[product50]

You are wrong. Before joining Yahoo, Marissa was demoted from her position and no longer was in Larry's inner circle. She pretty much had her hand forced to quit Google given the influence she had once no longer remained.

Wrt joining other tech companies, it is debatable whether she could get a CEO role of $30B+ tech company given she never had such an accreditation before.

Wrt your excuses on why she failed, those are exactly that - excuses. If it is such a common knowledge that middle managers are political centers, why didn't she do anything about it? There wasn't a single round of layoffs at Yahoo in her first 2.5 yrs when everyone was asking why Yahoo needs 12k+ employees to support $4B in annual revenues. She failed to figure out what was wrong with Yahoo and take adequate steps to fix it. In essence she completely failed in her duties as ceos.

I think a lot of frustration here is not that CEOs earn that much. I, for one, am totally fine if Satya Nadella earns $100M+ for all the great work and transformation he has done over at Microsoft. So I don't agree with your proposal on fixing the salaries of CEOs based on a multiple. I think what is frustrating here is that here is a CEO who clearly failed across the board and did nothing noteworthy (and made huge costly mistakes such as hiring Henrique de Castro which cost Yahoo $100M) but still was seemingly unaffected in securing the CEO role and being paid handsome salary/bonuses.

[wwalser]

Any ah… evidence for that first claim (or any of them really…)? It seems obvious that she would have netted more money if she had just stayed anywhere near the top tier of Google.

Yahoo was a capsized ship before Marissa came aboard. The fact that she got it into harbor at all is impressive enough for me. I always assumed there was a near-zero chance that she would save it from complete collapse.

Making bets that don't pay off is par for the course for a CEO (Bezos & Satya are both great at this), some just have the luxury of huge profit centers to point at when investors come knocking. Marissa made her bets — some worked, others didn't. She managed to get an asset that, for a time, was negatively valued in the market[1] sold for parts. How she is compensated for the feat is, I assume, based on her employer's evaluation of that result.

1. http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos...

[koolba]

Which of her bets would you say payed off?

All that comes to mind for her tenure is overpaying for a bunch of acquisitions and then destroying what's left of them.

[wwalser]

Imagine you have something and you take it to the market and investors tell you it's worth negative amounts of money. It's actually worse than worthless. Then you take it to them later and they purchase it for multiple billions of dollars.

Did she turn a valueless asset into a hundred billion dollar company? No. No one _expected_ her to, some may have hoped that she would but hope is different to expectation as is made clear from her compensation agreement.

"If you turn this company around we'll pay you loads of money. Money stacked so high you'll have trouble keeping them from toppling over. On the other hand if you _just_ make it worth a few billion, we'll _just_ give you a lot of money. The piles will not topple over."

On net her bets were of positive value to investors. That's the whole of the equation once the sale is closed.

[koolba]

I was specifically asking what successful bets she made as CEO and I don't see anything in your answer pointing them out.

Saying her bets won because she found a buyer is like inferring you got some correct answers because you passed a test. It doesn't answer which questions (if any) were actually answered correctly.

It's entirely possible the market had no appetite for Yahoo prior to her becoming CEO, she mismanaged the company but not enough for it to implode under her watch, and the market changed its mind to it in 2016/2017.

[product50]

Are you serious you don't know about her Google demotion? Here read this and get enlightened: http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/17/marissa-mayer-yahoo/

Also you didn't know about Henrique de Castro catastrophe? Here read this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercov...

If Yahoo was a capsized ship, why did they have to hire a very expensive exec for the death march? Obviously, the expectation was that Marissa can bring about some improvements.

Apologies for being snarky in this comment as I had a difficult time appreciating your ignorance.

[wwalser]

I appreciate that you've cited some sources (however questionable). The tone is fine, it's sometimes hard to maintain composure. Especially when someone points out that you're wildly making things up.

Any response to selling something for money which was, for a time, of negative value according to the market?

Edit: I just realized the first source is an op-ed with as much conjecture as your original post. Nice.

[jimmywanger]

I don't know how much evidence this is, but I can confirm Mayer getting demoted as I was an engineer on maps during the time that reorg was going on.

She no longer reported to Larry directly, she reported to Huber who took over all of Geo, which subsumed maps.

Internally, I don't think many people liked working with her. She had a coterie which did her bidding, but most people were not impressed, and there was much rejoicing when she joined Yahoo.

[wwalser]

I have heard that people didn't care for working with her. I don't find that surprising given her espoused views on work ethic.

[gloverkcn]

I wouldn't say capsized ship as much as "capsizing". Yahoo had a revolving door of CEOs. She was the 4th CEO in a decade. The one before her lasted 4 months (and made $6 million for his trouble). And in that time the stock price had gone from $40 to $16. Just because Yahoo was sinking doesn't mean it was sunk. Yahoo still had revenue, people, and products, but it had been declining for a long time.

It wasn't a death march, it was hail mary to see if Yahoo could be saved. The majority of her compensation was tied to stock price.

The snark doesn't bother me, but people want to hang the failure of Yahoo on Mayer. She did not take a vibrant, innovative, and successful company and drive it into the ground.

The stake in alibaba helped Mayer give her a windfall of cash she wouldn't have had otherwise. Her incentives were tied to stock price NOT performance. Start bashing the board for tying her compensation to the wrong metric.

[shostack]

This is a fair point that the board is really the one who set her objectives, and it seems she met them.

Many people don't realize that you can increase share price by "killing" a company if you can either let shareholders come out ahead as a result, or even just minimize their downside from what could have been a much larger loss.

For every CEO out there who makes hugely unpopular decisions that don't appear to be doing what the masses consider to be "the right thing" to get the company back on track...ask yourself if the board might have given direction that led down this path. Ultimately they are the ones the CEO reports to.

[valuearb]

Pretty sure the reason they had to spend so much to get a new CEO is that no one wanted the job, it was perceived as a very difficult turnaround.

[vonklaus]

Marissa Mayer executed the goal she was brought in for which was to create positive market sentiment so they activist investors who brought her in would make significant returns.

That said, obviously it was possible to turn around Yahoo, and the investors, Mayer and the company would be better off if she succeeded. I believe she tried genuinely hard to fix it and I believe she failed harder. Obviously, Microsoft is in a much different position but Nadella has had such success there that you would expect Mayer could've at minimum kept the company from failing.