New Yahoo book says Mayer the right techie for the job
SAN FRANCISCO — Like most Silicon Valley tech companies, Yahoo has never been wildly candid about its inner workings.
But a lack of cooperation didn't stop Nicholas Carlson from diving into a tale about one of the Web's first giants with a specific emphasis on its current high-profile CEO.
Out Jan. 6, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! (Twelve) dives into the former Google exec's efforts to turn around the pioneering company.
What Carlson has concluded is that despite controversial hires and prickly personnel programs, Mayer, 39, who joined Yahoo in 2012, remains one of the best hopes the company has to right its ship in these turbulent high-tech currents.
"There's no question Marissa has improved Yahoo's product and made it faster in terms of responding to consumer needs," says Carlson, whose book started as a long profile of Mayer for Business Insider.
Carlson's book spans from Mayer's early days as a precocious Stanford University undergrad and wraps just as the CEO's "two years of (financial) air-cover ends" with the nearly $10 billion windfall Yahoo made this fall on the sale of its Alibaba stock.
The author predicts things will get tougher for Mayer as investors put pressure on the $30 billion company to perform quarterly.
"She'll probably have to give some of that (Alibaba) money back to shareholders, and some people are saying Yahoo could wind up splitting into two companies," Carlson says. "One would be a holding company for its remaining Alibaba stock and other investments, and the other would be a smaller version of Yahoo. She might be running a $5- to $10 billion Yahoo, but it would also possibly be a healthier company."
Carlson laughs when asked if the Mayer he came to know through interviews with former colleagues and other industry sources is a woman he likes.
"I can say I admire her," he says. "She's impressive and works hard. But she also has user-interface problems, to use a phrase a onetime co-worker of hers came up with."
Beyond being blunt in meetings, Carlson reports that Mayer has "a terrible lateness problem, which she likely learned at Google because (co-founders Larry) Page and (Sergey) Brin are also folks who don't have a great respect for people's time."
On the flip side, there are many examples of Mayer rolling up her sleeves — sometimes in sweats, other times in high-fashion garb — and diving into the trenches, such as the time she stunned a group of engineers who were struggling with tweaks to Yahoo's mail service by showing up for a briefing on the problems at hand.
"She didn't have to do that, but it clearly impressed a lot of people there," he says.
Perhaps the best anecdote on how hands-on Mayer can be comes from her 2013 Christmas party. Staged at her Silicon Valley home, Carlson reports that the gathering welcomed colleagues and neighbors and featured holiday-themed films in a movie room, bonfires in the backyard and a full-blown ice skating rink on the property.
Every so often the ice would need smoothing, but instead of hiring someone for the job, the party's hostess hopped onto a miniature Zamboni ice-cleaning machine and started driving around the rink in overlapping circles.
"It was clear to those at the party that this wasn't a CEO doing this for a quick laugh, but rather Marissa deciding that a job needed doing and she was going to do it right," Carlson says. "The game may be on at Yahoo, but she seems ready for it."