder David Filo.
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 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.
Yahoos hero was coming. But huge challenges faced her.
Yahoos websites were getting fewer and fewer visitors every year. Meanwhile, Yahoos mobile
apps were being largely ignored.
For years, Yahoos 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 Yahoos 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 Mayers
face on it in the style of Shepard Faireys 2008 campaign poster for Barack Obama. Across the
lower third, the poster has one word in all-caps: HOPE.
When she finally arrived, Mayers first job was to meet the one group of Yahoo employees who
were not as excited by her arrival Yahoos 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 Mayers chief operating officer. Since he took the interim job in
May, hed warned the board that if he didnt 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 hed learned that she was getting the job, hed 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, Mayers 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 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 Mayers 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, Yahoos senior
executives walked into Mayers 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 theyd read about in so many fluffy profiles and had seen on TV or onstage at
conferences someone who was charismatic and warm; personal.
That was not what they got.

TechCrunch
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 principals 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. Wed like to keep
him. Realistically, he wont stay but that doesnt have any impact on you.
There wasnt any kind of commiseration or any kind of bear hug. There wasnt even a question
of Are you in or are you out? It was: I assume youre 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 Mayer Would you like to meet the people I brought?
Mayer looked at them.
No.
The truth is, the person Yahoos 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 wasnt 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 Yahoos 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 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.

jdlasica
Jim Heckman's and Marissa Mayer's personalities clashed.
The most pivotal meeting Mayer had in her first few days at Yahoo was with Levinsohns dealmaker, Jim
Heckman.
She had to learn exactly what Heckman had been negotiating with Yahoos 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 Mayers and Heckmans.
Mayer is passionate about the pixels in the picture. Shes shy. Shes careful. Shes bold, but not
reckless. Shes idealistic about people. She'll pay $60,000 to meet a designer, but wear his dress
modestly.
Jim Heckman breaks glass. Hes squinty-eyed and caffeinated. He makes deals. He uses your
first name. He quotes the comedian Daniel Tosh of Tosh.0. He doesnt 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 Yahoos 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 Hollywood studios. He argued that
advertisers would be willing to pay much higher ad rates if Yahoos content quality were higher.
He said rates could go from under $2 per 1,000 impressions to $20.
In Heckmans vision, Yahoo.com was more like a cable TV provider with a large, installed
audience, than it was a maker of technology products.

Microsoft
Steve Ballmer was ready to give MSN.com to Yahoo.
Heckman said he already had a deal negotiated with Google executive Henrique De Castro to begin
using Googles advertising technology instead of Yahoos.
Heckman said the same theory could be applied to other second-, third-, or fourth-place Yahoo
businesses. He talked about how Boeing lets General Electric, Rolls-Royce, and Pratt-Whitney
make the actual engines for its airplanes.
He told Mayer that hed negotiated a deal with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, wherein Yahoo
would turn over its entire search business patents and all in exchange for Microsofts 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 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 shed 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 Yahoos 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 Mayers 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 wasnt going to hire anyone above him, and certainly not
Henrique De Castro. She even hinted that Barrett could be Yahoos chief operating officer.
But then Barrett read a story on AllThingsD.com saying that De Castro had been hired.
Hurt, but politic, he called Mayers office intending to congratulate her on the big hire. He
wanted to begin discussing his own exit, as well.
Barrett got Mayers assistant.
She said, Marissa is unavailable. Im sure shed 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 didnt know
why, Barrett said, Yeah, I just wanted to say congrats on Henrique. He sounds like a really great
hire.
Mayer said, I wasnt able to tell anyone I was hiring him. I dont think you should feel bad.
I dont 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.

All Things D
Henrique De Castro's nickname is the most interesting man in the world, after the Dos Equis
spokesman.
De Castro has a distinct reputation among his former colleagues on the advertising side of Googles
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.
Mayers next most important and controversial hire was a longtime 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 Mayers 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 Mayers first year, Yahoo bought more than 20 startups.

Steven Henry, Getty Images
Jackie Reses is Mayer's executive bagman.
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 multimillion-dollar bonus was
due. (He sued.)
Mayer replaced Levinsohns chief marketing officer, Mollie Spillman, in August while
Spillman was on vacation. The new CMO was Kathy Savitt, a bubbly and charismatic
executive whod 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 Levinsohns 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.
Mayers 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 multibillion-dollar public company.
Mayer made the baby-raising part look easy.
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 babys been way easier than everyone
made it out to be.
What Mayer didnt 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 dont 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 hadnt intended to make a statement. Shed 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 Mayers direct reports,
and enthusiasm in the Yahoo workforce was swelling.
This was in part due to a series of cultural reforms Mayer brought to Yahoo almost immediately
upon her arrival.

REUTERS/Stephen Lam
She wanted to recreate the high-energy, high-productivity culture of Googles 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. Shed go over her plans for the company, that weeks 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 shed just learned the year before.
If you go to the Friday meetings, its 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 theyre cheering her
on. There is no question that theres 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 Mayers 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
Yahoos executives in Europe didnt hang up till 3 a.m. their time.
One of Mayers former Google colleagues says the lateness habit is something Mayer picked up
during her 13 years at Google.

