[mks40]

From reading this (and following this vaguely), I took the following assertions:

i) MM had virtually nothing to do with tripling of stock value, that was due to ownership in Alibaba/Yahoo Japan

ii) She did not turn Yahoo around as a business and made failed acquisitions.

Yet, the article wants me to believe

iii) Nobody could have done any better in this position. She achieved the best possible outcome

If her net contribution to Yahoo as a business was 0, it seems pretty unreasonable to assert that NOBODY could have made any better acquisitions (e.g. buy Instagram, not tumble), or strategic initiatives (why focus on search?).

[danieltillett]

I actually agree with the article that nobody could have done better, but they certainly could have done the same as MM for a whole lot less salary.

[ryandrake]

I will raise my hand to say I, for one, would have been glad to perform the job of “Fail to turn Yahoo around” for a mere $1MM. Yahoo shareholders sure got ripped off!

[curiousgal]

You didn't address OP's point:

>If her net contribution to Yahoo as a business was 0, it seems pretty unreasonably to assert that NOBODY could have made any better acquisitions (e.g. buy Instagram, not tumbler), or strategic initiatives (why focus on search?).

[pooper]

I can't answer for anyone else but I can say with pretty good confidence that Yahoo! would not exist today if they put me in charge. I would fling poop left and right the moment I discovered the back door. I wouldn't have gave two poops about shareholder value. I am sure "they" would have found something sketchy about my past life that is worthy of at least ten life sentences and I would be sent away for good.

I was already a little skeptical by the time Y! bought tumblr but I think the effort was there. I saw bringing in Katie Couric and David Pogue as a way to ease older people to watching "live TV" on Y!. I still don't think there was any fault with the vision. It might just be that the execution was a few years too early or bit too ambitious? I mean getting younger audiences to watch the news is not easy and getting majority of the "old" people to go from lean back to lean forward isn't easy either. It feels like a gamble and I still believe it succeeded in a parallel universe.

[rhaps0dy]

>I would fling poop left and right

Username checks out :)

[danieltillett]

I don't think on average anyone else would have made better acquisitions. Sure in hindsight we can say other acquisitions would have been better, but I don't think anyone else hireable would have done better than MM other than through chance.

Having said this I think Zuckerberg is massively undervalued as a CEO.

[charlesdm]

I always grin when I read articles where she talks about her work ethic and 12-14 hour work days. Whether she ultimately did anything, it does not matter. Most likely she added very little operational value.

She was paid well, but ultimately, was put in place by activist investors to sell off the thing and not rock the boat too much.

[johan_larson]

Nobody could have done any better in this position. She achieved the best possible outcome

Her plan was to bring back the glory days, back in the first internet land rush in the nineties, when Yahoo was one of the true giants of the Valley. She wanted to put it back where it had been, on par with Google and Amazon. But it didn't work. Could it have worked? Hard to say. I doubt anyone really knows. But it didn't.

I don't think she deserves a lot of credit for that. For tens of millions of dollars a year we should expect success, damn it, not a valiant effort.

The alternative would have been consolidation. Shut down all the stuff that's losing money. Sell off everything that is working but doesn't really fit. Focus on the stuff that's working, like Yahoo finance and sports reporting. The result would have been a coherent media company that could make real money. But it would have been a distant shadow of what Yahoo once was.

[edanm]

Firstly (and maybe flippantly?), net contribution of 0 is not necessarily bad - you're forgetting that a lot of CEOs could've destroyed value. E.g. arguably a few of Uber's actions have destroyed value, tons of companies effectively close, etc.

Secondly, I think net contribution of 0 isn't really accurate - there were a lot of actions that were taken to get more money out of the Alibaba shares, e.g. ways to mitigate the tax burden, and as alluded to by someone else in the thread (and in the article), finding an executive that helped undo (?) a deal that would've forced Yahoo to sell more Alibaba shares.

Lastly, even if all of the above is true, CEOs in large part take strategic bets. It's easy to look back and say that all the bets failed, but that doesn't make taking them the wrong move.

[ge96]

random leech comment

she promotes women as leaders, props for that

damn $900K a week... what does one do with such income hahaha cries

edit: damn I take it back, I was thinking of Facebook's COO sorry