Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

by Nicholas Carlson

Overview

A page-turning narrative about Marissa Mayer's efforts to remake Yahoo as well as her own rise from Stanford University undergrad to CEO of a $30 billion corporation by the age of 38.

When Yahoo hired star Google executive Mayer to be its CEO in 2012 employees rejoiced. They put posters on the walls throughout Yahoo's California headquarters. On them there was Mayer's face and one word: HOPE. But one year later, Mayer sat in front of those same employees in a huge cafeteria on Yahoo's campus and took the beating of her life. Her hair wet and her tone defensive, Mayer read and answered a series of employee-posed questions challenging the basic elements of her plan. There was anger in the room and, behind it, a question: Was Mayer actually going to be able to do this thing?

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! is the inside story of how Yahoo got into such awful shape in the first place, Marissa Mayer's controversial rise at Google, and her desperate fight to save an Internet icon.

In August 2011 hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb took a long look at Yahoo and decided to go to war with its management and board of directors. Loeb then bought a 5% stake and began a shareholder activist campaign that would cost the jobs of three CEOs before he finally settled on Google's golden girl Mayer to unlock the value lurking in the company. As Mayer began to remake Yahoo from a content company to a tech company, an internal civil war erupted.

In author Nicholas Carlson's capable hands, this riveting book captures Mayer's rise and Yahoo's missteps as a dramatic illustration of what it takes to grab the brass ring in Silicon Valley. And it reveals whether it is possible for a big lumbering tech company to stay relevant in today's rapidly changing business landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455556601
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Carlson is Business Insider's chief correspondent. His investigative reporting rewrote the histories of Facebook, Twitter, and Groupon. His coverage of Yahoo! won Digiday's award for Best Editorial Achievement of the year. Carlson is a frequent guest on CNBC and contributes to the Bloomberg biography series Game Changers.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Bobbie Had a Nickel 1

Part 1 25

Chapter 1 Sparky's Big Machine 27

Chapter 2 The Mogul 52

Chapter 3 Bear Hugs and Poison Pills 95

Chapter 4 F-Bombs Away 117

Part 2 133

Chapter 5 Painfully Shy 135

Chapter 6 User Friendly 145

Part 3 177

Chapter 7 Win Win Win 179

Chapter 8 Bully Pulpit 195

Chapter 9 The CEO Has No Clothes 207

Chapter 10 The Unicorn 219

Part 4 239

Chapter 11 HOPE 241

Chapter 12 Time to Shine? 277

Chapter 13 Failing Fast 306

Epilogue: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Marissa? 317

Afterword: The Long, Profitable Death of Yahoo 328

A Note on Sources 335

Acknowledgments 337

Bibliography 339

Index 348

About the Author 362

What People are Saying About This

Richard Wolffe

Nicholas Carlson has written the inside story of one of the most fascinating tech leaders of our time, Marissa Mayer, and one of the most frustrating Internet giants of our time, Yahoo. This is a fast-paced, compelling, and detailed account of Mayer's valiant efforts to turn round a company and culture that helped create the Internet as we know it... --Richard Wolffe, executive editor, MSNBC.com, and author of The Message

Fred Vogelstein

Before there was Google or Facebook or even Amazon, there was Yahoo. It was the Internet to many in the 1990s. But it has been sick for more than a decade. In this fascinating, deeply reported tale, Nicholas Carlson, for the first time, tells us why. It's an astonishing story of mistakes and missed opportunities polluted by a startling lack of vision almost from the beginning. If you want to understand what truly scares big shots running companies in Silicon Valley, read this book. They all worry about becoming Yahoo. --Fred Vogelstein, author of Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, and contributing editor, Wired magazine

Editorial Reviews

As Nicholas Carlson demonstrates in Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!, a vivid account of her vertiginous career climb, Mayer is worth paying attention to for reasons that transcend gender. Carlson presents her as a complex personality who defies most stereotypes…The author brings juicy scenes and new details to Mayer's story…

The New York Times Book Review - Sheelah Kolhatkar

12/01/2014
Faced by the Google behemoth and by a growing identity crisis, Yahoo was foundering - and then they hired Marissa Mayer. "Yahoo's celebrity, superhero, savior CEO had arrived." Drawing from interviews with over a hundred sources, journalist Carlson tells the story of a woman "fascinating for her contradictions," who started her tenure at the company with a bang—only to be taken to task by her employees en masse at a company-wide meeting in November 2013. She had inherited a mess from former CEO Carol Bartz, which she handled deftly and to widespread applause - particularly for her decision to reverse a mass layoff. So how did her team lose so much faith? Beginning with Mayer's introverted, focused, highly ambitious nature and the start of her career as a Google intern in 1999, Carlson draws a compelling picture of an ambitious engineer uncomfortable in the spotlight, but determined to excel. The narrative has the pace and pop of an exposé, and readers will find themselves both rooting for and against this complicated leader, whose confident, self-promoting behavior, Carlson points out, is not considered unusual for an executive—assuming that said executive is a man. Exciting and informative, and necessary reading for Silicon Valley junkies. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

The New York Times says the book is "a lot of fun to read" and "an impressive feat."

The New York Times also writes, "As Nicholas Carlson demonstrates in MARISSA MAYER AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE YAHOO!, a vivid account of her vertiginous career climb, Mayer is worth paying attention to for reasons that transcend gender. Carlson presents her as a complex personality who defies most stereotypes."

