Marissa Mayer Quotes

The mobile phone acts as a cursor to connect the digital and physical.

Work for someone who believes in you, because when they believe in you, they'll invest in you.

KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)

Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder.

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.

Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history

Yang believed Microsoft made ugly, bad products. Its besuited culture was so the opposite of Yahoo’s.

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.

Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”22 This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their own volition, and create.

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.

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.

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.

An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.

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.

Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.

I’ll never forget talking to Marissa Mayer when she was at Google about a whale-watching trip that her boss had organized to help the team bond. Marissa gets seasick. She knew she’d wind up blowing chunder over the side of the boat if she went. But her boss pressured her, saying she should go anyway, to be a good team player. You shouldn’t have to barf over the side of a boat to demonstrate you’re a good team player.

An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)

If it doesn't have a number, it's not a Key Result.

Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.

As Sergey has commented: “I do think I benefited from the Montessori education, which in some ways gives the students a lot more freedoms to do things at their own pace.” Marissa Mayer, at the time a Google vice president of product management and now CEO of Yahoo, told Steven Levy in his book In the Plex: “You can’t understand Google… unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.”22 This teaching environment is tailored to a child’s learning needs and personality, and children are encouraged to question everything, act of their own volition, and create.

We couldn’t figure out why until we went out and did a user study at a nearby college, actually watching students try to use Google. According to Marissa Mayer, at the time a Googler and now CEO of Yahoo, they were so accustomed to cluttered websites that “flashed, revolved, and asked you to punch the monkey” that they thought there had to be more coming.165 They weren’t searching because they were waiting for the page to finish loading. Engineering vice president Jen Fitzpatrick added: “We wound up sticking a copyright tag at the bottom of the page, not so much because we needed a copyright on the page, but because it was a way to say ‘This is the end.’” The copyright notice fixed the problem.

one of our earliest challenges was that users would look at the Google Web page and not type anything. We couldn’t figure out why until we went out and did a user study at a nearby college, actually watching students try to use Google. According to Marissa Mayer, at the time a Googler and now CEO of Yahoo, they were so accustomed to cluttered websites that “flashed, revolved, and asked you to punch the monkey” that they thought there had to be more coming.165 They weren’t searching because they were waiting for the page to finish loading. Engineering vice president Jen Fitzpatrick added: “We wound up sticking a copyright tag at the bottom of the page, not so much because we needed a copyright on the page, but because it was a way to say ‘This is the end.’” The copyright notice fixed the problem.

Oddly, Orkut became a sensation in Brazil. “In Brazil, Orkut is the Internet and Google is search,” wrote one local journalist, who added that using Orkut was “like putting sugar in your coffee, watching Globo telenovelas, or heading to the beach from Christmas to Carnival.” On a trip to Brazil in 2006, Sergey Brin was asked why, and he responded, “We don’t know—what do you think?” When pressed, Googlers would refer to stereotypes of Carioca sociability, but that didn’t sufficiently explain why Orkut became the social networking choice of this country over other competitors—or why Orkut was so badly left behind in the rest of the world. Marissa Mayer’s personal analysis was based on the Google yardstick of speed. Brazilians, she says, were used to lousy Internet service and thus more tolerant of the delays. “They would just keep sitting there and waiting,” she says. Orkut was also dominant in India, where it was the number one Google service—ahead of search and Gmail. “There is no second product in India—Orkut is dominant,” said Manu Rekhi, the Orkut India product manager, in 2007. “I’ve seen beggar kids who use their money to get on Orkut.” Mayer also attributed that success to its quick response compared to other services. “Do you know why Orkut took off in India?” she would ask. “Opposite time zone, and no load on the servers at night. Speed matters.” (Why Orkut ruled in Brazil, however, was a mystery never solved.)

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.

the key to keeping such a distributed organization pointed in the right direction was to have a clean and simple strategy that everyone knew.

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

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.

