
Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography - neya
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-biography-2013-8?op=1
======
jacquesm
Buried in there this gem:

"The first is that she would recreate the technological circumstances of her
users in her own life. Mayer went without broadband for years in her home,
refusing to install it until it was also installed in the majority of American
homes. She carried an iPhone at Google, which makes Android phones, because so
did most mobile Web users."

edit: this one is funny:

" As she spoke, two of the people seated near her typed away like crazy,
trying to take verbatim notes in Google Docs."

Yahoo using google docs for their email strategy :)

Who is leaking to Kara Swisher?

Having a leaky board member can be lethal.

"She said that Tumblr was an excellent product — an amazing tool for self-
expression. She noted that it was beating Facebook with younger consumers."

Aha. Younger generation+mobile->tumbler acquisition.

Funny how in the same breath that Yahoo acquires companies to shut them down
they can state with a straight face the new way of doing this is to let them
stay independent post acquisition.

~~~
wdewind
> Funny how in the same breath that Yahoo acquires companies to shut them down
> they can state with a straight face the new way of doing this is to let them
> stay independent post acquisition.

I don't think that's fair. There is a huge difference between acquiring a
successful startup and letting them continue to be themselves, and acqui-
hiring a failing startup and stripping it for parts. The point is tumblr isn't
a repeat of flickr, delicious etc. Summly etc., are in a different category
altogether, and it's not like they are being misled about what's going to
happen when they are being acquired.

------
andrewljohnson
I would call this historical fiction, not a biography. The author says as much
(after tens of thousands of words that almost no one will read all of).
Quoting someone else, he writes:

 _" As part of the narrative, I have included passages of dialogue. Dialogue—
what words were said— is a fact like any other. It is not necessarily a
quotation from an interview with me and I would discourage readers from
inferring that one or both of the speakers is a direct source."_

The article ends up being overwhelmingly flattering, and subtly balances the
flattery by bringing up and then dispelling muckety-muck from the news, with
an insider POV. And of course no one has to vouch for a word of it.

~~~
hershel
Om malik thinks that the founder of business insider is biased: " Business
Insider’s Henry Blodget, who benefits directly from the largess of Yahoo as a
longtime shareholder and part time employee "

So this might explain this article.

And Om's take on yahoo: except for a rising share price, yahoo has achieved
nothing in the past year [1].

[1][http://gigaom.com/2013/08/22/no-henry-you-need-to-get-
real-a...](http://gigaom.com/2013/08/22/no-henry-you-need-to-get-real-about-
yahoo-here-are-the-facts/)

~~~
plinkplonk
Om's analysis should be a submission on its own. Pretty devastating.

------
BlackJack
A terrific read! I learned a lot about what kind of a person Marissa is. If I
had to summarize, I'd say she's "firm but fair".

An observation: There are 8 pages in total, but pages 1-3 were much shorter
than 4-7, and 8 was the sources page. I think it's pretty smart of them to
keep the first few pages short to keep you moving, and let the latter half be
longer as you're committed to finishing if you've made it that far. I don't
know of this is common practice for longer articles, but it's a great thing to
do!

~~~
yo-mf
Good point, though I just read it on mobile where is automatically shows as
one page, something I find to be a smoother reading experience.

------
ahk
The dollar numbers being talked about in the article are kind of stunning, for
a website that dropped off my radar more than a decade ago. Who are all these
people with all that much money and where are they getting it from??

~~~
pavs
You are giving too much credit to your internet usage preference and its
relation to a company being relevant and successful.

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simplezeal
Personally I find it amusing that she mixed personal life with work - her
dating Larry and all.

You lose a lot of respect from peers if you are rising fast and they find out
a powerful person has soft spot for him/her.

I am wondering if that had something to do with so many Googlers hating her.
She was always pain to work with - office hours etc. What changed?

~~~
rhizome
_lose a lot of respect from peers if you are rising fast and they find out a
powerful person has soft spot for him /her._

The only place this kind of favoritism is a negative is with personal
relationships. Nobody bats an eye when the riser is a fraternity or alma mater
cohort, where that kind of thing is _expected_.

If I were a betting man, I'd say it's a class argument that the favoritism
wasn't "earned" in the proper way, without the old school tie.

Aside from that, in contemporary business culture, losing respect of your
peers is no loss when you're upwardly mobile. They're the ones you're leaving
behind.

~~~
pessimizer
>The only place this kind of favoritism is a negative is with personal
relationships. Nobody bats an eye when the riser is a fraternity or alma mater
cohort, where that kind of thing is expected.

I suspect that you're projecting here. I think favoritism in any of those
situations is _both_ expected and resented.

I don't see how sexual relationships are any less class-based than alma mater
or frat stuff. People are more likely to have been in the same frat with
someone outside of their class than to have dated someone outside of their
class.

~~~
rhizome
I think you're thinking that class necessarily means economics. Think more
"cohort."

~~~
pessimizer
I am thinking cohort. People tend to date people who hang out in the exact
social circles as they do. Which is what happened in this case, really.

There are lots of token and outsider members of colleges and frats that the
insider groups will never even notice. The person dating the boss or the
bosses' daughter/son is more likely to be a member of an insider group than
somebody who attended the same elite university at the same time - especially
if the frat/college person is of a different race or economic class than the
boss.

Went to the same school, in the same frat, from the same town, went to the
same camp, dated your sister once are all shorthand for describing insider
groupings, not the cause of them.

People who work hard who are not insiders in that way will resent it.

~~~
rhizome
Not sure what your point is.

------
BerislavLopac
The most interesting detail to me is this mentioned so off-handedly that it's
easy to miss it: "At one point during Mayer’s early years at Google, she and
Page started dating."