"A corporate thriller [that does] a superb job of bringing to life the dramatic story of Yahoo."—The Financial Times

"A quick, compelling read...[one that] is, without question, a riveting lens from which to study Yahoo: There are ups, there are downs, there are heroes, and there are villains."—Fortune

"Good books about business and its leaders often come in two forms: a book with a message but without a gripping narrative to tell it, or a compelling narrative bereft of a message. In this extraordinary tale, Nick Carlson takes the reader on an amazing roller-coaster ride, traversing Yahoo's ups and downs, and in the end leaving us not just with memories of a thrilling ride but with wisdom. Once, Yahoo was King of the Internet. Over its two decades, Yahoo recruited able leaders who, despite previous successes, stumbled. Sometimes they were at fault. Sometimes they were defeated by forces Hercules could not control. Among the many virtues of this book is that Nick Carlson strives to understand, not punish, the amazing cast of characters in this long-playing drama. Memories will linger long after this roller coaster stops."—Ken Auletta, author and Annals of Communications writer, The New Yorker

"Nicholas Carlson has written the inside story of one of the most fascinating tech leaders of our time, Marissa Mayer, and one of the most frustrating Internet giants of our time, Yahoo. This is a fast-paced, compelling, and detailed account of Mayer's valiant efforts to turn round a company and culture that helped create the Internet as we know it.."—Richard Wolffe, executive editor, MSNBC.com, and author of The Message

"Before there was Google or Facebook or even Amazon, there was Yahoo. It was the Internet to many in the 1990s. But it has been sick for more than a decade. In this fascinating, deeply reported tale, Nicholas Carlson, for the first time, tells us why. It's an astonishing story of mistakes and missed opportunities polluted by a startling lack of vision almost from the beginning. If you want to understand what truly scares big shots running companies in Silicon Valley, read this book. They all worry about becoming Yahoo."—Fred Vogelstein, author of Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, and contributing editor, Wired magazine

From the Publisher

Good books about business and its leaders often come in two forms: a book with a message but without a gripping narrative to tell it, or a compelling narrative bereft of a message. In this extraordinary tale, Nick Carlson takes the reader on an amazing roller-coaster ride, traversing Yahoo's ups and downs, and in the end leaving us not just with memories of a thrilling ride but with wisdom. Once, Yahoo was King of the Internet. Over its two decades, Yahoo recruited able leaders who, despite previous successes, stumbled. Sometimes they were at fault. Sometimes they were defeated by forces Hercules could not control. Among the many virtues of this book is that Nick Carlson strives to understand, not punish, the amazing cast of characters in this long-playing drama. Memories will linger long after this roller coaster stops.

The New Yorker - Ken Auletta

02/01/2015
Besides offering biographical details about Marissa Mayer's life before she became the CEO of Yahoo! in 2012 at age 38, this in-depth company history by Business Insider chief correspondent Carlson paints a vivid picture of the corporate culture and product offerings from Yahoo!'s founding to the time Mayer was hired. It then covers Mayer's leadership to the autumn of 2014. Under Mayer, Yahoo! was transformed from a content provider to a high-tech corporation that is still thriving. Based on the past history of successes and failures at the company, and the nature of this rapidly changing industry, the author shows that sound management decisions and strong plans have been integral to its survival. Despite its size, Yahoo! still seems fragile and vulnerable, especially to events beyond its control. VERDICT Business readers will be drawn to this story and will want to know what happens next. The text is supplemented with an extensive bibliography.—Caroline Geck, Camden Street Sch. Lib., Newark, NJ

Library Journal

2014-11-15
The inside story of the cult of personality that surrounds the leadership of Silicon Valley's technology behemoths.Business Insider chief correspondent Carlson's complex study of Yahoo's spectacular rise and turbulent fall is less gossipy than Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires (2009) and more accurate than that book's adaptation, The Social Network, but it does carry that same strange feeling that it's hard to believe these bizarre events transpired in one of the world's largest companies. The first section recaps Yahoo's rise while offering a parallel portrait of a shy 24-year-old engineer who became nearly indispensable to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There's even a cameo by Mark Zuckerberg, who brazenly demanded $1 billion from Yahoo for Facebook in 2006. There's also a reference to "Project Godfather," an early attempt to wipe out other search firms from the market, and the story of CEO Carole Bartz, who was fired over the phone. The remainder of the book focuses on the aforementioned engineer, Marissa Mayer, who was handed the reins of the multibillion-dollar company at the age of 37, with no practical experience managing finances, human resources or global operations. Operating under the safety of Yahoo's major investment in China's Amazon-like site Alibaba, Mayer transformed from Yahoo's savior to a CEO under siege, criticized by employees suffering under an arcane review system, under pressure from her board to fire thousands of people, and possibly running out of time to turn the company around. "If turning around a company is like building a bridge in the middle of a war zone, with bombs dropping out of the sky every minute, then Marissa Mayer was the lucky army engineer who got to build a bridge from Yahoo's past to Yahoo's future under perfect air cover—air cover provided by Alibaba," writes the author in this page-turning account, which is thankfully light on jargon. A well-researched, up-to-date story about a fight to define one famous company's future.

Kirkus Reviews