Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! Quotes

“Pay-Pal.” People wrote down “payments.” He said “Google.” People wrote down “search.” He said “eBay” and they wrote “auctions.” After a few more companies, he said “Yahoo.” He collected the thirty pieces of paper on Yahoo. Everybody had a different word. What was Yahoo trying to be? No one inside the company knew anymore.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Thompson announced that Yahoo was going to sue Facebook over patent infringement. The move deeply embarrassed both the engineers at Yahoo, who thought that kind of behavior was for trolls, and the media people at Yahoo who depended on traffic partnerships with Facebook to build audiences.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Finally, the memo said that Yahoo was full of employees who were “lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while—at all levels—employees are enabled to ‘hang around.’ Where is the accountability? Moreover, our compensation systems don’t align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren’t adequately recognized for their efforts.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“The Journal called the memo the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” because in it, Garlinghouse complains, “We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything—to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.… “I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. “I hate peanut butter. We all should.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“By a “product person,” Loeb and Wolf meant someone who could get teams of engineers and designers to build software tools that consumers find useful, addictive, or fun. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was this kind of executive. So was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Someone even suggested the insane idea that Google should scan all the libraries in the world and put every book ever written online. But no one laughed the idea off. They started to think about how it could be done.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Even simpler: He could hire reps who knew how to use the phone to sell ads, rather than just take orders over email. Yahoo didn’t have that before.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Coleman came to Yahoo from Reader’s Digest and had been in publishing for twenty-five years. When he got to Yahoo, he would laugh a lot because he believed there were so many simple things he could do to get the business growing. For starters, he could hire salespeople who actually knew buyers in the companies they were trying to sell ads to. Yahoo didn’t have that before.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“One day, Jerry Yang sat down for an interview with Doug Levy, a former journalist who had become well known for his tech-industry coverage in USA Today. Levy was no longer a member of the media. He was working as an independent media consultant and he’d figured out a good gig. He would go into a company and interview its executives as though he were going to write an article. Then he’d prepare a critical piece and let them read it. The idea was to show them where the company’s holes were.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Widely admired by the public at large, Mayer has many enemies within her industry. They say she is robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail. They say her fixation with the user experience masks a disdain for the moneymaking side of the technology industry. Then there is her inner circle, full of young, wildly loyal men and women.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Yang believed Microsoft made ugly, bad products. Its besuited culture was so the opposite of Yahoo’s.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“One reason that happened was that as Google added market share, search marketers decided to quit splitting their budgets between Yahoo and Google and concentrate all their bidding power in one market—Google’s. That further drove yield, further enabling Google to buy market share, and on it went.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“By the time Google was telling Semel $1 billion, $3 billion, and then $6 billion, they had a plan. Now it was time to put that plan into action. It was time to go to the mattresses. At first, they called it Project Godfather. They called it that because, in the movie The Godfather, there’s a montage where, as Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone has his godson baptized in church, his hit men take out all of his family’s enemies at once. That was the plan Decker, Weiner, and Coppel had come up with for Yahoo. They were going to have Yahoo’s M&A team take out the entire search industry—except Google, of course—all at once.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“The moral of Mayer’s story was that it’s always better to surround yourself with the best people so that they will challenge you and you will grow.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“the key to keeping such a distributed organization pointed in the right direction was to have a clean and simple strategy that everyone knew.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“In 1999, you could open Netscape Navigator and use the Internet all day and never leave Yahoo and never want to. This was by design.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Jackson considered how the very best activist campaigns he had studied over the years not only presented an alternative path that could create more value for shareholders but also made a clear case that the target company was being run by fools.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“As he wrote the memo, Garlinghouse thought about a game he’d played with his coworkers at a management retreat the prior summer. There were thirty people in the room, and he told them to write down one word in response to what he said. He said “PayPal.” People wrote down “payments.” He said “Google.” People wrote down “search.” He said “eBay” and they wrote “auctions.” After a few more companies, he said “Yahoo.” He collected the thirty pieces of paper on Yahoo. Everybody had a different word. What was Yahoo trying to be? No one inside the company knew anymore.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“More often than I’d like, I’m told we are executing a certain way “because Marissa said so.” This explanation leaves out valuable context. There was probably a good reason for the decision, but that’s absent from this pat answer. Can we ban the practice of “because [executive] said so” and encourage people to explain why a specific choice was made when relaying those decisions to others?”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Andreessen talked about the difference between technology companies and “normal” companies. He said the output of normal companies is their product: cars, shoes, life insurance. In his view, the output of technology companies is innovation. Whatever they are selling today, they will be selling something different in five years. If they stop innovating, they die.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“it was becoming unwise to send a résumé from an email address with an “@yahoo.com” at the end.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“In 2011, two years into Bartz’s tenure, a company called Hunch did a study comparing Gmail and Yahoo Mail users. It found that Yahoo Mail users were overweight women aged eighteen to forty-nine who lived in the Midwest and had never traveled outside their own country. They owned CDs. They had high school degrees. Gmail users were typically thin men aged eighteen to thirty-four with college degrees. They lived in cities and had traveled to five or more countries. They had MP3s. Yahoo users liked magazines; Gmail users liked blogs.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“He wanted to say that there wasn’t enough accountability or sense of ownership at Yahoo. He thought it was too hard to figure out who was in charge of big decisions at the company. Most of all, he thought that Yahoo was spreading itself too thin. It had acquired a photo-sharing site called Flickr—and yet it was still investing in a product called Yahoo Photos. Why?”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“If buying Facebook was a bad idea, it was bound to be a bad idea at $850 million, too. If it was a good idea, $2 billion would end up looking as cheap as $1 billion.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Google’s logic was sound: An ad that pays $0.55 per click is more valuable than an ad that gets $1.00 per click if it gets clicked on twice as much.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“The young woman at the table typed away while the older executive paced and dictated. The whole scene felt very old-fashioned. Not very Yahoo.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“They decided it made the most sense if the email came from Terry Semel, Yahoo’s new CEO. This posed a problem. Semel wasn’t much of an emailer. It wasn’t clear he actually knew how to use email or his laptop at all.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“jobs. How it would work was that Mallett would take someone from one team—say, Yahoo Finance—and tell them to find six other people from around the company to build an entirely new product. It didn’t matter if the team all worked in the same place. Maybe you found someone in London who was good at building a real-time feed in HTML. Maybe the best sales person for the team was located in New York and the designer you needed was in Sunnyvale. Fine. Just go. Build it now. And don’t forget your day job.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“When Yang and Filo started Yahoo, they weren’t trying to start a business worth tens of millions of dollars. They weren’t trying to start any kind of business. They weren’t even trying to create a website lots of people would use. They just wanted to make a handy tool for themselves and have some fun.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Over the past few months, we have introduced a number of great benefits and tools to make us more productive, efficient and fun. With the introduction of initiatives like FYI, Goals and PB&J, we want everyone to participate in our culture and contribute to the positive momentum. From Sunnyvale to Santa Monica, Bangalore to Beijing—I think we can all feel the energy and buzz in our offices. To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together. Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices. Thanks to all of you, we’ve already made remarkable progress as a company—and the best is yet to come. Jackie”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!