"She deployed quick fixes to solve Yahoo’s morale problems, including expanding parental leave and hiring high-profile celebrities to run the company’s media division."<p>Didn't she also cancel work from home arrangements? I think it's highly debatable if that was good for morale...
Reid Hoffman interviewed Marissa Mayer for his blitzscaling lectures at Stanford and she gives some insights into her mobile strategy and why she made these acquisitions. In short and paraphrasing massively Yahoo had a tiny team dedicated to mobile and she wanted to change this fast. Full interview here: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS9mzbgI_qk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS9mzbgI_qk</a>
I think it's interesting to note Marissa took over in July 2012, since then the stock price rose by 140%. During that same time Google did 152%, Microsoft did 75% and Apple did 15%.<p>Of course this is only a small part of the story, but at the end of the day she works for the owners of the company, the shareholders, and they care about their share price. They've done quite well compared to others, under her leadership.<p>Am I excited about Yahoo, or would I invest, or do I think it's a well run company? Nonono. But there's a narrative that Marissa's doing a terrible job, and contextualised by a declining trend for at least half a decade prior to her joining the company, and shareholders faring quite well so far, I'd say it's nowhere as bad as people think.
Is talent really in that short supply that acqui-hiring makes sense? Wouldn't Yahoo have been better off just paying a million dollars a year to each of the developers Ms Mayer managed to bring on board?
You know, at first I thought she would turn Yahoo around due to her cachet and Yahoo still having a ground to leap from. I dismissed naysayers by writing that down to chauvinism and envy our little world is full of. Now, I'm pretty sure she stalled and nose-dived Yahoo to the ground. At first there seemed to be a strategy behind it all, to build-up Yahoo as a media empire of sorts. However, then random acquisitions started and it showed lack of either strategy or focus. Buy shit and instead of building upon what you bought, they moved onto more buying, while ignoring previously bought stuff. That's just bad leadership, lack of strategy.
Inspite of making so many mistakes, Yahoo is still one of the top 10 most visited sites. What is working for them?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites</a>
Trying to acquire talent is not a terrible approach. From <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html</a><p><i>In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get programmers who would never have come to you as employees by buying their startups...</i>
> Marissa Mayer turned Yahoo into a startup lottery.<p>Yahoo just participates in the startup lottery like every other company its size. The lottery already existed, and Yahoo was already part of it, long before Mayer. Ditto after Mayer, I'm sure. Don't blame her for one of Silicon Valley's fundamental pathologies.
This really is a bit sad to see. Tumblr by all accounts is just a porn aggregator site at this point, so the lone possible bright is BrightRoll... maybe?
Lots of complaining at someone who took the stock from 15 dollars to 30 dollars. It was take some risks or die. Yahoo had long gone stale. You can argue she took the wrong risks, but you'd probably do just as bad. That's why they call them risks.
Does anyone know the median price for these deals? I assume it's highly skewed. What would a 5 person failing mobile app get, and how long would they be locked in to Yahoo for?
"Hey, your company isn’t working, therefore we’re bringing you on for the talent. We’re not interested in the product and service you have in market,...."<p>If your goal is to increase revenue and profitability, surely buying companies that have demonstrated they're great at losing money is a really bad idea? You're hand picking individuals who are the very best in the business at blowing investor cash.
When Marissa Mayer states that Yahoo "is the fastest growing startup in the world", I hope she doesn't actually believe that or take pride in that- and is just saying it for hype.<p>They invested 2.8B to produce no meaningful profit and only a fraction of that in revenue. Under her logic, only looking at the output, they'd be a faster growing startup if they just put that money into a bank account.
> "Gizmodo also made him cry once."<p>Really?! The original post [0] wasn't even necessary. But refering to it again! Come on...<p>0: <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15-year-old-app-developer-cry" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15-year-old-app-deve...</a>
Did Gizmodo do a similar comprehensive rundown of Eric Schmidt's acquisitions? Or of Mark Zuckerberg's acquisitions? Have they in fact done anything so exhaustive and pointed for even one <i>male</i> tech CEO, of which there are far more to choose from?
What blows my mind is how positive the HN crowd were about the acquisition of Tumblr at the time:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737185" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737185</a><p>Everybody on HN now appears to be firmly in the camp of "Tumblr was a terrible acquisition, it was obvious at the time, what a disaster". Now we read about the other 52 companies that for the most part are also disasters.<p>My questions are:<p>How did Marissa manage to purchase a whopping 53 companies and waste so much money before somebody realised that Yahoo was collapsing from the inside out?<p>Is this all on her shoulders?<p>Surely the board signed these deals off? Are they equally culpable here?
What's worse is that in spite of the ridiculous sums that Yahoo paid, the technical talent that they bought in was of pretty average quality.<p>She just bought over-hyped companies run by a bunch of kids. These kids were better at self-promotion (and perhaps business) than at producing great software.<p>Really good software engineers are not in the public view - They are too busy learning and writing code to waste their time fundraising, blogging about their technical achievements or chatting up journalists.<p>Marissa Mayer turned Yahoo into a startup lottery. What's left of Yahoo is just a freakshow of capitalist excess.<p>I don't see how this acquisition spree was ever going to 'attract talent'. Seriously; would any talented, hard working, self-respecting engineer want to have some entitled multimillionaire lucky startup brat as their boss?