[compiler-guy]

Marissa is one of the smartest people I have ever been around. Most of my knowledge comes from running in neighboring circles at Stanford. The (then) girl just had an amazing ability to remember things, get things, and analyze them. She also has outstanding social intelligence, and a bit of a reality distortion field.

Of course she chose the rocketship in 1999 while the rest of us fumbled around in the dot com bust. She always had the knack of picking the right place to be at the right time, and the talent (or ability to bs) that she could get noticed when she needed to.

The yahoo thing was the worst misstep I've seen her take, but she got paid $200 million to take the risk, and I'm working for peanuts. So who is the smart one?

Edited to add: There is exactly zero chance she remembers me. But everyone I hung around remembers her. She has a very strange ability to be remembered.

[tardo99]

I've known Marissa since Stanford too, and you're wrong. I'm not sure if you're lying or what, but you're wrong.

Edit: Before you pile on, I'm rich too. Not as rich as her but rich enough not to take issue with her for that reason. The reason people remember Marissa is she was pretty. End of story.

[compiler-guy]

Apparently our experiences in her orbit were pretty different.

That doesn't mean I'm lying, and I don't think you are either.

I have no idea what your experience is, and I have absolutely no reason to lie. I doubt Marissa could pick me out of a police lineup if her life depended on it.

But I watched her kick ass at Stanford--both socially and intellectually--and it takes more than a pretty face to do that.

[tardo99]

If you went to Stanford in that era, then you know that Symbolic Systems was basically "Computer Science Lite."

[compiler-guy]

Which she crushed, and then she moved on and crushed the master's level courses.

And then got a job at Google. Of all the dot-com companies hiring on campus at the time throwing million dollar opportunities at new graduates, she picks the unicorn.

At some point it isn't luck anymore.

Anyway, I'll agree to disagree here. The post I originally responded to was a question about what is so special about her.

I only know what I saw when I could observe her. That my observations differ from yours is OK with me.

[JudasGoatse]

So she completed a second-rate major and luckily joined the fastest-growing company in US history ... that makes her smart and capable? Like OP, I know several people who knew her at Stanford (I didn't go there) and she was regarded with uniform disdain by everyone who was technically sharp.

I know several people who worked with her at Google, and she was fairly disliked there. She got frozen out and would have been eventually run out of the company had Yahoo not foolishly come calling. I WAS at Yahoo with her and I can verify that she did a terrible job there. Random decision making, company-wide initiatives that whipsawed from quarter to quarter, billion-dollar impulse acquisitions that almost immediately got written down. And let's not forget Polyvore - the 200m indulgence that she paid to her former assistant against the recommendations of the M&A team; that was just straight cronyism and corporate malfeasance.

True, Yahoo would have been a challenge for any CEO. But there were rational strategies that could have yielded some success. Marissa, on the other hand, went in the opposite direction and recklessly destroyed billions in shareholder value while pocketing hundreds of millions herself. Read the Kara Swisher articles on her at Recode. They were spot on. I heard a Business School professor on MSNBC argue that Marissa Mayer was the single most overpaid CEO in history. As a Yahoo employee who got to observe her tenure up close, I can't disagree. She's a terrible example for women in tech.

[jhwang5]

TIL Jess Lee was Mayer's assistant

[tardo99]

Preach.

[tardo99]

Fine. It's not luck after college. Then how do you explain her string of failures at Yahoo? It starts being luck again at age 35?

[kelnos]

It's perfectly possible she was just promoted above her level of competence (Peter Principle in action). She may have been fantastically effective and successful at her job at Google (I don't know either way), but when trying her hand at the CEO job, it turned out it didn't match her skills. Not to mention Yahoo! wasn't exactly in great shape when she took the job; IMO the board screwed up (possibly intentionally): they needed someone with experience bringing a company back from the brink of failure, not someone who'd never been a CEO before.

[compiler-guy]

Life is complicated. Being very smart is no guarantee of success. I’ve never claimed that she was infallible or perfect.

Even Gary Kasparov, Genoa Auriemma, and the Golden State Warriors fall off their perch eventually. It doesn’t mean they aren’t damn good at what they do.