Dizano News – Marissa Mayer is sitting in URLs, the Yahoo! Afeteria, making the case for the future of a company that almost everyone in Silicon Valley views as doomed.
Employees swarm around her, assembling rows of chairs for the afternoon’s FYI, a new weekly ritual where employees get to lob questions at Mayer and her executive team. It’s been a long July, in which Mayer’s one-year anniversary as chief executive officer was marked with an uninspiring second-quarter earnings report. Mayer prefers to focus on the company’s increase in Web traffic. She won’t give numbers but says it’s enough to erase the entire decline from the previous year. “Name another Internet giant that went through three years of decline and then started to grow again,” she says. “It’s a very good sign.”
When Mayer left her executive role at Google (GOOG), she knew she was taking on what might be the hardest job in the Valley. Yahoo has had a lost decade, laboring under a series of failed product strategies and CEOs. It was a Web directory under founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, then a Web portal under Tim Koogle. Terry Semel made it a tech company with Hollywood pretensions, and, most recently, it languished under Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson as a dot-com relic known mostly for losing its top talent to competitors.
Now Mayer wants to transform it into a media company for the mobile age. She’s refocusing her 11,500-employee company on the kind of personalized, habit-forming content that people view on tablets and phones. That means new kinds of e-mail, messaging, and news applications, tailored to the location-aware and always-on nature of the mobile experience. “I hope that at some point we are looking at a world where mobile is a majority of our revenue,” she says.
Since Mayer took over, Yahoo stock is up 75 percent, though the rise mostly reflects the increasing value of the company’s ownership position in the Internet giant Alibaba, which dominates China’s e-commerce market. She’s cut away ribbons of red tape and instituted an internal online service called PB&J, for process, bureaucracy, and jams, that allows employees to complain about organizational snafus. Under her watch, Yahoo has released new Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Weather apps that have impressed users and critics. The company reports that attrition, including employees who’ve landed better jobs elsewhere, fell by 59 percent in the second quarter. “Marissa has done two things at Yahoo,” says Ben Ling, a partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures and a former Google colleague. “She has made it an attractive place for top talent to work, and she has begun to release products that engage consumers on a daily basis.”
At 38, Mayer is young for a CEO, but she’s been a Silicon Valley icon for more than a decade. As Google’s first female engineer, she was renowned for her work ethic and public ease with her initial public offering riches. She invested in a cupcake store, became active in San Francisco philanthropy circles, and once paid $60,000 at a charity auction for lunch with Oscar de la Renta, her favorite designer. Lest anyone think her too profligate or fabulous, there’s her laugh—a honking sound so nerdishly distinctive that a compilation video of it has more than 500,000 YouTube views.
This balance of charisma and credibility has been crucial to Yahoo’s effort to revive its depleted ranks of researchers and engineers, especially for developing mobile technology. There have been some stumbles, though. Her comments about the ease of parenting a newborn outraged a lot of working mothers (Mayer has a 10-month-old son), and she unintentionally started a national debate by ordering all of Yahoo’s work-from-home employees back into the office. Last month the company handed Third Point, the hedge fund controlled by activist investor Dan Loeb, a $655 million profit by promising to buy back 40 million of its shares as Loeb and two others resigned from the Yahoo board. Critics chastised Mayer for paying full price for such a large block of shares to someone who was instrumental in her hiring. Yahoo spokeswoman DJ Anderson says the company already had a repurchase plan in place. “Our price was based on market closing, and Yahoo did not pay a premium,” she says.
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Source: Can Marissa Mayer Save Yahoo?
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