Popular magazine articles and Oprah-style television shows falsely represent work-life balance as an individual challenge, a lifestyle choice available to all women. The feminism on offer is woefully thin and unpleasurable. On the high end of the income scale, feminism seems to mean working even more than men. The media celebrate women such as Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her brutal work ethics--magazine articles report, awestruck, they they barely sleep, that their staffs struggle to match their work hours, that they've become the rare female leaders in their spheres by laboring harder than male colleagues. Mayer reported proudly that while at Google, she would sleep under her desk. By this measure, feminism, that Utopian striving for equality that we've carried through centuries of opposition, is boiled down merely to the right to work ourselves to death. If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it. And this is a vision that can be palatable, just barely, only at the high end of the economy where work is plausibly couched in self-actualization. . . . If any feminism is going to be worth its name, it will improve the lives of all women instead of setting them in competition with each other or applying only to this or that region or income stratum. Liberal feminism would grant women the right to compete. A radical feminism would grant women a good life in which they have real power.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

it was becoming unwise to send a résumé from an email address with an “@yahoo.com” at the end.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the fall, Mayer went to Stanford and began taking premed classes. She planned to become a doctor. But by the end of her freshman year, she was sick of it. I’m just doing flash cards, she thought. This is easy. Too easy. It’s just a lot of memorization. Mayer wanted to find a major that would train her to think critically and become a great problem-solver. She also wanted to study how people think, how they reason, how they express themselves. She had a nagging voice in her head saying, It’s not what Zune knows, but how Zune thinks. Mayer began to answer the voice in her head—and find a course of study that helped her learn how to think—when she took an introductory computer science class: CS105. During the semester, she entered a classwide design contest for extra credit. Calling on the same part of her brain that made her such an excellent pompom choreographer, Mayer made a screen saver featuring exploding fireworks. In a class of three hundred, Mayer came in second.

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.

If Microsoft and Yahoo didn't combine, Google was going to own the Internet forever.

Marissa Mayer, who was appointed president and CEO of Yahoo! in July 2012, said in an interview, I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist. I think that I certainly believe in equal rights, I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so in a lot of different dimensions, but I don’t, I think, have sort of the militant drive and the sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that. And I think it’s too bad, but I do think that “feminism” has become in many ways a more negative word. You know, there are amazing opportunities all over the world for women, and I think that there is more good that comes out of positive energy around that than comes out of negative energy.

In 2013, for example, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn’t sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for not spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). “If you’re not visibly busy,” she signaled, “I’ll assume you’re not productive.

For example, AllThingsD broke the story that new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had secured a $1.1 billion acquisition of blogging platform Tumblr. It was a major scoop at the time with lots of details. Yahoo quickly followed with an official announcement that included the “promise not to screw it up.” They did. Eventually, Tumblr passed from Yahoo to Verizon and, in 2019, was purchased by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic’s WordPress, for $3 million.

Chapter 11: Working Together Toward Equality For a long time, the focus has been on making sure women have the choice of working outside the home or in the home. The fact that women have this right is celebrated. The question now is, are we so focused upon the issue of personal choice that we’re failing to encourage women to go for positions of senior leadership? Men and women both need to support each other. Women have not always been there supporting each other, and many times women have actually done the opposite. When Marissa Mayer was named CEO of Yahoo, she was in her third trimester of pregnancy. She announced that her maternity leave would be a few weeks long, and she would be working throughout it. Many feminists were upset with her, arguing that Marissa was “hurting the cause by setting up unreasonable expectations.” Whatever women decided for themselves as far as leave should be fully supported. Sometimes women who are already in power become obstacles to more women gaining power. This was especially true in the days of tokenism, when women would look around and see that only one woman would be allowed to climb the ladder into the senior management. Women can view other women as rivals and treat them with hostility, or undermine them, ignore them, or even sabotage them.

Marissa Mayer, who became one of Silicon Valley’s most famous working mothers not long after she took over as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, says that burnout isn’t caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.

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.