When is marissa mayer due

It brought resources to new projects. And it brought new thinking to existing projects. MAYER: By going across disciplines, you actually get a much more holistic pattern, but it also worked because you knew someone at YouTube, you knew somebody who was working in social. You knew someone who was working in machine allocation or infrastructure. They really started creating a really wonderful element of glue across the organization.

By , she was hiring 20 a year. To date, around APMs have gone through the program. Si Shen, co-founder of Papaya Mobile. Jess Lee, co-founder of Polyvore. Bret Taylor, president of SalesForce. Jeff Bartelma, product Director at Dropbox. Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana. Nick Baum, founder of Storyworth. Dan Siroker and Pete Kooman….

In , Marissa got the call from Yahoo. In the s Yahoo pioneered many of the online services we take for granted today. But it had failed to capitalize on them again and again. The list of squandered opportunities reads like a Shakespearean tragedy. Once so vibrant, thou dost now move like a shadowy spectre through this mortal coil. Your twin crowns, Search and Mail, now worn by Google. YahooTV eclipsed by YouTube.

YahooBriefcase cast aside for Dropbox and OneDrive. Yahoo Music is silent, while Spotify sings out loud. Flickr hath lagged greatly behind Instagram. And the once-mighty Geocities has now crumbled and above its ruins tower Squarespace and Wix. A full 25 percent of the staff had quit in the past six months. So Marissa was taking on a nearly impossible situation. When an entrepreneur takes on a turnaround, I often describe it as throwing yourself on a grenade.

But this was like throwing yourself on an entire truck of TNT. But she could make the employees that she needed out of the ones she had.

What was your initial theory? Despite all the turmoil at the top, you could feel that. That was really my hypothesis when I went in. I was blown away when I got there because there were so many people there with so many ideas and so much energy to try and improve the company. It was really just waiting for someone to come and really try and harness it.

There are thousands of things that are wrong with this place. I was in the cafeteria and this guy came up and snapped his hand on my tray. We might do something actually fun and cool. Is it go-time? Can we actually run, do stuff, build stuff? By all means, run, go, do. Many people saw Yahoo as the walking dead. But even the most zombified of companies can still have employees with a flash of passion in their eyes.

Sure, a lot of the more ambitious people will have left. Those who remain — and especially the ones who want to run and go and do — will feel stifled by the system that has risen around them. And they will resent it. Your job is point the team in a direction and get everything else out of the way. We wanted to come up with something that was kind of catchy and memorable and an acronym. We were like, process, bureaucracy. MAYER: We basically came up with a really scalable wisdom of crowds, like solutions to point us where the problems were.

They were everything from like, we had a doorway on the stairwell in Bangalore that would get locked. It would make everyone walk all the way around the building to use the staircase on the other side. She could have cut through bureaucracy from the top down, with edicts and pronouncements. But by engaging employees in the process — by making them her partner in routing out bureaucracy — they became part of the solution.

And this can start the transition from a cynical and disengaged team to a renewed and engaged one. With the underbrush clearing out, Marissa wanted to encourage new ideas to flourish. But what she could do was bring out the dormant ideas — and long-dormant passion — that could turn the company around. She could take the employees she had and make them into the idea-generating employees she needed. Instead, we got, I believe, submissions of ideas from across the company.

There were a lot of really amazing ideas in there. I think in the end, we greenlit almost of them. We started seeing tens of millions of dollars of new revenue come through that. But ultimately, she ran out of time. And this is where we hit a key limitation of my theory. Building people with the skills you need is far easier at a smaller scale startup. The company culture is still being formed and you have a longer timeline.

But you have to keep your eye on the clock. But I want to take a few minutes with Marissa as she reflects on her time at Yahoo. Once a pioneer in search and email, Yahoo had been steadily losing users and relevance for years. The company was treading water as its competitors raced by on jet-skis.

For many of its investors, the only real value they saw left in the company was the ownership stake it held in two other companies, the Chinese internet giant Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.

A sell-off of some of the Alibaba stock brought an influx of cash that could be spent on the new ideas that were sprouting up. But that rocket pack also came with a short fuse. And that fuse was lit when investors became eager to cash out the Alibaba holdings. Marissa and her team ran out of time. We were starting to grow areas.

The growth on that is unbelievable. The best way to do this would be to separate Yahoo from its Alibaba investment.

But new government rules were making this more difficult. They sold the Yahoo core assets to Verizon and kept the Alibaba holdings in a new company called Altababa. I had one cat that was very interested in the internet and the operating business and the other sort of cat who were very interested in the Asian assets and what was going to happen with those.

Yahoo, wait sorry, we mean Altaba this takes some getting used to , will then shrink its board to five directors. Yahoo cofounder David Filo and chairman Maynard Webb also intend to step down from the board. Yahoo says in the filing that none of the board members are resigning "due to any disagreement with the Company" over "operations, policies or practices.

Related: Why Marissa Mayer couldn't save Yahoo. Mayer remains Yahoo's CEO and has repeatedly stated her intention to stay with the company at least through the transition period with Verizon. Mayer built her reputation within the tech industry as a product leader during her tenure at Google. That's where in she met Enrique Munoz Torres, her Sunshine co-founder. There, the two collaborated on a number of projects, including iGoogle, a now-defunct Google product that allowed users to turn the Google website into a customized homepage for their browser.

Mayer originally opposed the idea of iGoogle, but Torres' presentation of the project sold her on it. It was my job to keep it clean, and Enrique got up and his idea was to just put a bunch of stuff on it, and he knew I would just be like 'No,'" Mayer said.

Torres followed Mayer to Yahoo in , serving as a senior vice president on search and ads. The two began to discuss the foundational ideas for Sunshine in their last year at Yahoo, Mayer said. They decided the ideas didn't make sense at the time but could be worth revisiting.

The two have been working on Sunshine since