Now, I'm not saying that this had anything to do with her later success, on
the contrary -- she obviously proved repeatedly that she is amazingly capable.
But it's interesting that this kind of power shuffle that's going on in large
companies inevitably includes some dose of sexual attraction; it reminds me of
Salman Rushdie's Moth podcast appearance[0], where he described something
similar in a Latin American coup.

[0] [http://www.podcast-directory.co.uk/episodes/salman-
rushdie-w...](http://www.podcast-directory.co.uk/episodes/salman-rushdie-
writer%E2%80%99s-block-14492745.html)

------
krakensden
Is it meaningful that everyone she didn't get along with at Google had a name
from southern Asia?

~~~
adharmad
Kamangar is from Iran

~~~
meepmorp
Which is in south(western) Asia.

------
od2m
This article has very low information density.

~~~
hga
Indeed. But it does have rather a lot of information.

If you're interested in this, and e.g. Google history you might want to read
it; I had to decide I couldn't justify the time and energy.

------
wj
That tidbit about her piano teacher's daughter was from a great talk about
creativity she gave at Stanford in 2006.

My notes on the lecture: [http://personalopz.com/blog/nine-lessons-learned-
creativity-...](http://personalopz.com/blog/nine-lessons-learned-creativity-
google/)

------
anuraj
I am very interested to see how a dead horse can be brought to life again - it
would be an incredible feat if Marissa does it.

------
jokoon
Misleading title, does this article dig up some dirt about mayer or not, I
don't get it.

The title sounds like people have been lied to about Mayers, but what lies ?

------
mrwnmonm
what did you feel while reading this?

------
graycat
For the context, that is, computing, the Internet, mobile, etc., there is a
fundamental problem: We are awash in cheap processor cycles, main memory
bytes, solid state and rotating disk bytes, infrastructure software, LAN and
Internet bandwidth, client devices, sensors, transducers, etc. and for most of
these are getting more rapidly.

The fundamental problem is what the heck to do of high value -- change the
world size -- with these fantastic, cheap resources?

Open ocean sailing? Permitted trading without the many 'tolls' from long paths
across land.

Personal cars? Killed off the horses and passenger trains and opened up
suburbia.

Trucks? Killed off a lot of freight trains.

Electric lights? Got rid of lighting by burning candles, whale oil, kerosene,
and coal gas.

Big stuff.

Computing's done a lot so far. The fundamental problem now is, now what?

The common assumption is that a big IT company must frequently 'reinvent'
itself and 'create' its future. If so, then the big IT companies -- and
related companies in 'media', cars, etc. -- just must successfully address
significant parts of this fundamental problem.

So, the fundamental problem must be (no choice) shared by Yahoo, Google,
Apple, Facebook, Samsung, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM,
Amazon, newspapers, TV, movies, DARPA, essentially all _information
technology_ (IT) startups and venture capital, etc.

Efforts that successfully address significant parts are coming forward quite
slowly, maybe only a few such efforts each 10 years. Not fast enough.

Big IT companies, I hate to say it, but a lot of you guys stand to go the way
of buggy whips if you fail successfully to address significant parts of this
fundamental problem. So, better set up a group, issue thinking caps, and get
to work. Maybe the projects look 'blue sky', but at least some of them have to
go all the way to revenue, earnings, and big changes in the world. Gotta be
willing to stand there on the sea shore and think "open ocean sailing" and,
then, make it real, make a lot of money, and change the world. Do that or you
are in line for a buggy whip award.

In a musical analogy, a little, student's piano sonata won't cut it; think
more like Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony'.

One way -- not the only one -- is to look at some 'economics', i.e., how to
take some work needed in the economy and do it better and/or cheaper.

Yahoo? So, you have a lot of stock market data. Now what? Envision an
investor, see what else they need, and start to provide it. Yes, there should
be a mobile tie in.

Yahoo? Yes, you have some headline news, maybe some of it is entertaining.
What about information that is really valuable? Find some such categories and
how to get the information out there.

Yahoo? There's lots of stuff on the Internet, and recently at AVC.COM Fred
Wilson has been complaining that he doesn't know how to find blogs, videos,
etc. he wants. A solution is needed.

With just the economic driver, we can go on and on. I didn't say that it was
all easy, but neither was Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony', and when he wrote it
he had been stone deaf for years.

Get on it Marissa or be in line for a buggy whip award. And, f'get about
picking colors or numbers of screen pixels. And, to think better, get some
sleep.

------
nwzpaperman
When do we get another Vogue photo shoot?

------
af3
print version?

~~~
moondowner
I guess this will do it:
[http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%...](http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fmarissa-
mayer-biography-2013-8%3Fop%3D1)

------
crazygringo
This is 22,424 words long. Literally the length of a light book. (Even long-
form journalism usually tops out at around 7-8,000 words.)

Anyone got a TL;DR?

~~~
bryanlarsen
TLDR: everything you need to know to predict how Marissa Mayer will run Yahoo.

I would say that the article is very short. It's supposed to be a biography;
those things are usually massive.

It's a great condensation of a biography; just enough detail from the early
years to get a sense of Marissa as a person and what guides her, the detail
increasing through her Stanford and Google years to fill out her style and her
strengths and weaknesses. And then a bunch of detail about why she was hunted
and how, and on some of the pivotal actions she took at Yahoo (like the Tumblr
acquisition and Mail redesign).

It's long, but it's very much story telling so it reads well. If it was half
the length it could contain the same amount of information but would be much
harder to read. In many cases the best way to convey information is to tell a
story.