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.
Mayers lateness was a pain, sure. But by the early fall of 2012, Mayers staff had grown used to
it. In fact, they were actually glad when shed show up late to a meeting, because that meant at
least she hadnt 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 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 werent, 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 wasnt 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 dont miss those meetings. Maybe it happens once in a year because of something.
But 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, lets 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 Mayers lateness, for the skipped meetings, and for the priority of product
discussions during those meetings, though.
Prior to joining Yahoo, Mayer had decided the companys 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, Mayers 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 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 Mayers 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 publics
consumption.
Stanton was spot on.

Fortune Live Media
Upon taking control of Yahoo, Mayers 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 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 Yahoos 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 Yahoos 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
home page, is as important to Yahoo as Yahoo Mail. Its the biggest reason any of Yahoos 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. Its often the first thing we check in
the morning and the last thing before going to bed.
Three months before those words hit the Web, Mayer and 30 designers, product managers, and
engineers sat around a huge table in one of Yahoos 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 theyd 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 home page 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. Lets first get some stuff out the door that
actually works, says a witness to those early days.
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 Mayers 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.
Youd look at her and shes smiling!
This was Mayer in her ultimate element.
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.
Mayers 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.
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 wasnt really listening.
Everyone settled in; Mayer dropped a bombshell. For months, it had been decided that the new
Yahoo Mails 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.
Seths 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 its not. Mayers 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.
Seths team got the changes done, but there was fallout from Mayers decision. The lead Yahoo
Mail 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 hed 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 didnt think was finished. A
products color may seem superficial, but Mayer is obsessed with data that shows it is not. At
Yahoos scale, if you can change a color a little bit and affect the performance by some factor of
0.01 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. Wed gotten comfortable with what Yahoo-ness was about.

Mayer put Adam Cahan in charge of a new group called Mobile and Emerging
Products.
Yahoo's mobile problem
When Mayer came to Yahoo in 2012, Yahoos mobile traffic was still tiny compared to other big
tech companies like Google and Facebook. Yahoos mobile apps werent 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.
Yahoos biggest products are Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and so
on.
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 2013 acquiring more than 20 mobile startups. In almost every case,
Yahoo would shut down the startups product, sign its engineering and product development
people to two- and four-year contracts, and integrate them into Cahans team.
Mayers second big move to improve Yahoos 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 voice mail from the chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg.

Screenshot/Forbes
David Karp, founder and CEO of Tumblr.
He listened to her message. All Sandberg said was that shed like Karp to call her back.
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 voice mail.
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.

World Economic Forum
When Sheryl Sandberg left a voicemail on David Karp's phone, it threatened to blow up the deal.
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
board didnt think it was time to get greedy.
Still, Yahoo had to be told about the voice mail. 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 Sandbergs voice mail, 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 didnt 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 hadnt 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 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 didnt 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 didnt 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. Hes brash. Hes got a mustache. He
looks like the cartoon version of a deal-making, back-slapping, investment banker. And yet, hes
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 Tumblrs 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 shed take a second look.
When Marissa Mayer studies a topic, she doesnt do it 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 didnt 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 didnt 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.

Mario Tama, Getty Images
She really took ownership of this, really persuaded David that she would let Tumblr stay
independent.
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
shed like to bring up the possibility of buying Tumblr.
Would he be able to meet again that Sunday?
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 thats what
Google had done with YouTube, what Facebook had done with Instagram, and its 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 shed like to buy Tumblr. She said Tumblr
would, in a snap, improve Yahoos 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 Sandbergs voice mail only
hurried the process along.
Finally, over the next weekend, Karp and his board accepted Yahoos 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 shed come as an executive. Her penchant for teacherly
mentoring allowed her to cultivate a relationship with Karp and close a deal that had seemed
impossible.
One source close to Tumblrs 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 dont 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. Hes not motivated by money in the same way
as the rest of us. Hes really passionate about the product. His concern about selling to Yahoo
was that it would get subsumed.
Marissa convinced David that this wasnt the old Yahoo and that shes going to run it
differently.

(Page 7 of 8)

Illustration by Mike Nudelman
Now into her second year as Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer from Wausau, Wisc., says Im 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.
The challenge shell 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, Yahoos stock has gone from $15.74 per share to hovering
around $28 in August 2013.
But, while investor confidence in Mayers vision and performance so far certainly plays some
role in the stocks magnificent surge, a much greater factor has been Alibaba, the Chinese
Internet company in which Yahoo is a part-owner.
Yahoo has benefited 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 Yahoos 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 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 Mayers performance is that the person more responsible than
anyone else for her being the CEO of Yahoo, Third Points Dan Loeb, sold off most of his
holdings in the company in July 2013. That month, he, Michael Wolf, and Harry Wilson
resigned from Yahoos board, as their settlement with the board required them to do if Third
Points stake in Yahoo ever fell below 2 percent.
Third Point remains a major Yahoo shareholder, but Loebs 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 Mayers 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, thats remarkable. In the middle of August 2013, ComScore reported that
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. Mayers redesign of Flickr is a delight.
Yes, some people dont 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 dont like what shes done to me and I dont like what shes done to many
other people, doesnt mean I'm going to shy away from giving her credit. She brought life back
to Yahoo. Theres no question about it.
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 hadnt come in, all the smart people would have left.
And that would have been the end of Yahoo.