[clarle]

I was at Yahoo during the Marissa Mayer era.

I think the thing with Yahoo was that it tried do too much, and it never really had any focus on any particular vertical. Its legacy has always been that it was the place you would go for anything, and I think that hurt it more later on because the company itself was unfocused, and it didn't have a money-printing machine like Google's ads to fund the experimental work.

When Marissa Mayer was on board, the focus was "mobile and emerging products", which was absolutely the right call in 2012, but it was still too general to rally a company around. It had a lot of great small things, but none of them had enough investment to turn into a multi-billion dollar business on its own, as well as a lot of legacy things that still needed to be maintained.