[compiler-guy]

It's not just the opportunities that were on the table at the time, but also declining all future opportunities if this venture failed.

You get one shot at a job like this. The company making the offer had to make it worth her while to

A. Leave Google, and while she wasn't the top dog at Google any more, she was still extremely well respected, and incredibly well compensated, and--perhaps most importantly--very, very safe. What would it take for you to leave a job like that?

B. Spend her one shot at the ultra-big time at a company near death, where it was likely that she couldn't save it, regardless of what she did.

Yahoo had to offer her the big bucks for to take a risk like that, and one part of reducing the risk to her is to give her a golden parachute, where regardless of whether the venture succeeds or fails, she is still better off than at her old position.

And you have to make all the numbers risk-adjusted.

All of this negotiated _before_ you know if she is going to succeed or fail.

Yahoo wanted her that badly and spent what it took to get her.

[jimmywanger]

> she was still extremely well respected, and incredibly well compensated, and--perhaps most importantly--very, very safe.

Re: well respected and very safe, not really. Worked during that time in Maps. Cracks were starting to show.

She wasn't that well respected in engineering circles. Maybe in product management she was, I don't have much visibility into that.

Also, her safety was in question. She already got shunted to a position with less authority and a further degree of separation from Larry Page. She wouldn't have gotten fired, but a slow stripping of responsibilities and transfer into a ceremonial role probably wouldn't have been out of the question.

[compiler-guy]

There is no doubt she had lost in her last round of executive intrigue at Google, but still, she was employee number 20. Even shunted aside, she was making millions of dollars.

There was certainly a group of engineers who didn't respect her, but there was also a very large contingent who did. On the product level, many credit her work on the look and feel of early Google products with a broad portion of Google's early success. (And indeed, one reason she was shunted aside because Google had decided to abandon her vision of Google's look and feel.)

Your last paragraph is pretty much pure speculation. It's pretty clear she was unhappy at Google, but what would have happened if she hadn't taken the Yahoo job? She could have bided her time until a better situation came along. Google wasn't going to fire her.

[jimmywanger]

> There was certainly a group of engineers who didn't respect her, but there was also a very large contingent who did

I don't know of a single engineer who respected her who worked directly with her. The ones who didn't work directly with her were sort of indifferent, and I tended to discount those data points.

Of course, YMMV, plural of anecdote is not data, but the informed engineering sentiment was neutral to negative.

> Your last paragraph is pretty much pure speculation.

It depends on your definition of "safe". She was in no danger of getting fired, as I pointed out. She also was in no position to be taking on more responsibilities or product areas - the fact that she had much of geo taken away from her is a indication of lost faith.

Internally, geo was not considered an especially well run organization for multiple reasons. The chances of recovering from that in an organization is low to none, in my experience.